How to Leverage DevOps Insights and Eliminate Bottlenecks
A dynamic dashboard that automatically compiles Salesforce DevOps metrics offers the insight you need to spot bottlenecks and hit your productivity goals.
Why It Matters: Analyzing DevOps metrics and putting these insights into action helps your team members continually refine their processes over time, enabling them to create increasingly secure products at faster speeds.
- Wasted time drastically reduces the return on investment (ROI) for DevOps projects. And if these bottlenecks aren’t fixed, the drain on ROI is compounded over time.
- Increased automation and intentional processes eliminate bottlenecks in the application life cycle.
Here are six ways to eliminate Salesforce DevOps bottlenecks with the help of a dynamic dashboard:
- Thoroughly Understand Your System
- Familiarize Yourself with Common Bottlenecks
- Don’t Be Afraid of Challenges
- Speak with Your Team
- Identify Key Success Criteria
- Use a Dynamic Dashboard to Simplify Identification
1. Thoroughly Understand Your System
You can’t fix what you don’t see. And if you don’t understand how things should operate within your system, you’ll never be able to tell when something isn’t working the way it should.
You can’t compare your system against anyone else’s, so you need to start with a baseline understanding of what’s going on.
Understanding your system helps you identify your unique bottlenecks.
2. Familiarize Yourself with Common Bottlenecks
Having a basic understanding of common bottlenecks gives you something to look out for and a path forward when they’re found. We’ve identified a series of common challenges through our experience helping companies implement new tools to solve their problems.
Here are some common challenges to watch for in your Salesforce DevOps pipeline:
- Post-deployment verification
- Staging environment validation
- Monitoring and alerting
- Release coordination
- Code merging
- Compliance checks
- Patch management
- Manual testing
- Resource allocation
This is only a sample of the types of bottlenecks you might run into. For a more thorough explanation, watch our webinar on bottlenecks here.
3. Don’t Be Afraid of Challenges
Digging into your current DevOps processes to find areas for improvement can seem overwhelming. The mental block holds a lot of teams back, instead allocating their time and resources to pushing through these bottlenecks with inefficient processes.
Learning from your mistakes is the best way to streamline your approach to Salesforce development and refine processes moving forward.
Tackle these challenges head-on and the benefits will snowball as problems are fixed.
4. Speak with Your Team
Nobody knows the intricacies of your DevOps processes as well as the team members who work with them day after day. High-level discussions on sourcing new tools and reconfiguring org charts will miss the details necessary to find ways to improve your DevOps approach.
Meet with your team members and encourage open communication. Everyone should be comfortable to raise a concern when issues are found.
These insights offer clear paths to identifying problems, which is the first step toward streamlining processes.
5. Identify Key Success Criteria
This helps you know when you are succeeding.
Every company’s Salesforce DevOps strategy is unique. Identifying your goals and success criteria will help determine the success of your efforts and point to potential areas for improvement when you fall short.
Here are some success criteria examples that can be used to build out your own metrics:
1. Defect Density: The number of confirmed defects in Salesforce releases per the size of the release.
- Example unit of measurement: Defects per 1,000 Apex/Visualforce/LWC/Flow/ MuleSoft lines
- Example target: Less than 1 per 1,000 lines
2. Security Hotspots: Areas in Salesforce code with potential security vulnerabilities.
- Example unit of measurement: Number of hotspots identified per release
- Example target: Zero hotspots with critical severity
3. Change Failure Rate: The percentage of Salesforce deployments causing a failure in production.
Example target: Less than 5%
Example unit of measurement: Percentage (%)
6. Use a Dynamic Dashboard to Simplify Identification
Regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and insurance need to keep data security regulations top of mind when incorporating new DevOps tools.
Ensure your usage of the AI model complies with relevant security standards and regulations.
The specific regulations are determined by location and industry.
Next Step…
DevOps tools are a critical aspect of streamlining your Salesforce DevOps pipeline, but they offer plenty of other major benefits.
Read our blog on How to Protect Your Salesforce Environment with DevOps Tools to learn more about leveraging these tools to keep your data safe.
FAQs
What is a dynamic dashboard in Salesforce?
An unintelligible pile of information doesn’t do anybody any good. You need to present this data in a clear, coherent fashion if you want to be able to harness the insights buried somewhere within. A dynamic dashboard in Salesforce is a versatile reporting tool that enables users to create customizable, real-time visual representations of their data. Unlike standard dashboards, which display data from the perspective of the dashboard creator, dynamic dashboards allow each user to view data according to their own security settings and access levels. This means that users can see personalized data without the need to create multiple dashboards for different roles or departments.
What types of DevOps metrics should I be tracking?
A DevOps pipeline includes a wide variety of functions, processes, and tasks. Each of these aspects creates its own set of data. Prioritizing these data sets for analysis will provide the best blueprint for refining processes and improving results. Data can be separated into a few larger buckets of information. Here are some examples:
- Performance Metrics: System availability and uptime, latency and response times
- Quality Metrics: Automation test pass rate, defect density
- Security Metrics: Vulnerability detection rate, incident frequency
- Deployment Metrics: Deployment frequency, success rates, change lead time
Monitoring these metrics offers valuable insights into the performance of your Salesforce DevOps efforts.
How do I know I have a bottleneck in my Salesforce DevOps pipeline?
There are two ways to identify bottlenecks in your Salesforce DevOps pipeline. The first is to analyze available key performance metrics for glaring inefficiencies. This could take the form of extended lead times for changes, frequent deployment failures, or a high mean time to recovery (MTTR). A low deployment frequency despite high demand or persistent backlogs in tasks can be signs that your pipeline is struggling to keep up. The second way to find bottlenecks is to speak with your team members. With firsthand experience, they’ll be able to point toward inefficient processes and areas where projects tend to slow down.
