Your DevOps pipeline is a great opportunity to create new and useful tools for your customers and team members. The applications and updates produced through these efforts can increase your market value and prestige in the eyes of your customers.
The ultimate goal of every Salesforce DevOps pipeline is to increase revenue.
The cost that goes into your DevOps projects needs to be balanced out by the benefits of the eventual products. This might not be so easy to measure as these projects don’t always produce sellable results. This means the best way to get the most from your efforts is to reduce the amount of money being spent throughout the development process itself.
The only way to accomplish this is through streamlined efforts and beneficial tools throughout your pipeline. Salesforce continuous integration tools are an essential aspect of accomplishing this goal. Continuous integration is an automated tool that integrates lines of code from multiple developers into a single software release.
But how does this help your overall DevOps efforts and reduce overhead costs?
Here are 7 ways Salesforce continuous integration tools save your company money:
1. Reduce Manual Processes
A DevOps project is liable to have thousands of lines of code. Manually testing and integrating every one of these not only takes a large amount of time, but it also creates an opportunity for human error. People are not infallible, and given a highly repetitive task, there is a strong likelihood of making a mistake.
Errors in the testing phase can lead to broken deployments and create the need to rework previously completed aspects of a project.
Errors are costly. And they become even more costly to rectify the later they are found in the development cycle. Reducing manual processes saves money in both a reduction of errors as well as expediting the arduous testing phase.
2. Allow Team Members to Focus on Pressing Issues
Taking these highly repetitive tasks off of your team members hands gives them more time to focus on important matters. This could come in the form of being able to pay even closer attention to the development phase or even moving onto the next project.
Team members that are bogged down in processes that can easily be addressed with Salesforce continuous integration tools aren’t being as productive as they can be.
A main aspect of saving money is increasing the amount of output your team is able to produce. Taking away mindless tasks through automation allows your team members to focus on more important matters and push out more DevOps projects.
3. Increase Code Quality
The quality of your code is directly related to the success of your DevOps products. And your ability to verify the validity of coding structures can also be tied to the overall cost of each project. We mentioned how coding errors become more expensive to fix if they aren’t found early in the process. In fact, these problems can cost up to 150 times as much if they aren’t located before the production phase.
Salesforce continuous integration tools test the lines of code as they are merged into a singular repository to weed out any errors and give your team the chance to rectify them.
Continuous integration can be paired with other DevOps tools like static code analysis to give you an even greater chance to find coding errors as early as possible.
4. Better End User Experience
A faulty, buggy software release will be quickly abandoned and further ignored by the intended audience. Word spreads quickly when an update or application doesn’t function properly. And if there’s no reward at the end of a DevOps pipeline, then all of the money that was sunk into the project was wasted.
Automated testing tools like continuous integration remove problematic lines of code to ensure the product functions properly.
Saving money on the process of producing an update or application is one thing, but it needs to be combined with a successful launch in order to provide profitable returns and justify the time and effort.
5. Reduction in Failed Deployments
A failure during the deployment phase can mean a total downfall of the project. All of the time, money, and effort put into the application or update goes to waste. Your team is then faced with backtracking to find the errors and rectifying them to try to save the product.
Properly testing and integrating the massive amounts of lines of code drastically reduces the chances of a failed deployment at the end of a DevOps pipeline.
One of the main benefits of Salesforce continuous integration tools is the confidence you receive from knowing the entirety of your project has visibility. Not only does this help get your products in the hands of the end users, but it also saves you lost money from failed deployments.
6. Less Employee Turnover
This money saving benefit is a little different than the others. We’ve been focused on how continuous integration streamlines your DevOps pipeline. Powerful automated tools can save you in another way as well—a reduction in training time.
Utilizing automated DevOps tools makes working on your projects more enjoyable for team members.
They aren’t saddled with tedious tasks, allowing them to focus on more enjoyable aspects of the process. This makes them less likely to look for a new job and saves the company money on finding, onboarding, and training new hires.
7. Expedites Time to Market
You need to be able to quickly introduce new functionalities in order to be a leader in your industry. Rolling out new updates and applications before your competition positions you as an eminent source for your services.
Streamlining and optimizing your DevOps pipeline with tools like continuous integration speeds along the development processes so you can quickly address your customers’ needs.
Return customers are essential to a successful business. Introducing products to the market that reflect the immediate needs of potential customers is a great way to build trust. And a trusted company is more likely to attract repeat customers.