Adhering to Salesforce coding best practices helps streamline and optimize DevOps pipelines to produce better products at an accelerated pace.
Why It Matters: Salesforce coding best practices synergize the efforts of your team with the goal of producing more secure products as efficiently as possible. Best practices are habits and tactics generally regarded as providing the most optimal results. Incorporating best practices into your process will:
- Lead to an increased ROI by minimizing repetitive work.
- Increase team member satisfaction because their efforts are streamlined.
- Enable Administrators to better manage their teams when members know what to expect.
Salesforce Development Best Practices
Here are 6 Salesforce coding best practices that help DevOps teams see the greatest returns from their development pipeline:
1. Utilize Static Code Analysis
The strength of your code is the single greatest factor in the success of your DevOps project. This is the infrastructure upon which the rest of your product will be built. And just like with a house, faulty infrastructure can lead to dangerous outcomes.
Providing your team with proper tooling gives developers the support they need to create reliable updates and applications every time.
Enabling your team to produce the strongest possible structure is the first Salesforce coding best practice. Even the most skilled developers make mistakes, which can result in potential data security vulnerabilities and failed deployments.
Static code analysis is an essential tool that provides complete visibility into code health from the moment it’s written all the way to deployment.
This automated tool supports your Salesforce developers as they incorporate the rest of your Salesforce coding best practices. Lines of code are checked against a set of internal rules. Errors are flagged the moment they are introduced into the code repository, making it much easier for developers to immediately fix them before they snowball into larger, more costly issues.
Intentional practices combined with strong tooling create the best atmosphere for developing reliable code. Your updates and applications are immediately made more secure and reliable.
2. Implement Source Code Management
The pandemic put remote work on the fast track. This continues to have repercussions as we move further into 2023. Geographically disparate teams need to be able to communicate and collaborate, which has pushed cloud computing to the forefront of IT infrastructures.
Incorporating cloud-based release management tools and testing infrastructure are crucial aspects of Salesforce DevOps for many companies, which will continue to grow in importance.
Organizations need to continually improve their release processes to deliver high-quality software updates and features to their users more quickly and efficiently. Cloud computing and dedicated DevOps tools are essential for accomplishing this.
3. Containerization Technology
Containerization refers to the practice of running applications in isolated, self-contained environments called containers. Each container provides a complete runtime environment, including the application code, dependencies, and configuration files, but does not include the underlying operating system.
Containerization technology provides a standardized environment for deploying and testing software, which helps release managers identify issues earlier in the release process.
These capabilities benefit the automated release management process by enabling faster deployments, increased scalability, and improved compatibility. Containerization is going to be increasingly utilized in automated release management in 2023.
4. Improved Automation
Automated tools that enable faster and more secure release management practices will continue to be optimized throughout the year. Security patches, increased reliance on artificial intelligence, and cloud-based functionalities are all going to be a focus for application developers.
Organizations can further enhance the automation capabilities of their release management tools by incorporating new technologies such as AI and cloud computing.
Automated release management solutions will continue to evolve towards providing end-to-end automation of the entire release process, from code development to deployment. This will involve integrating with other tools and processes, such as static code analysis, continuous integration and continuous development or CI/CD, and more.
5. Salesforce Secure Coding Guidelines
You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists. Failing to have an updated view of the inner workings of your Salesforce DevOps pipeline has the potential to lead to costly outages. Salesforce security posture management toolsempower admins to maintain visibility of essential functions like team member permissions settings and compliance factors.
Automated checks of Salesforce profile and permissions settings eliminate the threat of overexposed data, making companies much less likely to experience data exposures, corruptions, and deletions.
Employees should only have access to the data they need to accomplish their tasks. Anything beyond that opens up data sets to an increased possibility of costly accidents.
6. Microservice Architecture
Microservice architecture breaks down a complex application into smaller, independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently of one another. Each service is responsible for a specific business function and communicates with other services through APIs.
Automated release management in a microservice architecture manages the deployment of individual services, as well as the orchestration of multiple services, to create a complete application.
This approach focuses more on specific tasks, which allows developers to work on individual services without impacting other parts of the application. This makes it easier to incorporate changes and add new features without disrupting the entire application.
Next Step…
Now that you know what to expect from automated release management this year, let’s look into how to incorporate these capabilities into your Salesforce DevOps pipeline.
Check out our blog, “10 Tips for DevOps Implementation for Salesforce,” to learn more.