Salesforce deployment tools reduce the potential for human error by automating critical quality and security processes in the DevOps lifecycle.
Why It Matters: A streamlined release cycle enables organizations to be more flexible and agile in their responses to software needs. Eliminating errors and automating time-consuming manual processes enable faster delivery of features and updates.
- Human error is continuously labeled as the leading cause of data loss.
- Faulty updates have the potential to create outages, which can cost up to $9,000 per minute on average.
Here are seven ways Salesforce deployment tools expedite release cycles:
1. Streamlines Collaboration
Large development teams are prone to errors without proper tracking, documentation, and support.
Version control is a critical aspect of a streamlined Salesforce deployment strategy because it helps teams align their efforts and avoid costly errors.
Avoiding overwrites and untraceable rollbacks helps teams focus on pushing a DevOps project to production while avoiding redundant work. Version control enables teams to easily manage and track changes to stay productive.
2. Reduces Manual Errors
People make mistakes. It’s unavoidable. The only way to reduce the number of mistakes your team makes is to minimize touchpoints on highly repetitive tasks that are prone to errors.
Salesforce deployment tools automate the deployment of metadata components, which reduces deployment time and minimizes the opportunities for errors to derail a project.
Automation is your best friend when it comes to eliminating user mistakes and letting your team focus on more urgent matters.
3. Enables Early Identification of Conflicts
The sooner you identify and flag mistakes, the easier it is to keep your release cycle running smoothly. Unchecked errors become increasingly difficult—and expensive—to fix the later they’re found in the application lifecycle.
Run pre-deployment checks to identify conflicts or issues to avoid reworking an update and ensure smoother releases.
Having multiple layers of testing through Salesforce deployment tools lowers the cost of each project and increases deployment success rates.
4. Validates Code After Every Commit
A great way to eliminate errors as early as possible is to validate your code after every commit.
Automated continuous integration (CI) pipelines are set to do this and take laborious processes out of your developers’ hands.
Multiple layers of testing are available in a CI/CD pipeline through automated tooling. Salesforce deployment tools integrate seamlessly to ensure that no surprise errors are going to cause issues when your update reaches deployment.
5. Delivers Total Visibility with Real-Time Metrics
Information is key to improving your Salesforce DevOps approach with each project. Salesforce deployment tools automatically compile useful metrics that help pinpoint problem areas and highlight successes.
Dashboards and reports provide insights into deployment performance, success rates, and bottlenecks, allowing teams to optimize processes.
Smoothing out these potential delays ensures your team is continuously improving and finding ways to produce reliable updates in a faster, more efficient way.
6. Simplifies Rollbacks
Backup plans need to be in place in the event of errors. Dialing a project back without messing up dependencies can be difficult, and if done incorrectly, necessitates rework from your team to get everything running smoothly again.
Built-in rollback capabilities enable deployment tools to restore previous configurations quickly if issues are found after an update is released.
Streamlined rollbacks help teams make the necessary adjustments without needing to rework massive chunks of the update.
7. Provides Immediate Notification of Coding Errors
We mentioned how early detection of errors makes it easier to fix them while also reducing the cost associated with these mistakes.
Integrate static code analysis to ensure code quality and adherence to best practices before deployment.
Flawless code won’t guarantee a successful deployment, but it will go a long way toward expediting the code-writing stage. This benefit is doubled by eliminating the need to fix coding errors in the future. Salesforce deployment tools work together to eliminate errors and expedite the time it takes to move an update through the DevOps lifecycle.
Next Step…
Your needs from Salesforce deployment tools will evolve as you expand your business. Best practices are to find a tool and stick with it, which means you need to assess scalability along with functionality when sourcing your tools.
Our ebook, Avoid Unnecessary Growing Pains: Safely Scaling Salesforce DevOps, digs into everything you need to know about this important consideration.