AutoRABIT is excited to announce two new advancements that, together, enable true continuous delivery in Salesforce:
- Auto-approval for quality gates: Commits and merges can be triggered automatically without manual intervention if tests are passed.
- Auto-merge to multiple branches: Sophisticated teams that perform numerous commits and merges a day can save time and money by automating repetitive processes.
Let’s dig a little deeper into what these new functions allow AutoRABIT users to do, as well as how they contribute to achieving true continuous delivery.
1. Auto-approval for Quality Gates
New code needs to be reviewed and approved before it moves into production. Failing to do this can result in bugs and errors that lead to broken functionality and even data security vulnerabilities.
These reviews are incredibly time consuming when performed manually. Highly repetitive and lengthy reviews are also subject to human error. The truth is, we simply can’t focus on minute details for too long without experiencing a degradation in accuracy.
AutoRABIT’s new update enables auto-approval of quality gates, which automates much of the process of reviewing code prior to approvals.
Users can define quality thresholds through factors like static code analysis results and code coverage. Your team can then proceed with the merge or commit once this criteria is met. From here, it’s sent for approval.
Merge conflicts occasionally happen, causing an update to fail the quality requirements. When this happens, the system will send the conflict back to developers, so errors can be fixed before progressing further down the DevOps pipeline.
The automatic quality gates functionality reduces the need for hands-on code correction.
Once the automation is established, a developer could theoretically deliver a project to production, as long as it meets the quality requirements. This facilitates what’s known as continuous deployment, which takes the idea of continuous delivery one step further by removing the approval stage.
Manual approvals can be overlooked or delayed until the release manager approves new commits. Enabling this updated feature ensures projects continue along the Salesforce DevOps pipeline.
2. Auto-merge to Multiple Branches
In the traditional flow, a new job is created every time a user tries to merge to a certain branch, even if the source is the same. This means when a user wants to merge the same thing to five different branches, then five individual jobs have to be created—all with their own lifecycle. This creates a lot of overhead.
The new AutoRABIT update simplifies this process by letting you auto-merge to multiple branches.
This allows users to define multiple destinations for merging a singular piece of data from one job. This greatly increases the efficiency of processes within your DevOps pipeline because it allows multiple people to work on a similar set of data.
For instance, this allows a user who wants to merge into an integration to simultaneously merge with a QA and master.
Problems with new code are sometimes found in the QA stage. Previously, small fixes must follow their own lifecycle. This update gives developers the ability to work in conjunction with each other on different sections of a project. The capacity to focus on hot fixes, for example, greatly accelerates the process.
Sophisticated teams that perform numerous commits and merges will see tremendous benefits from this capability by reducing repetitive processes.
3. Achieving Continuous Delivery
Realizing continuous delivery is the ultimate goal for any DevOps teams because it means they’ve streamlined and optimized their processes to the greatest extent possible. Fast, reliable delivery of strong code offers a myriad of benefits, such as improved productivity, higher release velocity, and an increased throughput on daily, monthly, and yearly basis.
Both the auto-approval for quality gates and the auto-merge to multiple branches capabilities reduce the amount of labor-intensive work needed to reach production.
Adding quality gates fast-tracks the approvals stage by reducing the amount of time a release manager needs to spend manually reviewing each project.
Minimizing the number of active lifecycles through auto-merging to multiple branches simplifies your lifecycles, reducing errors and complexity.
Both features are available in the latest AutoRABIT update, and are essential to streamlining DevOps processes and achieving true continuous delivery.
