Digital transformation, the emergence of hybrid working, and continuous market uncertainty have every organization relying on the Salesforce platform to manage their day-to-day operations. But as new business requirements and opportunities progressively increase workloads for Salesforce teams, there is a pressing need to embrace ways that ensure the release of high-quality work.
Against this backdrop, many teams are turning to CI/CD to automate Salesforce workflows and more efficiently manage and maintain them. Read on to uncover how you can make software delivery more resilient and agile with Salesforce CI/CD.
The Need for CI/CD
In today's volatile era, changes and updates to software products must be made constantly. This helps them keep pace with the changes happening in the business landscape. But just introducing new edits to working software without proper testing or via a random approach can lead to several issues in software availability or performance. Eventually, this can impact user experience.
The concept of CI/CD makes the process of introducing change systematic and seamless. While CI enables teams to automatically move work items along a release pipeline through regular integration, CD aids in deploying changes – as soon as the work item has been approved. Together, CI/CD ensures that any change or update is developed, tested, validated, and deployed most efficiently. As a result, no issues arise during the release process.
Leveraging automated tools and processes, CI/CD reduces the time it takes for teams to review new work, making sure every individual work item is deployed successfully to a new environment at any stage in the process. By ensuring that the latest changes immediately reflect in the production environment, CI/CD delivers added value and new functionality to end-users as soon as possible. This makes the software more agile, flexible, and resilient to changing priorities.
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What Are the Advantages of Salesforce CI/CD?
Salesforce CI/CD streamlines the software development process, enabling developers to:
- Push commits quickly
- Roll out releases frequently, and
- Mitigate issues before they cause user experience problems.
Through inherent stabilization of change management, it ensures that smaller, more iterative commits are less risky or disruptive – so users can make the most of the latest features and updates.
With Salesforce constantly releasing new updates and features to keep up with market trends and customer expectations, Salesforce CI/CD helps teams overcome common troubles by integrating their changes and keeping sandboxes in sync. Moreover, acting as an automation framework, Salesforce CI/CD makes releasing software less risky and more manageable.
Leveraging low-code development tools, advanced automation processes, and a naturally robust and customizable platform, Salesforce CI/CD makes changes within the Salesforce ecosystem manageable and secure.
When it comes to the advantages of Salesforce CI/CD, there are many that teams can benefit from. With Salesforce CI/CD, teams can
- Eliminate repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone manual processes. As a result, they can enjoy substantial savings in development effort and time.
- Ensure a reliable way of delivering high-quality products (and changes) to end-users – consistently and continuously
- Simplify commits and release new changes and updates more frequently and with greater confidence – making Salesforce releases more predictable
- Automate the build, test, and deployment process to bring new features to users quickly and with lesser risk
- Spend more time developing new features and less time on administrative tasks. This helps in improving the speed and accuracy of releases as well as quality and innovation.
- Improve the quality of releases through constant data validation, testing, and compliance checks
- Detect issues in software updates early on and take steps to prevent them from causing problems later in the development lifecycle
- Spend less time worrying about catching errors in Salesforce code and more focusing on innovation and improvement
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Tips and Best Practices to Keep in Mind While Enabling Salesforce CI/CD
Here are some tips and best practices to keep in mind if you want to
- Have a better idea of what to expect in terms of new Salesforce features and functionality
- Launch commits with more confidence
- Respond to business requirements with greater agility
Tips and Best Practices
- Craft a culture of continuous improvement and build a CI/CD mindset from the very beginning
- Foster collaboration between teams so they can take advantage of Salesforce’s wide breadth of pre-existing integrations and customizations.
- Be clear about the quality standards you want to achieve and communicate the same across your development organization.
- Encourage everyone in the team to form a sense of product ownership. This can help enable faster processes and the development of more features.
- Ensure quality control throughout the Salesforce CI/CD pipeline by checking every change/update against a set of quality and security standards.
- Constantly look for areas of improvement and enable transparency to achieve the required levels of efficiency, stability, and innovation
- Create a culture of fast feedback to ensure quick response to new customer requests and business needs
- Ensure visibility across the development process and make identifying risks and protecting sensitive data easier.
Wrapping Up
To sum up, businesses need to respond to new trends and change requests effectively and with utmost reliability in today's era of constant change. Any update to any software can improve the organization's performance and ROI, but only if it is delivered across the organization consistently and securely.
As teams across different departments rely on Salesforce to manage complex tasks, having a robust CI/CD solution in place prevents new changes and updates from spiraling out of control. Salesforce CI/CD allows for continuous updating and improvement of the Salesforce platform. This enables organizations to make the most of every feature and bring more value to the business.
ACCELQ can be the ideal tool to enable Salesforce CI/CD and test automation. Contact us today to learn how ACCELQ can help you dramatically speed up release cycles while making software delivery more resilient and agile.
Suma Ganji
Senior Content Writer
Expertly navigating technical and UX writing, she crafts captivating content that hits the mark every time. With a keen SEO understanding, her work consistently resonates with readers while securing prime online visibility. When the day's work ends, you'll find her immersed in literary escapades in her quaint book house.
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