Is Salesforce Development ‘One Size Fits All?’

“Does one size fit all?” How many times do you ask yourself this question? 

How many times have you arrived at the hardware store for a small part, like a plumbing fitting, only to realize there are seemingly infinite options? Which size is right for your project? Which material? Is an aluminum piece more durable than a PVC piece? Oh wow, there is an innovative new mesh pipe fitting—since it’s the newest does that mean it is the best?

This dilemma isn’t specific to the hardware store. Finding the DevOps tools that fit your needs can feel a lot like selecting the right plumbing fittings. If you’ve led the search for a new tool, you’ve likely asked vendors, "does your product work with product X, Y, and Z?" That’s because your development tools can’t solve pain points in a silo. They need to integrate seamlessly into your development lifecycle and tech stack, so your teams can truly leverage the product’s capabilities without disrupting their workflows.

Now more than ever before, integration plays a vital role in achieving true Digital Transformation. When your development processes are distributed across several tools, you’re slowing progress by forcing teams to jump between technologies and manually connect their processes. This is a key inhibitor that’s keeping teams from meeting the demands of the business—and their customers. And when development teams cut waste out of their processes, they enable their businesses to offer solutions, insights, and value that wouldn’t be impossible without a unified view of the customer. 

While the benefits of integration are simple and clear, building integrations can be quite complex. Generally, integrations aren’t plug-and-play. Rather, developers must build and maintain the “plug:”

• Upfront, they must write code to handle the API for product X, Y and Z
• And down the line, they must monitor the connection and write new code as each product evolves

With developers maintaining many integrations, it can be easy to see why building and maintaining those connections for their own tools may fall by the wayside. But what if there was a low-code solution to connecting your DevOps tools?

Copado’s new Pipeline Builders makes end-to-end process configuration possible. With the power of Salesforce Flows, Copado enables you to click-to-integrate 3rd party tools, streamlining static code analysis, regression testing, project management and more.

Included in the Copado Winter ‘21 release, Pipeline Builders unlock new automation possibilities to provide more flexibility and build process efficiencies. Let’s dig into how Pipeline Builders truly make Copado the one-size-fits-all DevOps solution.

Salesforce Flow

If you want to execute jobs from third-party tools as part of your deployment (e.g. perform a regression as part of your data migration), you must first set up a connection. This is where Salesforce Flows come in. Using the same UX your admins and devs use to create process flows, they’ll configure each piece of the integration. This will allow Copado to trigger third-party actions as part of your deployments. 

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For example, many of our customers use third-party code analysis and testing tools. When you set up an integration via Salesforce Flows, you can not only create an alert that an analysis or test needs run in your third-party tool(s), you can actually trigger it. 

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Automation Templates 

In addition to connecting your end-to-end development lifecycle via Flows, you can also create Automation Templates to define steps and triggers within your development lifecycle. Automation Templates allow you to configure a set of reusable steps for automating DevOps tasks like triggering builds in other technologies, running regression tests, setting up a new environment, and more. Steps in a template can be included in deployments as quality gates and can also be triggered in the new automation step, from an apex class or as a Salesforce Flow action. 

Results

A global Results object now stores the result of your job executions. You will no longer need to create a new object to store information of third-party job executions or hunt through related lists to find the results you are looking for. By leveraging this single object, you now have unified reporting of all your external job activity within Copado.

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With Copado Pipeline Builders, we’ve eliminated the friction of working across multiple DevOps tools. Rather than wasting time switching between UIs, manually triggering jobs and building custom integrations, your team has the flexibility to configure and customize Copado to match your full development lifecycle. Not only does Copado become one-size-fits-all, but it also provides a single-point-solution for viewing your DevOps progress.