In the world of professional sports, teams often set out to win trophies by signing superstars to massive contracts — only to fall short of expectations due to poor strategy and teamwork. In a similar way, Salesforce development teams often fail to promptly deliver the high-quality products business stakeholders need to stay competitive due to communication and collaboration shortcomings.
A few years ago, our development and operations teams worked in silos. We spent long hours and late nights executing manual deployments. We stepped on each other’s toes due to a lack of visibility. We struggled to meet compliance and security standards — and blamed each other when things went wrong. As a result, the digital transformation projects we tackled were hampered by delays, frequent outages and frustrated end users.
Now let’s fast-forward to the present. Today, our teams work together seamlessly to facilitate real-time collaboration and share knowledge. We deliver high-quality Salesforce solutions ahead of schedule, reduce operational challenges and provide better value to our customers. Instead of pointing fingers when issues arise, we collaborate to quickly identify and resolve issues. Everyone is on the same page and the work environment is 100% more enjoyable.
So what changed? We adopted DevOps practices for Salesforce development.
DevOps revolutionizes the way teams deliver software by breaking down barriers between development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). The goal of DevOps is to streamline the software delivery process across departments and enable efficient collaboration throughout every stage of the development lifecycle: planning, coding, testing, deployment and monitoring.
Embracing DevOps principles has not only enhanced the efficiency and reliability of our development and operations teams — it has positively impacted our entire organization. DevOps triangulates people, process and technology to help us deliver with speed and confidence.
By adopting DevOps practices, one of the key changes we implemented was the automation of development and deployment tasks across our Salesforce pipeline. This reduced the chances of human error and allowed us to deliver high-quality software more frequently. We also implemented continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, which enabled us to release new features and fixes to production much faster.
The DevOps marketplace is full of software solutions that solve 20% of the problem — with 100% of the budget. But after implementing Copado and leveraging comprehensive automation capabilities for deployments, back promotions and testing, our teams have achieved proper alignment and now enjoy up to 40X faster Salesforce release times.
We’ve been able to resolve several significant deployment issues previously associated with change sets and can now automate repetitive tasks to eliminate human errors and accelerate release cycles. CI/CD practices have enabled us to catch and rectify issues early in the development process, resulting in error-free releases and more reliable project deliveries.
Most importantly, implementing Copado and adopting DevOps methodologies has improved the overall satisfaction and engagement of our team. These tools and practices have become the cornerstone of our project management — helping us achieve higher levels of efficiency, quality and collaboration.
We found a better way to work that saved precious time, smoothed the wrinkles in our development process and delighted our customers. Personally, Copado made my daily tasks more organized and easier to accomplish.
Organizations must swiftly respond to market demands and industry changes in today’s competitive landscape. Copado offers tools to help you plan and orchestrate complex releases — empowering your team to manage multiple changes and deployments simultaneously.
With Copado, you can define CI/CD pipelines for your Salesforce projects. This means that changes are automatically built, tested and deployed across environments (development, testing, staging, production) based on predefined criteria.
Automated testing helps you catch bugs and issues earlier in the development process to drive stability and reliability across each Salesforce release. Copado enables the setup of automated testing pipelines to ensure that changes are thoroughly tested before deployment to production environments.
DevOps fosters collaboration throughout cross-functional teams to minimize communication gaps, reduce silos, and improve project coordination. Copado facilitates real-time collaboration by providing a centralized platform for communication, planning and tracking. In addition, Copado integrates with version control systems like Git, allowing developers to manage their code changes in a structured manner and enabling collaboration.
Automated deployment processes and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices lead to consistent environments and reduce the risk of errors caused by manual configuration. Copado provides features to track changes, maintain compliance, and keep an audit trail of all actions taken in the release process.
DevOps practices enable the automation of scaling resources up or down based on demand to optimize performance and resource utilization. Copado helps you manage different Salesforce environments — ensuring consistency and making it easier to promote changes through the pipeline.
Monitoring and feedback loops provide insights into application performance, user behavior and other metrics to help teams continuously improve their products. Copado integrates with monitoring tools to help you gauge the performance of your Salesforce applications in real-time.