Unlocking Success with Copado: Mission-Critical Tools for Developers

Copado isn’t just another DevOps provider. We’re on a mission: a goal to change the game when it comes to low-code CI/CD and AI-driven test automation for Salesforce.

In the latest episode of the Copado webinar series, we focused primarily on three specific areas of our offering: CI/CD, Robotic Testing, and quality intelligence. In our eyes, these areas hold the golden key to unlocking your Salesforce development team’s potential. This step-by-step article will take you through some of the fundamental points we discussed in the webinar.

Salesforce CI/CD

CI/CD is laying the groundwork of modern software development, so it does and will continue to, play a huge role in any successful DevOps strategy.

The Challenges and How We Fixed Them

One of the biggest challenges facing any DevOps strategy is the variety of contrasting personas working on projects and the need for simultaneous collaboration. Whether you’re a small team or a large one, we’ve grasped what is required to make this *tick*, helping to drastically enhance a company’s Salesforce delivery. Ultimately, the developer's experience is vital.

To do this, we diagnosed the challenges that were clear barriers to progress and resulted in delayed projects that struggled to get off the ground:

Lack of Visibility

A lack of a central system can compound current problems for development teams and create new ones. Pushing a team to learn how to use new tools constantly only wastes precious time that could be better used to improve projects. Quality, planning and analyzing velocities are other barriers that come with no centralized system. With Copado, that all changes immediately.

Difficulty in Enforcing Quality

It’s simple: the bigger the team, the harder it is to enforce quality successfully. Enforcing quality with a central system is different. Everybody on your team is on the same page, with a better ability to analyze and report results across all Salesforce pipelines. The result? A clear idea of metadata changes and pre-production standards.

Steep Learning Curves

The enforcement of quality also leads to steep learning curves for many developers, who have to make use of various tools to achieve the desired results. With a bigger team, this is even more challenging. In response, Copado utilizes a hybrid approach for different users. For example, pro-coders can use tools they’re familiar with while we automate a whole host of tools into the pipeline. This means developers won’t have to remember to initiate these easy-to-bypass steps during the development process.

The benefits of using Copado for CI/CD are undeniable. Faster release cycles, enhanced code quality, and drastically reduced app errors mean CI/CD with Copado just makes sense. The numbers speak for themselves too, with 78% fewer app errors, 90% faster recovery and 20% faster app development. With all that extra time, your brand can focus on the areas that matter.

Robotic Testing

As you can imagine, high-level testing can be incredibly challenging in ever more complex software environments — but that doesn’t diminish its importance. Challenges for developers can include a lack of communication, test environment duplication, and, to put it bluntly, tight deadlines. When conducting individual tests manually, the task becomes even more difficult.

Copado’s Unique Take on Robotic Testing

Copado’s cloud-based test automation solution is data-driven, relying on real-world information that could transform your DevOps. But why should you data-drive your tests? Here are some of the problems you’ll encounter if you don’t:

• Tight coupling between functional tests and data
• Coverage gaps leading to expensive defects
• Increased maintenance complexity

The benefits that come with utilizing automated data-driven, cloud-enabled testing are even clearer:

• Flexible data-set selection
• Convenient data availability on the cloud
• Improved coverage, with the ability to cover negative and positive scenarios in a single test

Incorporating Copado’s data-driven Robotic Testing solution could be fundamental in transforming your testing structures. With a 70-80% increase in automated test coverage, 90% more functional testing coverage and a 375% reduction in testing hours, our ‘real-world’ case study for Propic is the perfect example of Copado’s Robotic Testing in action. Ultimately, serious progress is left by the wayside without enhanced, automated testing.

Quality Intelligence

Code can be completed before a deadline and reach the bare minimum requirements, but if it isn’t meeting the highest quality — what’s the point? Our Robotic Testing system can run thousands of test cases every week, increasing exponentially with extra projects, test suites and robots. As you can imagine, that can lead to a lot of data.

Why Is Quality Intelligence So Crucial?

Without a firm, focused view of data and a solid analytical structure, tracking results and gaining specific insights can be challenging. For clients, these benefits include:

• Tracking test run results
• Detecting failed tests
• Analyzing release readiness
• An increase in customer satisfaction
• Lower support costs
• Fewer unnecessary errors
• A higher quality service

Quality Intelligence tools actively assist developers in maximizing their code quality and performance and the benefits are undeniable.

The Copado Project Dashboard

With all these advantages in mind, we rebuilt our project dashboards from the ground up. This Project Dashboard is the consequence of a data-driven attitude and determination to make clients squeeze every drop out of their information. Here are some of the key perks of the Copado Project Dashboard:

• The ability to sift through huge amounts of test data, all by utilizing global filters
• Results shown after the first test run only to demonstrate the performance of scripts
• The capability to display a variety of metrics helps to showcase test results and trends over time while providing information at both the robot and test suite levels

The result is an efficient system that focuses on specific demands, providing extra flexibility and scalability, all while reconstructing and creating new metrics.

Conclusion

Unlocking success is never easy, but integrating the automated Copado Platform into your current set-up can be transformative. Tune in for the second episode of "What's New on the Copado Platform?" to discover new functionalities and how to level up your Salesforce development.  If you’re a developer and keen to learn more, check out Copado integrations on developer.copado.com.