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SMA Solar Technology AG is a leading specialist in photovoltaic system technology. From homes and businesses to large-scale PV power plants, the German manufacturer is dedicated to the delivery of PV and energy management solutions. With 3,500+ employees and 20 countries of operation, SMA is setting the standard for the future of decentralized, digital and renewable energy supply.
In 2015, SMA set out to overhaul their digital experiences by implementing the Salesforce Platform. Before long, SMA’s Salesforce practice swelled to 1,300+ active users as the company introduced it across each region. But as SMA scaled Salesforce, they realized they needed a native DevOps solution to enhance workflows, introduce version control, and drive developer efficiency. Enter Copado.
Find out how Copado tackled SMA’s software development issues — empowering the company to innovate faster and lead the competitive renewable energy landscape.
Production Releases (from 40 Days to 7 Days)
for Tracking Changes and Comparing Versions
Visibility Reduces Merge Conflicts & Overwritten Code
Development Across Dozens of Sandboxes
Rolling out Salesforce across SMA’s sales and service teams enabled the company to centralize CRM operations and deliver more customer value. Teams managed deployments by moving changes from dev sandboxes to staging and then to the production environment — all tracked via Jira tickets. By employing multiple dev streams, only one thing prevented SMA from achieving a successful Salesforce delivery: poor visibility.
SMA used Salesforce Change Sets to manage each release — but they frequently ran into merge conflicts, overwritten code and bottlenecks due to a lack of visibility across teams working in parallel. When two or more developers modified the same Salesforce element (like a APEX class or a page layout) in their respective sandboxes and attempted to deploy them using a change set, only one set of changes would be deployed. This led to lost work, rework and development delays.
With Change Sets, SMA struggled to manage different versions of the same component. Sophisticated version control isn’t supported by Change Sets. This made it difficult for developers to track changes, compare versions and collaborate seamlessly.
Because each unique change wasn’t properly isolated, SMA faced a high risk of deploying errors and incorrect component versions. This made it challenging for SMA to advance changes quickly and roll backs of unwanted changes was cumbersome. When an issue was caught, quick fixes would get stuck in stages for 4-8 weeks for extensive testing, while simultaneously additional changes continued to enter the queue, before updates could be released to production.
To solve their change set headaches and accelerate Salesforce development, SMA set out to find a DevOps solution that was both enterprise-grade and easy to use. SMA evaluated multiple competing solutions in the market — but decided their version control tools required too much technical expertise for admins to learn.
However, SMA’s evaluation of Copado addressed all the manufacturer’s pain points. Copado’s Salesforce-native interface was easy for non-technical admins to master. The platform included a complete version control branching strategy and automated conflict resolution. Finally, since Copado provides end-to-end visibility and runs automatically in the background, SMA realized it could help developers isolate changes and individually deploy each one.
In 2020, SMA implemented Copado to free their deployment process from the limitations of Change Sets and allow parallelization. Copado’s connection to a Git repository allows each development to be freed of any dependency to another development on the same element.
Today, SMA’s Salesforce DevOps practice includes 10-15 development sandboxes that feed the integration environment, with 10-30 individual improvements in development and 5-20 improvements in staging at any given time — and none of them block each other.
Copado gives SMA’s teams the parallelization they need to audit development environments with precision and future-proof the continuous delivery process. Instead of chasing bugs and combing through versions for 4-8 weeks, developers can leverage automation to resolve nearly every issue in less than a week.
Now that SMA has mastered visibility, the German manufacturer is ready to take the next two steps to DevOps success: quality and speed. SMA plans to harness Copado’s automation capabilities to protect deployments from bugs, save time and scale Salesforce across the globe. To further stabilize and improve development, SMA has identified a few Copado features to master next:
Automated Quality Checks: Each Salesforce component has to pass three quality gates before release — meeting the “Definition of Done” (development completed), BAT (business acceptance testing) and UAT (user acceptance testing).
Automated Front-End Testing: Consistent front-end testing ensures core functionalities are operational and pinpoints problems before they cause damage.
A Unified Developer Experience: Copado DX enables developers to access everything they need from Visual Studio Code — no more jumping from Jira tickets to the development environment and console.
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