Accelerating Salesforce Deployment Time from Weeks to Hours

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The Challenge

Fixing a Development Process Blotted By Merge Conflicts & Testing Delays

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The printing company launched a digital unit in 2018 to keep up with the world’s digital economy and drive sales through its own e-commerce channel. Soon after implementing Salesforce, HEIDELBERG ran into deployment issues due to homegrown pipelines with limited automation and tedious manual process steps. 

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HEIDELBERG has 20+ Salesforce developers — a team of both pro-coders and low-coders. Due to the disparity in development skills across the team, only a handful of people in HEIDELBERG could navigate the company’s technical homegrown solution and manage deployments. Without automation built into the process, HEIDELBERG developers endured numerous manual steps to deploy any Salesforce changes.

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The HEIDELBERG development team was also faced with challenges surrounding their manual Branching Strategy. Developers would often deploy entire org branches rather than only the specific changes related to a feature because of the effort it took to track and maintain changes. This inevitably led to frequent merge conflicts and delays to other deployments in progress.

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For HEIDELBERG developers, the lack of visibility and traceability into environments and orgs had a major effect on efficiency across teams. If the development team had a UAT deployment scheduled on a specific day, it would fail if another business unit rolled out the software first on the same org. The teams couldn’t deploy anything else until they resolved the conflict.

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Navigating and fixing roll-back issues on the org branch usually meant delays, which impacted the internal business users at HEIDELBERG and slowed down the delivery of sales and support services. 

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The development team faced similar challenges during the testing stage as well. HEIDELBERG’s growing e-commerce business was a challenge to manage due to hundreds of thousands of product and user accounts. Performing UAT for this ever-expanding phalanx of features was quickly turning into a bottleneck. For HEIDELBERG developers, the last-minute fixes created frequent problems that were growing into a high-maintenance job.

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Key Challenges

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The Solution

Making the Cut as HEIDELBERG’s Favorite DevOps Platform

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The HEIDELBERG team needed a solution that could help them navigate the problems caused by the team’s homegrown DevOps tool.

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After comparing several DevOps solutions, HEIDELBERG found Copado’s feature set to be far better than the rest. For instance, Copado allows developers to organize and manage deployment-related code in the production org. HEIDELBERG also found Copado’s out-of-the-box integrations with tools in its tech stack like Jira, Git and Azure DevOps to be useful in syncing their DevOps process on one platform.

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Another deciding factor for implementing Copado: free guest users and the ability to share read-only licenses. These features allow developers to invite people who aren’t responsible for deployments to monitor development pipelines and track the status of user stories.

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HEIDELBERG eventually inked a deal with Copado after demoing the Branching Strategy capability and determining how it could fit the company’s use case. After comparing other solutions with similar functionalities to Copado, the team found Copado’s merging and production strategies to be much easier to understand.  

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With Copado, all branching is done automatically behind the scenes, allowing developers who are working on a User Story to easily access those specific changes committed to a uniquely contained feature branch in their repository. When a User story is deployed the updates in the deployment are limited to the User Story components. This both mitigates the need for manual component tracking, saves time, and reduces the risk of merge conflicts.

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The Outcome

Entering a New Chapter: Frequent Deployments, Pipeline Visibility & Agile Development

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Before implementing Copado, HEIDELBERG deployed Salesforce changes into production every two weeks on average. With Copado, they have improved the frequency of deployments to several times a week.

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The best part of DevOps automation? HEIDELBERG can now deploy Salesforce changes in hours instead of weeks. Thanks to Copado’s automation capabilities and agile DevOps process, it only takes the printing company one and a half to two hours to push a deployment into production.

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Before Copado, developers rolled out deployments once every two weeks and would still miss deadlines due to errors in the rollout. Fixing these issues often took up to two weeks. With Copado, the developers can do real-time fixes, roll out each deployment quickly and schedule the next one without wasting time.

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Copado allows the developers the flexibility to deploy smaller batches of code at a higher frequency. High-velocity deployment allows them to be more agile and makes it accessible to non-technical people within the organization.

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This internal transparency is important for HEIDELBERG because it enables stakeholders outside the development team to closely track the development pipeline and the statuses of specific tickets.

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Copado Branching Strategy has allowed HEIDELBERG developers to avoid the mess around merge conflicts between different orgs. Today, the success rate of deployments is significantly higher because the Copado Branching Strategy has made it possible for developers to create separate feature branches for separate orgs within the company — helping them avoid merge conflicts that used to hinder their deployment speed.

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The developers can now commit and deploy via CLI, leverage release management support and track user stories across each stage of the development lifecycle. Copado enables developers to back-promote changes and keep their individual sandboxes up-to-date without refreshing them every time.

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The Future

Gaining DevOps Maturity

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HEIDELBERG is maximizing the benefits of Copado’s out-of-the-box features and integrations — and the printing company plans to leverage more release functionalities and other capabilities as it gains DevOps maturity.

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