Bi-Weekly Salesforce Releases for MacMillan Learning

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The Challenge

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Before Copado, the Macmillan development team outsourced their development projects. The contractors used multiple development streams and a myriad of sandboxes, then brought everything together through the use of changesets, individual ANT scripts and configuration. This meant a lot of manual and repetitive work, as well as error-prone deployments, causing tension and frustration.

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Not only did the team have to spend time manually building changesets, but they also had to manually inspect each line of code as the sandboxes were constantly out of sync and alignment.

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Stuck Between Code Overrides, Delayed Sprints, and Lack of Collaboration

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Macmillan also suffered from issues related to overrides, lack of version control, and mistracking of metadata. They were on a two-week sprint cycle, handing over to QA for testing at the end of each sprint. When QA found bugs and issues, they sent them back to the developers for remediation, which delayed the next sprint cycle and pushed out prioritized tickets.

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The lack of a central source of truth made quality control and collaboration even more difficult. They wanted to bring QA into the same two-week sprint but knew it wasn’t possible without the support of a reliable DevOps tool.

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Key Challenges

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The Solution

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Macmillan saw a lift in their DevOps process as soon as they implemented Copado. The team immediately saw an increase in productivity and release velocity. Copado’s automation and collaboration features helped them cut down manual intervention and code creation. The whole team now works out of the same sandbox, using version control and a single source of truth to eliminate the chances of overwrites.

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Copado ensures that the release is in compliance and catches errors before they arise. Macmillan now finds themselves consistently and reliably able to meet their bi-weekly release cadence goal.

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The Future

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Through Copado, Macmillan is able to achieve its goal of increasing both its release quality and velocity. Today, they now focus on creating new innovation rather than doubling back on previous work, saving them countless hours and allowing their teams to reach new levels of innovation and release sophistication.

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The team admits that incorporating Copado into their deployment process was a game-changer. Copado helps them detect, fix, and deploy issues within the same sprint. Their stakeholders are now comfortable making sprint commitments — and can rely on those commitments.

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