2022 State of Salesforce DevOps Report

Copado’s third annual State of Salesforce DevOps Report is a story of resilience. We reached out to hundreds of global enterprises and heard the same thing over and over from their Salesforce practices:

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“Post-pandemic teams have recovered from last year’s dip in quality — but still struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation in 2022.”

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Since 2019: Longest Running Salesforce DevOps Report

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Our 2022 State of Salesforce DevOps Report explores key trends in low-code software delivery. In this year’s report, we collected data from 450 global respondents to shed light on the habits of high-performing Salesforce Development Teams across technology enterprises, financial services firms and more. We reached out to Salesforce Admins, Salesforce Developers, Solutions Architects and Technical Architects for answers to three mission-critical questions:

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• How do Salesforce Development Teams release more often?
• How do they recover faster?
• How do they capture business value?

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Quality & Stability Are Back. But What Happened to Speed?

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Copado’s 2021 State of Salesforce DevOps Report diagnosed a massive reduction in quality and stability across the ecosystem based on two alarming metrics: Increased change failure rate and time to recover. We attributed this trend to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing disruption to team workflows. Thankfully, quality and stability are back to healthy levels in Copado’s 2022 State of Salesforce DevOps Report — although we did notice a reduction in velocity…

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Top 3 Trends for Salesforce Development Teams

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Trend 1: Automated Testing Reduces Change Failure Rates

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Our respondents were clear: Automated testing is an effective way to increase speed, drive consistency, improve quality and reduce the cost of testing.

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What does the data tell us? Teams that fail to regularly test commits before deploying changes to production have a change failure rate of 24%, while teams with a consistent process lowered their rate to 18%. Even better — major failures were reduced by a significantly larger margin.

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What does the data tell us? Most Salesforce Dev Teams have minimal automated testing today. Fewer than one in four organizations are practicing test-driven development. Adding automated testing to the Salesforce DevOps strategy bakes quality into the process and curtails production issues. This helps teams escape costly downtime, emergency bug fixes and tarnished end-user experiences.

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What does the data tell us? Commits are tested before promotion about half the time. Usually manually.

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What does the data tell us? 55% of teams can feed test data into their CI/CD pipeline. There is still plenty of room for improvement.

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Trend 2: “Build Your Own” Slows You Down

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We surveyed both build-your-own toolchain and comprehensive low-code orchestration platforms. Teams using low-code DevOps tools designed for Salesforce release 50% more frequently than teams using build-your-own platforms like Jenkins.

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CI/CD is quickly becoming a commodified practice and set of capabilities in custom application development, but it’s still an emerging and underutilized practice for Low-Code Application Platforms. To make things trickier, the open-source tools that enable CI/CD for custom app development are ill-suited for the Salesforce Platform.

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The practice of CI/CD is the first step to more advanced release orchestration. Without this foundation, it’s nearly impossible to capture the benefits of value stream mapping, cross-application pipeline visibility and predictive analytics.

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What does the data tell us? CI/CD keeps environments in sync, tracks changes based on user stories, increases deployments, enables more reliable quality controls and provides a clear view of the flow of work from dev to production. Copado customers were especially likely to report all these benefits.

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What does the data tell us? Teams that achieve CI/CD often still struggle. Most of the challenges reported by our survey respondents are things that would be required on a one-person project. Things like using version control, fixing a broken test or updating a pipeline configuration. However, the two biggest pain points for Salesforce Dev Teams (dealing with merge conflicts and fixing failed deployments) are exacerbated the larger teams become. Why? Growing teams can lack stability and lead to communication gaps.

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Trend 3: Agile Planning Means Better Business Outcomes

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Teams that combine the power of Enterprise Agile Planning with a commercial Salesforce DevOps tool are 39% more likely to work for a successful company that achieves its goals.

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Traditional infrastructure and operations are getting folded into the low-code DevOps teams of today. This signals a change from “project-centric development” to “product- centric development.” Today’s teams are moving away from feature/checklist delivery and focusing on planning that aligns directly to customer satisfaction. It’s all about outcomes over outputs.

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What does the data tell us? Salesforce Dev Teams regularly participate in Agile Planning.

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What does the data tell us? Salesforce developers understand the shift from project to product-centric development. Salesforce has always been close to the customer given their roots in CRM. High-performing teams are in constant contact with their customers.

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What does the data tell us? Even though the cadence of communication is ideal, Salesforce developers still experience pain when it comes to understanding and translating customer requirements.

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What does the data tell us? Salesforce Dev Teams excel at connecting user stories to company value. At least 69% report visibility into how user stories relate to company goals. The fusion of EAP and VSM is especially interesting for Salesforce Dev Teams. Why? Because it accelerates this value realization and uncovers barriers to the flow of value from a user story perspective.

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Final Note from Peter Coffee: VP for Strategic Research at Salesforce

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In the coming years, enterprises will win or lose based on how they handle the hairpin turns of competitive innovation, evolving regulation and pandemic-elevated customer expectations.

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Today’s customers demand both speed and quality across every experience — and so do the architects of applications and the administrators of operational systems. Distraction and fatigue lead to loss of competitive edge at best (and dangerous errors at worst).

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Development and operations (DevOps for short) are domains that must cooperate – rather than being sequential silos of responsibility. If the discipline is new to you, let Copado’s 2022 State of Salesforce DevOps Report bring you up to speed. If it’s familiar to you, let it raise your expectations. Start your engines!