Salesforce DevOps and salesforce app development practices are picking up steam with the recent focus on source driven development on the Salesforce platform, particularly through increasing adoption of Salesforce CI/CD solutions using Salesforce DX. What contributed to this shift from ‘Changesets’ and ANT migration tool approaches? Following are some crucial factors:

Movement to Lightning

The shift to Salesforce Lightning Experience meant a lot more control to developers. There is a lot more code to be written and hence to be preserved for future reference. While the approach of solving using configurations and settings is still predominant in a CRM implementation, there is definitely a lot more custom code required if one is building a Salesforce partner or Salesforce service cloud implementation.

Movement from passive to connected websites

More and more customers in health care, retail, and higher education businesses are expanding the scope of websites from just Web-to-Lead and basic application-form capabilities. Today, in the Salesforce platform, it is easy to build a connected website to a customer’s internal systems through iPaaS solutions such as Dell Boomi. This brings integration complexity and hence a need for an enterprise-ready approach to Salesforce DevOps.

Agile Development – Reducing time available to deploy change

With the agile method of development being adopted popularly by all organizations, a project involving Salesforce development services is carried out using techniques such as Scrum, Kanban, and Lean agile. Only when a fail-fast development approach is taken, the time to deploy changes to a production system can be brought down.

Convergence of technologies for automation

Whether it is the use of tools such as Jenkins and AutoRabit for triggering automated builds (and deployment in target environments) when code is committed to a source control system like GitHub, or the ability to run automated QA tests created in Selenium or the ability to spawn new environments on-demand using Salesforce DX, automation is possible now in every phase of Salesforce DevOps through these proven approaches.

Platform longevity

CIOs increasingly invest in the Salesforce platform not just for reliability but also so that it can scale for their future needs. The scope of hooks to external storage such as Amazon S3 cloud for achieving regular enterprise needs and usage of infrastructure solutions such as Heroku dynos to deploy machine learning models supporting the core application is common today. The lifetime of a solution built on the Salesforce platform has considerably increased, thus causing the maintenance overheads and challenges that cannot be addressed unless Salesforce DevOps is put in place the right way.

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