DevOps encompasses a wide variety of technical and social practices for improving the development, delivery and operation of IT systems. Salesforce has become more than a CRM system; it evolved into a full-featured ecosystem and a low-code platform that made development far simpler and more approachable than traditional code-based platforms. Cross-functional teams build on Salesforce to create custom apps and integrations with other enterprises systems without requiring the rigorous approaches that are common with traditional technologies like Java.
Now, DevOps for Salesforce has emerged to enable teams to build applications faster. And as teams have built more and more customizations onto the Salesforce platform, the level of complexity has exploded. DevOps has emerged as a critical capability for teams to bring this complexity under control.
The Primary Challenge of Deployments
The primary challenge that most Salesforce teams face is deployments. Deployments on Salesforce are not just a matter of moving files, they require sophisticated management of thousands of XML files and careful management of dependencies. A number of commercial companies have appeared to help manage the Salesforce development life cycle, and the Salesforce development experience (DX) initiative has unlocked vastly more possibilities for teams to automate existing processes and adopt new workflows.
The need for more structured and rigorous approaches to Salesforce development has increased the need for teams to learn from traditional software development and DevOps teams and understand how traditional techniques like modularization and continuous integration can be adapted to the Salesforce platform. Technology and knowledge transfer from the broader DevOps community to the Salesforce community remains an active area of exploration.
Working in Parallel
It was the adoption of continuous integration by the extreme programming (XP) community in the 1990s that drove intense interest in the need for automated testing, especially unit testing. This allows teams to create exact copies of each other’s work and develop in parallel. Working in parallel allows for far faster innovation since work doesn’t have to be precisely sequenced.
But there’s a cost to working in parallel; these workstreams eventually need to be integrated into a cohesive whole. Software projects following a “waterfall” methodology may delay integration until near the end of the project. But these parallel work streams diverge naturally over time, meaning that integration can take months and require enormous amounts of rework.
Continuous Delivery: A Distinct Practice
Continuous integration (CI) avoids this issue by merging work early and often (at least daily). “If it hurts, do it more frequently,” is a mantra in the CI world, where the challenge is to resolve conflicts in small batches rather than letting them accumulate.
CI creates a constant risk of failure for software, since teams working on one part of the system may be making changes to shared components that can cause other teams’ code to fail. Automated testing provides a layer of protection by allowing functionality to be checked and rechecked thousands of times with minimal human intervention. Creating automated tests requires more effort than executing a manual test, but the cost of re-running each test becomes negligible. Thus, automated testing is a perfect solution for high-velocity teams who need fast and ongoing ways to ensure they are not regressing as they build new capabilities.
Continuous delivery (CD) is a distinct practice that’s often mentioned in the same breath as CI. Continuous delivery was popularized by the 2010 book of the same name by Jez Humble and Dave Farley. The practice of CD extends the idea of CI by aiming to deploy code to production in small batches on a regular basis; ideally at least daily. Whereas CI addresses the risks of developing in parallel, CD addresses the risks of delaying feedback from end users.
Software is built to solve specific problems. But each attempt at a solution by developers is a hypothesis that needs to be tested and confirmed. Only the people who actually experience that problem can tell developers whether these solutions are sufficient. So developers must get fast feedback from end users to have confidence in what they’ve built. Teams that neglect this practice are operating on assumptions and optimism; the longer they delay delivery the more the risks of those assumptions compound. Poor adoption and user experience is to be expected when teams don’t practice continuous delivery.
Increasing Pressure
CI creates added pressure to test quickly, CD increases that pressure significantly. Delivering small batches of changes reduces the risk of each change and makes them faster and easier to roll back. But by definition, we are changing production systems that may be used by thousands or millions of people each day. A failure caused by CI may waste a few hours of a developer’s time and delay delivery of a change. But a failure caused by CD can prevent thousands of people from doing their jobs, corrupt production data, expose security vulnerabilities and worse.
When developers integrate their work in CI, the goal is to run a fast set of tests that confirms nothing major has broken. But work being delivered to production needs to go through a battery of comprehensive tests to ensure it meets all functional and structural requirements. In a waterfall-style project, pre-release testing may involve scores of testers working for months. In continuous delivery, teams must be able to execute tests at every level of the system and have robust confidence that no failures have occurred.
Comprehensive testing requires testing the user interface, testing processes that span multiple systems, loading and confirming data using APIs, security testing and more. Continuous delivery has driven the need for automated testing to new levels and led to entirely new approaches like canary deployments. Canary deployments are a form of shift-right testing where a feature is initially delivered to a small subset of end users to check for issues before rolling it out to everyone.
The Essence of Lean
It’s often said that the main driver of success in DevOps is culture. The acronym CALMS is used to summarize the five aspects of DevOps: Culture, automation, lean, measurement and sharing.
Culture refers primarily to creating a culture of continuous learning and experimentation. The practices described above are not formulaic and require a growth mindset and a culture that prioritizes psychological safety and information flow.
Automation is the aspect of DevOps most commonly emphasized (including in what’s been written here). Automation enables dramatic efficiencies and is the central miracle of technology, but automation is not a panacea without addressing these other aspects of DevOps.
Lean refers to the manufacturing practices pioneered in the 1930s at Toyota and further developed and built upon in the late 1980s and 1990s. The essence of lean is to do more with less by understanding and optimizing the value stream by which work is actually performed.
Measurement refers to the importance of taking a data-driven approach to optimizations. Measurement provides teams with a way to gauge whether process improvements are effective or not.
Finally, sharing refers to the importance of sharing information, practices and resources between individuals, teams and organizations.
