Top 5 Salesforce DevOps Adoption Challenges
Imagine that you are a leader of a team that will have the full-scale management and implementation of Salesforce applications across an organization. A fast track and quality updates with quick turnaround of time has ended up as an overhead. However, when each of the deliberations is brought into smooth automation and efficient groupwork, you still somehow feel that you are floating on the shaky grounds. To actually change the way you work, make it more efficient and keep your Salesforce applications healthy.
Salesforce DevOps has been viewed as the best way of accelerating development and eliminating the multi-fold manual procedures. Teams that have introduced DevOps are said to have reported a change in their work processes, releasing improvement and interdepartmental cooperation. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the road, a person could multiply fast come to the conclusion that it is not as easy as a walk in the park to find the Salesforce DevOps modus.
Lack of version controls, code conflicts, unreliable environments are among some of the problems that creak under the adoption of Salesforce devOps. The longer you delay in finding the solution, the more it is becoming difficult to match your rivals. In case you believe that you will get the benefits of DevOps without encountering all of the hard challenges, take another attempt.
In the given article, we will examine the five primary Salesforce DevOps adoption obstacles that might be lurking in the path to complicate your life more than is required. You have nothing to fear and even at the end, we will also address how to ease off these problems that can enable you to navigate your ship out of the storm to actually make full use of the power of Salesforce DevOps.
Here are the 5 Challenges in Salesforce DevOps Adoption:
——————————
1. No Version Control or Source Code Management in Place
- Version control and source code management (SCM) are largely accepted as very important parts of DevOps.
- Inadequate version control makes it practically impossible to track changes, roll back to previous ones and collaborate with other labor forces because of the lack of branching.
- Historically, the Salesforce development has provided metadata-based delivery alternatives, which can bring unsustainable scenarios that cannot be underestimated unless appropriately owned.
- Introduction of any code and metadata to the Salesforce environment otherwise there would not be something like a Git would misinterpret all the deployments and cause chaos within the company.
- Developers will understand that they will not be able to work effectively as they cannot find an evident trace of who did what changes and when.
Solution:
Version control should be a crucial step of your Salesforce DevOps pipeline, e.g. with Git. This helps the development team work on Salesforce metadata conveniently by using a tool such as GitHub or Bitbucket. Collaborating is flexible and formal and it is through this that developers can work on branches and merge systematically. It is necessary to have traceability in any scalable development, which is provided by the introduction of version control early in the DevOps procedure.
2. Environments Are Out of Sync with Each Other
- However, over time, all types of Salesforce environments keep becoming separated: Developer sandbox, QA sandbox and Production.
- Such environments are expected to be aligned with each other in order to support the DevOps practices. When such does not occur, it is typically the case that a change done on one environment is not traveled to another environment and simply ignored or getting overwritten somewhere along the way, causing bugs and invariably the failures of deployments.
- It becomes a more involved case when it comes to diverse sandboxes or scratch orgs.
- Customizations and configurations in one environment end up being completely different.
- The imbalance with the environments does impose problems in the testing process since it is quite unclear whether it is code or it is environmental difference.
Solution:
The primary points to be considered on resolving this challenge are automation of environment provisioning and consistency of configurations. By using Salesforce DX you can automate Salesforce environments (scratch orgs) to the exact configuration of production and structure consistency across the board. The changes can be synchronized automatically by flosum or copado tools so that the same versioning is used across all environments and the latest set up.
3. Difficulties When Merging and Back-Merging Code
- Because it is an inevitable component of the DevOps lifecycle, merging and back-merging code will occur and there is no doubt about that.
- Salesforce DevOps is a bit different however, because Salesforce metadata is so much unlike metadata of a say a regular application.
- Rather than downloading files that have already been coded by a developer, in regular applications, the merging- and back-merging -code all happen in Salesforce metadata due to the high dependencies of it and its making the process of merging rather complicated.
- As an example, in case of two developers working on the same metadata the conflicts accumulating at the headache stage in the course of merge or back-merge would be inevitable.
Solution:
Hence at such points in the merging process as far as it is possible to get human labor out, do so. With the solutions like using such tools as Git, the code conflicts will be managed much more efficiently using an adequate branching approach. More advanced merger plans specific to Salesforce metadata exist with other Salesforce tools (ex: Gearset or Copado) and will give fewer conflict merge errors. The post-merge tests that will be performed automatically will contribute to the faster detection of the broken code or other application problems due to the merge.
4. Struggles with Test Automation and Maintaining Code Quality
- In any Salesforce implementation, it is not possible to overemphasize the need of high-quality code but be careful, maintaining high-quality code in Salesforce ecosystem may not be as easy as it is said to be.
- The Salesforce unique metadata model as well as the complexity involved in integrating with other applications make the maintenance of test automation and code quality somewhat harder.
- Automated testing of Salesforce apps is a niche skill as is actually writing the tests; once the tests are written, ensuring that they are executed in an efficient and effective manner becomes a blocking point somewhere in the CI/CD pipeline.
Solution:
The above issues, plus potentially additional issues would be solved by integrating automated testing in your DevOps pipeline. Examples of automation tools include Selenium, Apex tests, Salesforce native testing tools such as the Salesforce Testing Framework. The Salesforce DevOps pipeline is also vehemently helpful in maintaining good quality of code by the use of static analysis code tools, e.g., PMD or SonarQube that can uncover potential problems early in development life cycle. It is necessary to state that the development of tests by the developers and their maintenance during the development should not be viewed as an independent activity but one that should be fostered.
5. Challenges Integrating DevOps Tools and Processes
- The latest customizations are the Salesforce environments; whereby organizations can have their tool, process, or a combination thereof to maintain the workflows.
- Use of DevOps tools with Sales force like CI/CD platforms, source control and auto testing could also be confronted with challenges, like incompatibility, few APIs, lack of knowledge in the new tools.
- The other difficulty presented is that most of the DevOps tools are designed to work in conventional software development models, and they do not necessarily support the metadata driven nature of Salesforce to the fullest.
- Organizational legacies that include processes and other tools hinder the creation of organizational environments into agile DevOps tiers.
Solution:
Appropriate tools such as Flosum, Copado, or Gearset, which are specifically designed to work with Salesforce could be used to facilitate the decision of the appropriate DevOps tools. The concept of such tools is to be completely integrated with Salesforce even throughout the entire process of DevOps beginning with version control on to automated deployments. This involves training the teams on the integration of the DevOps tool which is exclusive to Salesforce into their pipelines. Clean approach on DevOps tools and well smoothened tools would imply easier ride through and certain positive outcomes guaranteed.
Conclusion
Adoption of the Salesforce DevOps is crucial to organizations interested in expediting their development processes while delivering high-quality updates. However, such adoption does not come without challenges. The hurdles are numerous: version control implementation, synchronization of the environments, mergers, test automation, and integrating the DevOps toolbox. All of these require intelligent solutions and a proactive approach.
If correctly addressed using suitable tools and processes, organizations will discover the magic of Salesforce DevOps and ultimately realize a more efficient, scalable, and collaborative development environment. Remember, DevOps is more than just tools; DevOps is a cultural change toward continuous improvement achievable only by proper planning and execution.
