It’s critical to understand the pros and cons of Salesforce DevOps before implementing it in your organization. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the development philosophy’s advantages, including improved collaboration and creativity, faster delivery of changes, reduced risk, and increased ROI.
We’ll also examine the disadvantages, such as the time and cost investment, added complexity, and potential disruptions and delays during the transition.
There’s one overarching benefit of Salesforce DevOps. It enables you to deliver higher-quality changes and applications much faster than you could using traditional release methods like change sets and Data Loader. Let’s take a closer look at these key advantages.
Implementing Salesforce DevOps eliminates silos and improves collaboration between development and operations teams. Salesforce admins, developers and business operation teams must work together to deliver process optimization for the business. This improved collaboration between the teams can lead to greater creativity and innovation.
Salesforce DevOps involves delivering incremental changes on a continuous basis. You can get updates and new apps to your sales team much faster than with traditional models. This in turn empowers them to do their job better.
Salesforce DevOps reduces risk because it allows you to be agile and respond immediately to the demands of the market. In the worst-case scenario, with conventional big bang releases, an app can be obsolete by the time it’s market ready. With Salesforce DevOps, you can prioritize bug fixes and change direction without too much disruption because you deliver work iteratively.
Arguably the most important benefit of Salesforce DevOps is that it delivers an increased ROI. Automation—a key aspect of Salesforce DevOps—and risk reduction contribute significantly to keeping costs low and maximizing returns.
While these advantages are significant, there are potential drawbacks, as well.
Implementing DevOps in Salesforce may require a certain financial investment if you need to purchase new automation tools and work management apps. At the same time, moving from a traditional development model to DevOps doesn’t happen overnight. You’ll need to dedicate time and resources to getting the framework and processes set up—all while ensuring business continuity.
To make DevOps work in Salesforce, your teams need to communicate, collaborate, and adopt new processes and tools. Depending on the flexibility of your team, this can be easy or challenging. In some cases, already established processes are so ingrained that they’re almost impossible to overcome.
Salesforce DevOps involves a different way of working. No matter how enthusiastic the team is, this can potentially have an impact on change management during the transition period. It’s advisable to delay any major updates or deliveries until everyone is comfortable with the new development philosophy.
Salesforce DevOps can provide efficiency gains and deliver a significant ROI for your business. However, there are many ways to implement DevOps best practices within Salesforce, and you don’t have to implement every best practice to start seeing results.
When you’ve decided on one or more best practices to implement, conduct a proof of concept trial on a smaller project, and use metrics to evaluate the results. This will allow you to make a data-driven decision as to whether Salesforce DevOps is right for your business or not.
What are the four most important DevOps principles?
To implement DevOps, you need to incorporate the following four principles into your development process: automation, iteration, continuous monitoring and improvement, and collaboration. Learn more about DevOps principles.
How can Salesforce DevOps help my organization be more innovative?
Implementing DevOps principles in Salesforce involves fostering communication and collaboration between development and operations teams. The resulting combination of different points of view can lead to heightened creativity that you can then harness for innovation.
This post is republished with permission from Salesforce DevOps HQ.
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