Tag Archives: continuous integration

Diverse Salesforce team learning how to do CI/CD without version control

How to Do CI/CD Without Version Control

You Don’t Always Need Git for Salesforce DevOps!

If you aren’t yet ready for source-driven development in Salesforce, it’s possible to do continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI/CD, without version control. We’ll discuss how to do this and why you might want to. We’ll also explain that you can also find your own balance between no automation and source-driven development.

How to Do CI/CD Without a VCS in Salesforce

Diverse Salesforce team learning how to do CI/CD without version control

Although many developer-centric Salesforce teams are accustomed to using a version control system (VCS) for CI/CD, it’s not an absolute must-have. You can still achieve the benefits of CI/CD in Salesforce without Git.

Continuous Integration With Sandbox Management

To establish continuous integration in Salesforce without version control, start with a best-in-class sandbox management strategy to keep your orgs clean. Then, during the development process, you continually sync configuration changes that have passed integration testing into your developer environments. You do this by pinpointing the changes within the configurations in your integration environment and pushing them back to your Developer sandboxes and scratch orgs. 

This ensures your lower-level dev environments are always up to date, which in turn minimizes the chances of bugs and release delays. 

With a solution like Prodly Sandbox Management, you can easily manage data and metadata across every environment in your release path without using a Git repository. This is especially helpful for admins and other low-code/no-code users.

Continuous Delivery With Automated Deployments

Now you have up-to-date developer orgs, it’s time to automate deployments to ensure continuous delivery. The benefits of automating deployments include speed, accuracy, a reduced workload, and a whole lot less frustration.  

Using Prodly DevOps, you can bypass data loaders and change sets, and instead, deploy your changes automatically. Prodly DevOps provides easy diff-viewing and pre-built automations for a large number of Salesforce apps, including Salesforce CPQ, Conga Composer, FinancialForce, and more. 

What’s more: You can even schedule deployments so they occur after hours, when they won’t disrupt your business users.

Why Do CI/CD Without Source Control?

One reason to do CI/CD without Git in Salesforce DevOps is that a source-driven development process takes time and effort to set up. You’ll also have to organize training and enablement on a completely new process for your team. Additionally, you have to use the exact same release path every time, which can compromise your agility, especially when it comes to small fixes.

The initial overhead of implementing source-driven development combined with the loss of flexibility often outweighs the benefits gained. Because of this, smaller teams rarely find the upfront investment of setting up a version control system for Salesforce DevOps worth the return.

Find the Right Balance Between No Automation and Source-Driven Development

When it comes to deciding between no automation for release management and source-driven development, it’s important to realize that the Goldilocks principle applies. This means that there’s no predetermined “right” or “wrong” balance between the two. What works for your Salesforce instance might be completely different from what works for another company. 

For example, let’s say you can achieve 90 percent of the efficiency gains of CI/CD with automated deployments. If you add version control, it might give you the other 10 percent—but it would likely require an inordinate amount of effort to set it up. In other words, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of using a VCS and decide on a course of action that will yield the greatest ROI for your specific company.

CI/CD With Prodly DevOps

Although source-driven development offers additional automation for Salesforce DevOps, you can achieve comparable results using Prodly DevOps.

Interested in learning more? Request a demo today!

FAQs

What is a VCS?

A version control system or VCS is a tool that makes tracking and managing changes to code and configuration easier. By using a VCS, you can ensure you’re always working on the latest version of the configuration. Learn more about version control for Salesforce. 

 

What are the most popular version control systems for Salesforce DevOps?

The most popular version control systems for Salesforce DevOps include GitHub, Bitbucket, Azure, and GitLab.

 

What is continuous integration for Salesforce?

Continuous integration for Salesforce is the practice of keeping Salesforce development environments in sync with production. It also involves syncing in-flight development work to identify and fix integration issues as early as possible in the development cycle. 

In a best-in-class Salesforce development process, changes to data and metadata are continuously integrated across parallel development paths. This way, everyone’s working against the most current configuration of Salesforce.

 

What is continuous delivery for Salesforce?

Continuous delivery for Salesforce is the practice of automating the delivery of changes to end users in production. A best-in-class Salesforce development process involves making and testing changes in a development environment, i.e. a Developer sandbox or scratch org.

After you’ve approved the changes, you use automation to deploy them through a release path of increasingly production-like orgs. These can include integration, UAT, and staging phases. The ultimate goal is to deliver thoroughly tested work to end-users. 

By using automation, continuous delivery for Salesforce accelerates the release cycle and reduces the risk of deployment errors.

A G2 badge showing that based on superior ratings, users love Prodly

Superior Ratings for Prodly in the G2 Winter 2023 Reports

Customers gave Prodly outstanding ratings as a DevOps platform, as well as a CI/CD and cloud migration platform. This resulted in Prodly being named a leader in the mid-market grid for cloud migration and a high performer in more than five categories of the G2 Winter 2023 Reports, including for CI/CD tools for enterprises. 

In addition, Prodly DevOps was the Fastest Implementation Enterprise product in the implementation index, meaning that it had the shortest go-live time in its category.

Prodly was also named a momentum leader in the cloud migration solution category.

A medal showing that Prodly won the Fastest Implementation Enterprise medal in the G2 Winter 2023 reports.

Superior Ratings for Prodly as a DevOps Platform

As an end-to-end DevOps platform, Prodly DevOps was named a high performer in the DevOps platform category, outperforming Copado in all eight metrics used to measure customer satisfaction. Moreover, Prodly received higher satisfaction ratings than both Copado and Gearset when it comes to our platform meeting requirements.

DevOps platforms ensure organizations’ continuous delivery projects are clearly defined. These projects must also be effectively automated and efficiently manageable within one framework to implement agile work environments in a streamlined manner.

A medal showing that Prodly was named a high performer in the G2 Winter 2023 reports

Outstanding Reviews for Prodly for Continuous Integration

As a high performer, the Prodly DevOps suite outperformed Copado in all eight metrics of the continuous integration category. This ranks applications according to their ability to integrate with configuration management solutions, continuous delivery applications, and continuous deployment software. 

Notably, more customers were likely to recommend Prodly than Copado. Moreover, more customers agreed our product met their requirements compared to Copado.

Excellent Ratings for Prodly for Continuous Delivery

The Prodly DevOps suite was a high performer in the continuous delivery category, outperforming Copado in all eight metrics. Continuous delivery applications build on the capabilities of continuous integration software up to the point of deployment. 

Again, more customers were likely to recommend Prodly than Copado, and more found that our platform meets their requirements when compared to Copado.

Superior Ratings for Prodly for Cloud Migration

Prodly was named a leader in the mid-market grid report for cloud migration, as well as a high performer in the cloud migration category. Cloud migration applications migrate large amounts of contacts, calendars, communication, and other data between cloud repositories or apps. This simplifies the organization, consolidation, and integration of a range of data types.

Prodly DevOps received higher satisfaction ratings than Hubspot Operations Hub in four of the eight categories, including for the likelihood to recommend the product, as well as the solution meeting requirements. In addition, it received higher ratings than Salesforce Connect in all eight categories

The Prodly suite of products is a comprehensive, end-to-end DevOps platform that enables change management in Salesforce without the need for programmatic knowledge. With solutions for work management, sandbox management, sandbox seeding, CPQ deployments, regression testing, and SOX compliance, it provides companies with the “clicks, not code” tools they need to accelerate innovation, bring new apps to their users faster, and drive more value to their customers.

Request a demo of Prodly in action!

A medal showing that according to the G2 technology review site, users love Prodly DevOps.