Implementing Salesforce Release Management Best Practices
Companies constantly strive for more incredible innovation to stay ahead of the competition. Driving innovation in information technology is the formula for business success. It accelerates business growth by making business processes seamless and efficient by increasing value, boosting productivity, and enhancing quality. With more people, businesses, and organizations going digital, the demand for innovative solutions has increased.
As systems become more advanced and efficient, they become more complex and challenging to work correctly with these cutting-edge technologies. This can make developers rush new products to market before they’re ready, leading to errors, failures, and crashes. It can be difficult for companies to develop and release a fix, whether a patch or an entirely new version. These issues lead to a much higher demand for more advanced tools for release management.
What’s Release Management?
Release management involves establishing different phases during software development, such as managing, planning, designing, scheduling, and controlling. In this way, release management ensures that release teams can quickly deliver the applications and upgrades as per the business needs while keeping the integrity of the current production environment intact. To ensure the success of every release, some phases must be followed. Each step must be completed before going on to the next to assure a stable deployment of new features.
What’s Copado & Its Use in Salesforce?
Copado is a Salesforce release management platform that provides an end-to-end solution. It supports the DevOps team collaborating with administrators and architects on a single platform. This deployment and release management system gives greater visibility and traceability to the Salesforce org. It also enables users to resolve errors more easily. Using the several tools and procedures provided by Copado, it’s simpler for all departments to work together. This will help in producing a high-quality release.
Best Practices of Salesforce Release Management
Releasing new features into production can be a long and stressful process. Nobody wants to release something into production that has annoying bugs, slows down users, or does something even more terrible. Salesforce release management is usually challenging to go through due to its challenges. This can be easier to deal with if you know how things work and how to use Salesforce release management best practices.
Below are the best practices that can be used for Salesforce release management:
- Modeling Deployments Across Release Environments: To design your deployment/code migration plan across several release environments, you must first understand what you want to achieve. The preparation of release automation plans details how code will flow from development to production, where and to what degree version control will be used, and which stages will be automated, allowing for more efficient release management.
- Setup CI for Automated Deployments: : Large business teams require a version control setup to interact efficiently, conduct change analysis, roll-back changes, and maintain code isolation through many releases. Version control branches are essential since they allow teams to work together more successfully. Integrating code as frequently as feasible is made possible by continuous integration, which serves as an “early warning” mechanism in the event of an error. Integration difficulties should be handled throughout the development stages rather than later. This way, problems will be solved at the start of the project.
- Use of Pull Requests & Feature Branching: Pull requests and feature branches are standard tools for developers to use while working on their projects. On the other hand, teams use shared units regularly and carefully and choose for or commit to productions when the time comes. It’s necessary to revisit the procedure to continue to benefit from the singling-out commits and the hotfixes.
- Practice Code Review: Practicing code review by the team will benefit effective release management. Code review is an activity where one and more people check each other’s code. This helps improve the quality of the code, supporting knowledge transfer by allowing developers to learn best practices, detect bugs, and ensure the seamless integration and functionality of the application.
- Use Automation: Automating tasks in the DevSecOps pipeline reduces errors, enhances productivity, and supports the successful delivery of a software product. Automation can be achieved at multiple stages in the release management cycle. For example, you can automate stages such as:
- Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD)
- Automated build pipelines
- Automated code review
- Automated testing using different testing frameworks
- Monitoring and failure reporting
- Testing: Another best release management practice is testing, which should be done before making new features live in the production environment. It’s possible that some errors may not be found before release. This may have a severe impact on the release. To avoid such a possibility, testing can be done using the automation tools that will help you run the test at a specific time and notify you if found any issues. This is the most effective practice to ensure your new development project operates successfully upon deployment.
My Conclusion:
Copado’s deployment and release management system improves Salesforce org visibility and traceability and resolves errors more easily. Using the Copado tools and procedures, it’s simpler to collaborate with other teams. Releasing new features into production can be tedious, and no one wants to remove a product that slows down users or does something even more terrible.
Salesforce release management can be easier to implement if you follow the suggested best practices: model deployments across release environments, set up CI for automated deployments, use pull requests and feature branching, practice code review, use automation, and test before making new features live.
Is your Salesforce implementation optimized for release management? Is your organization efficient and effective with Salesforce DevOps and releases? Feel free to contact us to discuss this topic and our experience/expertise in implementing these best practices for Salesforce and release management for global corporations.
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This post was written by Nixon James, Director of Salesforce Practice at SoftClouds. Nixon has two decades of experience innovating, designing, building, and delivering world-class CRM/CX/ DevOps/AI solutions around the globe to meet our clients’ digital transformational needs. Nixon is passionate about our clients’ goals and committed to making their vision a reality and his number one priority for client success.
SoftClouds is a recognized leader in CRM/CX transformation with experience in numerous service cloud implementations with pre-configured best practice business processes for multiple verticals/domains.
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