Salesforce DevOps Center
Accelerate Development and Shorten Release Cycles
The DevOps Center is a powerful tool that helps teams release technology faster and more efficiently. With this tool, you can easily move changes between different Salesforce development environments, using features such as visual development pipelines, source control with GitHub, and automatic change tracking for your environments. The Salesforce DevOps Center is designed to streamline the entire process and bring admins and developers together to build, test, and deploy solutions much faster. Just imagine having a central hub where everyone can collaborate using the same tools and best practices. The Salesforce DevOps Center empowers your team to achieve this and more:
- Simplified Collaboration: Admins and developers work seamlessly on the same codebase.
- Improved Visibility: Sales leaders gain real-time insights into how changes impact sales processes.
- Visual Pipelines: See exactly what’s happening at each stage of development.
- Enhanced Automation: Admins can build secure automation, while developers can take it further with custom solutions using their preferred tools.
- Effortless Change Tracking: Monitor all changes made within the Center.
- Streamlined Releases: Release managers can effortlessly move changes between environments, accelerating time to value.
Initial Configuration of DevOps Center
A Salesforce admin or user with appropriate permissions can easily install and configure the DevOps Center. To get started, install the DevOps Center package from the DevOps Center Setup page in a supported org edition. You can install DevOps Center in your pipeline's final release org or any other separate org. Once installed, you can easily connect the DevOps Center to all your development, testing, and final release environments. The following image helps us understand how to enable the DevOps center.
- Install the managed package in “Setup.”
- Find “DevOps” in Quick Find.
- Follow the downloadable guide for setup, GitHub, and configuration.
Key Concepts of DevOps Center
DevOps Center provides a structured approach to managing your Salesforce development process. Here’s how it works:
- Grouped Releases: Organize changes into logical releases, making deployments more focused and easier to track.
- User Stories Drive Work: Business needs are translated into actionable user stories, ensuring development stays aligned with goals. User stories are then linked to specific work items for clear traceability.
- Atomic Work Items: Break down tasks into single, well-defined work items. This avoids redundancy and simplifies progress tracking.
- Customisable Pipelines: Define clear stages for your work items to progress through. These stages represent the workflow for each change within your project.
- Bundled Stage Promotion: Move multiple related work items together through pipeline stages, ensuring efficient deployment of cohesive changes.
- Seamless Version Control: Leverage GitHub branches for managing code versions. This allows for easy collaboration, branching, and integration across teams and organizations (currently supporting GitHub).
The points explained above help to understand the data model below.
DevOps Center Makes Releases Easier
DevOps Center simplifies releases by using work items instead of change sets.
- Work items act like user stories: They contain a list of metadata changes, which are then processed through a pipeline.
- Creating work items: Users can create a user story and link it to one or more work items. Typically, it links to one. But if you need to fix metadata in an existing work item, create a new one (since you can’t reopen the old one). The user story shows the link between these connected work items. This link isn’t visible in the DevOps Center.
- Goodbye, change set headaches: Before, we needed to make a new change set. It had all the metadata for every push between environments. For example, from Dev to UAT and UAT to Prod. Copying a change set wasn’t an option. This change sets a big time drain and frustration. Change sets could get huge, containing hundreds of items for a single release.
DevOps Center lets you have multiple work items for a release. This breaks down large releases into smaller, easier-to-manage pieces.
- Creating a work item: When you create a work item from a user story, as shown in the image below, you link it to a specific Salesforce sandbox. Behind the scenes, the DevOps Center creates a GitHub branch for that work item.
Save Time Migrating to the DevOps Center
Need a faster way to move your Salesforce org to the DevOps Center? Here’s a trick:
- Pull a list of all metadata changes.
- Pick the changes you want to add to a work item.
- Done! This is way quicker than building a change set by hand.
You only need to do this once. The work item will then carry all the changes through the pipeline. It’s a clean and simple way to populate work items, making your DevOps Center migration a breeze.
The image below illustrates how we can select metadata to add to the Work Item in the DevOps Center.
Move work from start to finish with pipelines
Pipelines are how your work moves. Everyone uses them after production. Think of a pipeline as a series of steps, like a recipe. Each step is a different Salesforce environment. A pipeline is like a practice or testing kitchen. You might have a space for new features and then a space to test them (UAT or staging). Finally, there is the real kitchen where everyone gets their food (production).
DevOps Center lets you have multiple pipelines, each for a different project. For example, imagine pipelines for urgent fixes (Hot Fix). Then, for necessary but not urgent changes (High). Also, for smaller updates (Medium and Low). This way, you can give each change the right attention based on its importance. Less risky changes can move faster and cost less to put in place. The DevOps Center uses Elements.cloud. It uses it to to see the risk of a change. It looks at the data involved, how it connects to other things, and what business processes it affects.
The image below displays the DevOps Center Pipeline with Work Items at each Stage of the Project.
This diagram shows how data flows between Elements.cloud, Jira, DevOps Center, and GitHub:
Ready to use DevOps Center?
DevOps Center is now available to everyone in your organization! The installation link is in the Setup section. Just search for “DevOps” in the quick find box.
Before you install, take some time to get familiar with the core ideas behind DevOps Center. Think about your current business analysis and development processes. Some teams might need to adjust their workflows to work best with the DevOps Center.
If you are unsure where to begin implementing DevOps for your Salesforce development team, you can rely on the expertise of our team at Globant. Our experienced professionals can guide you through the process and help you increase efficiency and accelerate your software development cycle. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us at globant.com/contact for assistance.
References
Manage and Release Changes Easily and Collaboratively with the DevOps Center
