Autodesk’s Best Practices for Continuous Innovation with Salesforce

This blog post covers a Dreamforce 2018 session delivered on September 25. To watch the session, check out this recording.

Kate Gentry (left) and Tzvetana Duffy talking about Autodesk’s continuous innovation journey

At Dreamforce 2018, we embarked on an adventure with Autodesk to discover how it incorporates innovative thinking, employs effective change management practices, and supports continuous integration systems on the Salesforce platform — all while seamlessly adopting Salesforce’s three major yearly releases. What can other companies that use the Salesforce Platform learn from Autodesk’s continuous innovation journey? A lot, actually.

During their Dreamforce 2018 presentation, Kate Gentry, senior director of release management at Salesforce, and Tzvetana Duffy, director of Salesforce’s data and automation platforms, spoke about Autodesk’s Salesforce journey, with Einstein Analytics being the primary impetus for change, innovation, and customer success.

Autodesk has been delivering trust and quality to customers by incorporating the following best practices.

• Using an innovative mindset fueled by Salesforce’s extensive resources and services
• Implementing change management practices to measure feature quality, maintain a stable platform governance for process alignment, and allow stakeholders to agree with development team decisions
• Implementing continuous delivery, which requires CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment) systems for the ability to rapidly test and release features

These best practices are all addressed in a single methodology: DevOps. DevOps (development and operations) involves an agile and collaborative relationship between software development and IT operations. A company that has a DevOps culture is more likely to hit its sales targets, ensure continuous innovation, and make every customer story a successful one. Although the Dreamforce session did not call out DevOps by name, its key takeaways — and the story of Autodesk’s journey to establishing innovative practices — represent the hallmarks of a DevOps culture.

As an Innovator Thinketh

Continuous innovation requires cultural evolution — an evolution that takes time, patience, curiosity, risks, and collaboration. In modern software development, continuous delivery best practices “have been proven to help teams quickly deliver high-value work with increased business value and psychological safety.” [1]

The Salesforce Platform is built to support continuous innovation, and Salesforce offers a robust set of resources to help customers with their own innovation journeys: interactive webinars, Salesforce accelerators (quick work sessions for solving specific Salesforce challenges), trails, Help articles, and more. If you are a Trailblazer in your company, taking advantage of these offerings can help you unlock your innovation.

Continuous innovation is also daunting! But it doesn’t have to be, and it wasn’t for Autodesk. Autodesk has been a Salesforce customer for 10 years, and it recently saw:

• A boost in business productivity and code deployments over the past year and a half thanks to its adoption of the Lightning Platform
• An increase of sales teams more easily understanding customer data by using Einstein Analytics
• A reduction in friction between customer-facing teams that needed to interact with each other and could all benefit from the Lightning Platform and Einstein Analytics

For a bird’s-eye view of how Autodesk runs its business on the Salesforce Platform, consider that Autodesk:

• Configures its implementation of the Salesforce Platform for three domains: sales, support, and marketing
• Has approximately 20,000 users in its Salesforce org, and more than 2,750 customers in its Customer community
• Receives approximately two million API requests per day for its Salesforce org
• Has more than 60 teams distributed across the United States, India, and Singapore that use the Salesforce Platform
• Deploys features built internally on the Salesforce Platform in more than 20 releases per year through agile delivery practices and automated continuous integration

Accelerate and Automate

Autodesk took advantage of the Lightning Platform’s improved user experience to increase productivity, efficiency, and innovation. Sales and services reps can more easily close deals, support customers, and innovate on the platform with Lightning’s features.

One application that Autodesk enabled on Lightning is the Sales Tracker, which provides sales teams and managers a visualization of their leads and opportunities on multiple devices.

With Einstein Analytics, sales reps can use self-service dashboards to become more productive. And data experts can work with Einstein Analytics users at the beginning to determine the types of data needed and gather the appropriate insights.

Change (Management) Is Good

Change is a constant. To keep pace with it — and even stay ahead of it — development and operations teams must track and record how they establish best practices in platform governance, which includes change management. And to ensure that teams don’t clash in development and deployment, it’s important that they agree on and align with those best practices and work together in following them.

For its platform governance, Autodesk established these best practices and helped teams incorporate them into the development life cycle.

• Using common monitoring and alerting frameworks that drive platform excellence
• Using change management that is lightweight and appropriate for the software development process based on the feature’s business impact
• Creating and implementing design standards
• Implementing a CI/CD pipeline, which is a software development process that allows teams to save time and development work by automating version control, code review, check-in, and deployment

These four best practices cover the inception, plan, build, and run phases of Autodesk’s software development life cycle. Taken together, they help Autodesk with prioritizing feature requests.

• In the inception phase, software architects propose solutions, platform object owners identify dependencies, and development teams work on technical designs.
• In the plan, build, and run phases, software architects suggest design changes. Platform object owners and development teams have sprints during which they automate code reviews and CI/CD workflows.

Salesforce also advises release governance guidance for the design, build, and run phases of software development.

• In the design and build phases, product owners get features through the design and build phases by collaborating with architecture teams, cloud governance teams, and product managers. Product owners also enable developers to safely innovate on the Salesforce Platform.
• In the run phase, the Site Reliability teams carry out features so that customers can safely trust in the quality of the product. Site Reliability teams utilize governance in operations, support, and release management.

Change management is important to have at the start of software development, because it maintains stability throughout the development life cycle. Your development and operation teams should establish both platform governance and release governance models to ensure platform integrity and smooth release operations.

Keep Calm and Execute

Salesforce has three major releases a year. To prepare customers for these releases, Salesforce provides many resources across multiple channels. Check out the Salesforce Release Strategies Trailhead module to learn more about how we release new features. Throughout the release life cycle, Salesforce rigorously adheres to CI/CD best practices, which is a solution that Autodesk has built into its own CI/CD pipeline.

Autodesk does its homework when it comes to preparing for Salesforce releases. For each release, Autodesk performs the following tasks:

1. Meet with Salesforce advisory boards to review the Salesforce product roadmap. Autodesk and Salesforce determine how to balance customized features with built-in Salesforce features.
2. Check out the Salesforce release notes.
3. Leverage Salesforce’s release support to onboard customers to the new features.
4. Run automation and regression test suites when Salesforce upgrades the sandbox instance. Autodesk has over 600 custom objects, so efficiency is key to running end-to-end automated test cases and spot-checking feature behavior.
5. Run specific performance tests on features, which can be time consuming and expensive in the short term, but can pay off in business and customer productivity down the road.
6. Communicate issues to Salesforce.

Before you deploy your own customized features, minimize the changes that you release so that you can easily pinpoint and resolve issues related to the features. Throughout the CI/CD pipeline, you can enable features on your Salesforce org using a combination of standard Salesforce functionality, your own custom code, and business-process changes. You can also incorporate the CI/CD pipeline to automate low-value work. All of these practices need change management policies to ensure timely adoption of your features.

You can set up the CI/CD pipeline flow by following this process:

1. Have proper version control.
2. Automate code reviews as much as possible.
3. Use automated test regression.
4. Deploy code.

Salesforce recommends the new Agile Accelerator app for managing and automating your agile development on the Salesforce Platform.

In general, you can build speed into your continuous deployment process to successfully release features, which maximizes business value and impact for your customers.

Key Takeaways

1. Use the tools that Salesforce provides to accelerate innovation.
2. Establish a governance model to ensure platform integrity and smooth release operations.
3. Establish and invest in an automated delivery pipeline.

Resources

• Agile Accelerator on the Salesforce AppExchange
• Dreamforce 2018 Session: Best Practices for Continuous Innovation on the Salesforce Platform
• Salesforce Release Strategies Trailhead module

References

[1] Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps — Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

About the author

Michael Polce is a staff technical writer on the Content & Communications Experience team at Salesforce.