1

Salesforce DevOps
at enterprise scale
Discover the best practices and benefits
of streamlining DevOps for Salesforce
 2

Contents

Introduction...........................................................................................4
Who is this ebook for?..................................................................................................... 5
What is DevOps?..............................................................................................................6
Why DevOps for Salesforce is different ........................................................................ 7
The benefits of DevOps for Salesforce..........................................................................8
Why DevOps for Salesforce is needed......................................................................... 10

The components of a successful DevOps process............................ 12

Culture............................................................................................................................. 13
Strategy........................................................................................................................... 14
Communication....................................................................................................... 14
Application management....................................................................................... 15
Version control . ............................................................................................................. 16
Branching strategies............................................................................................... 17
Testing............................................................................................................................. 18
User Acceptance testing............................................................................................... 19
CI/CD...............................................................................................................................20
Backup and recovery.....................................................................................................23
CONTENTS 3

Charting your Salesforce DevOps journey.........................................26

Who to consider when building your DevOps process...............................................28
The wider business.................................................................................................28
End users.................................................................................................................29
Salesforce team......................................................................................................30

Measuring success.............................................................................32
Process............................................................................................................................34
People impact..........................................................................................................35
Business impact......................................................................................................37

Building a DevOps solution.................................................................38

The business case..........................................................................................................39
Tooling.............................................................................................................................40
Build your own.........................................................................................................40
Vendors....................................................................................................................42
If you decide to buy................................................................................................43

Next steps........................................................................................... 44

About Gearset......................................................................................45
 4

Introduction
The best enterprise Salesforce teams are underpinned
by great DevOps processes. The 2023 State of Salesforce
DevOps report has shown that 50% of enterprise teams
have adopted leading tools and processes, and of those
teams 42% are seeing monthly return on investment
(ROI) of over $50,000.

The 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps report tells us that only

9% of elite teams adopted DevOps with a waterfall, “big bang”
approach. There’s good reason for this. Implementing DevOps
is not a one-time project to check off your list. It’s a journey that
will require continual improvement and iteration.

As you set out, it’s best to begin with a roadmap that provides
a clear understanding of what DevOps for Salesforce means
in an enterprise context, and clear objectives for your
implementation. This ebook should function as an introduction
to the key principles and best practices for enterprises seeking
to implement DevOps for Salesforce.

50% of enterprise teams have adopted

leading DevOps tools and processes

42%
are seeing monthly return on investment
(ROI) of over $50,000 following adoption
INTRODUCTION 5

Who is this ebook for?

If you’re a member of senior leadership (VP Technology,
VP Salesforce, IT/Operations Director), you’ll understand
how and why DevOps for Salesforce contributes to the
overall success of your company’s strategy. You’ll see
that investing time and resources into streamlining your
Salesforce delivery will reduce organizational risk and
boost your Salesforce ROI.

If you’re responsible for a Salesforce delivery team

of more than 10 dedicated Admins, Developers,
Architects, or Business Analysts, then this ebook
is for you.

If you’re a Salesforce Platform or Product Owner, then

you’ll gain useful insights into how to manage your
org and build a successful culture for your declarative
and programmatic configurators.
INTRODUCTION 6

| What is DevOps?
DevOps aims to streamline an organization’s development
workflows, using the best practices for processes and tooling.

Though DevOps takes these processes from software development

and IT operations, the fundamental problem that DevOps aims
to solve is related to people. Specifically, DevOps is designed
to break down the silos in a release process between developer
and operations teams.

For example, in the world of Salesforce development, DevOps

helps bring together every member of the Salesforce team
to work harmoniously — with a shared knowledge, understanding
of, and responsibility for, the delivery process.
INTRODUCTION 7

Why DevOps for

Salesforce is different
As Salesforce is a Software-as-a-Service product, some major
challenges of software development are handled for you. Traditional
DevOps responsibilities such as hosting, infrastructure, scalability
and security are — for the most part — already taken care of.

DevOps for Salesforce is concerned with the delivery

process itself, and how teams collaborate effectively
to deliver changes. The primary focuses are how
Salesforce orgs are managed, and how changes reach
production. This means that the whole Salesforce team
can, and should, be involved in as much of the delivery
process as is possible.

Salesforce is a unique platform, with unique metadata and custom code

that doesn’t mimic traditional software delivery. This makes Salesforce
delivery challenging — perhaps surprisingly so given how easy
it is to build on the platform. To seamlessly deliver robust applications
and overcome these significant hurdles, Salesforce-specific solutions
and continuous investment in your team are required.
 8

The benefits
of DevOps
for Salesforce
A well-oiled and efficient DevOps process
with reliably repeatable deployment
practices has a whole host of benefits that
save more than just time:

Applications and system Increased collaboration

updates delivered to end between all stakeholders
users faster — the crux
of digital transformation Decreased
organizational risk
Tighter feedback loops
between development teams Increased resilience
and end users encouraging in the event of data loss
user-driven development or corruption

There are even more benefits besides, but they all boil
down to one key outcome:

more value, more often.

THE BENEFITS OF DEVOPS FOR SALESFORCE 9

These benefits clearly translate to a Salesforce context. A poor DevOps

process hampers the ability to get the full value from Salesforce, which
impacts the wider business as Salesforce is a mission-critical part of your
business’ technology stack. In fact, 98% of teams report that Salesforce
is integral to meeting wider business objectives. Letting new, business-critical
applications, features, and developments stay stuck in the development cycle
as a result of poor process will drain your ROI as it creates:

Less efficient Salesforce Hampered efficiency of

end users Salesforce delivery teams

Paid-for functionality that’s Employee dissatisfaction,

obsolete until utilized which causes high turnover
THE BENEFITS OF DEVOPS FOR SALESFORCE 10

Why DevOps for

Salesforce is needed
Salesforce implementations are getting increasingly complex.
The 2023 State of Salesforce DevOps report found that 90%
of organizations had increased demand on their Salesforce team.
85% of organizations also reported that their dependence
on Salesforce had increased.

With more new products, more With Salesforce as a cornerstone

changes, and more intricacies to of your business strategy, teams
Salesforce offerings, it’s becoming need to have the agility to pivot,
harder for Salesforce professionals and fast. Delivery methods can
to keep up to date and develop hamper this ability to pivot or bring
detailed knowledge. This presents new products to market, especially
a larger challenge to enterprises, as customer attention spans are
who are operating on a greater shorter than ever. If you’re not there
scale. A mature and well-oiled to capitalize when it matters, then
DevOps process alleviates a you’ll lose to the competition.
significant amount of pressure
on this team, and frees them Salesforce is a significant
up to spend more dedicated time investment for your business.
learning how to get the most out Streamlining your Salesforce
of the Salesforce platform to benefit DevOps process is one of the most
the business. effective ways to see increased
returns on your investment. With
Leaders aren’t just concerned with DevOps you give yourself the best
the complexity of the Salesforce chance to prevent efficiency sinks,
platform. They’re also being forced free up your team to research and
to rapidly adapt their business implement new platform capabilities,
strategy in line with changing and empower the business to pivot,
markets and the fluctuating state meeting the market where it is,
of the global economy. when it is.
THE BENEFITS OF DEVOPS FOR SALESFORCE 11

90%
The 2023 State of Salesforce
DevOps report found that 90%
of organizations had increased
demand on their Salesforce team.

...
111
 12

The components
of a successful
DevOps process
There are many moving parts in your DevOps process, technical
and non-technical. While both are important, neither can be truly
optimal without the existence of the other.

In this section, we’ll cover the steps to establishing a successful

process with context for enterprise organizations. It’s worth
noting that enterprises face specific and amplified challenges.
At scale, it takes more effort to break down silos and manage
dissenting opinions on technical decisions.

...
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 13

...

| Culture
A strong DevOps culture forms the foundation of any successful
DevOps process. It’s also the hardest thing to implement if the
desire for change isn’t there, and a challenge to maintain if there
isn’t mutual understanding of the reasonings behind your
DevOps processes.

One of the key benefits of DevOps is breaking down silos between teams
and individuals, which requires a level of communication and transparency
that can be complex in an enterprise organization. While it may be
uncomfortable to open up work to judgment and scrutiny, leaders can
mitigate this by upholding the value of peer review. Transparency creates
opportunities for feedback and learning from different angles, and will
contribute to individual personal growth.

DevOps enables continuous improvement and tight feedback loops,

which can have numerous benefits, including being more successful
and more fulfilled.
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 14

| Strategy
Businesses make significant investments in their Salesforce orgs,
and expect to see returns. Therefore, it’s essential to have a solid
strategy in place for delivering changes and new applications to your
end users across the orgs that you manage. And this strategy will and
should be expected to change over time. The key principle of DevOps
is continuous improvement, and as such your strategy and delivery
process should follow this philosophy.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to crafting

a DevOps process that works for you. But there are some key areas
that you should consider:

⟶ Communication
Clear and efficient lines of communication should be established between
all the stakeholders involved. Configurators, Testers, Business Analysts,
Users, and Leadership should all have visibility into the development cycle,
and lines of communication that establish trust. We recommend setting
up automatic progress notifications, via services such as Slack, which will
be delivered to the relevant stakeholders.

Communication isn’t just about the methods used. It can only be effective
when it’s clear and concise. And this is incredibly important in an iterative
DevOps environment.
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 15

⟶ Application management
You’re likely already using an IT service management system like JIRA,
ServiceNow, or something similar to manage user stories and epics
for your development. Your strategy shouldn’t only consider how these
applications are used, but how they’re integrated into your development
lifecycle for greater transparency and vision. With transparency and
visibility into what each member of the team is working on, it makes
it easier to distribute workload, anticipate delivery windows, and make
sure work isn’t being duplicated between individuals or teams.

“
[Before adopting DevOps] different teams and individuals
worked in silos. This meant it was difficult for us to see
who was working on what. And there was no consistent
deployment process: some people used change sets while
others used SFDX. At one point we had 65 sandboxes all
completely out of sync. With no single source of truth, work
was often duplicated and thrown away as a result, wasting
precious developer time.

Paul Watkeys, Head of Digital Products,

Veolia, UK&I
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 16

| Version control
A Git-based version control system (VCS) is at the heart
of any modern DevOps process. Version control allows your
team to track all the changes made and easily review individual
contributions, while making it possible for multiple contributors
to work on the same features at the same time.

Individual developers and configurators contribute new work within

Git branches, which are later merged into the main branch — containing
the latest and stable version of the project or org — once the work
has been reviewed.

There are countless benefits of using a version control

system like Git. Among many other things, it helps you:

Reduce risk and avoid costly mistakes, by making Git the

source of truth for your development team instead of your
production org.

Track and annotate your development work with a complete

history of every change your team makes to your org
— to help your auditing and debugging processes.

Collaborate with multiple team members working in the same

org without overwriting each other’s work or treading on each
other’s toes.

Release reliably and safely by testing your changes first

until you’re satisfied they’re fit for purpose.
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 17

⟶ Branching strategies

The biggest consideration in your use of version control

is going to be the branching strategy.
50%
Your branching strategy will dictate how your team interacts with the
various environments in your pipeline, and forms the basis for how your
automated pipeline will work. The branching strategy most commonly
used by large teams is an “environment” branching strategy, i.e. orgs
backed by persistent branches.

The C2FO team also had version control on their radar, as they
wanted to improve collaboration and introduce code reviews
to their process.

“ We needed to build our release process,

and we also needed version control ­— so we were
looking for a solution that could do it all.

Corrine Walker, Salesforce Engineering Manager, C2FO

More information on branching strategies, and how to assess

what might work best for you can be found in our Version control
for Salesforce whitepaper.
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 18

| Testing
Unit testing is an integral part of software development, reflected
in Salesforce’s requirement that developers test at least 75%
of any new code they deploy to a production org. But the tests that
are written need to be useful and meaningful to make sure your team
can easily review and reliably build on your code in future.

Automation can help you by testing changes every time they are merged
into the main branch and/or deployed to another environment. An
agile DevOps setup will also let you populate development or testing
environments with data from production, so you can check your code
works with actual data — real (albeit sometimes “dummy”) data that will
come in all sorts of shapes that you might not have thought about when
you started writing your code.

Automated testing allows you to:

⟶ Save time and effort, by making sure

your changes are deployable.

⟶ Avoid shipping faulty code and causing

existing functionality to break.

⟶ Make sure that you’re developing

the precise features that your
organization needs.

⟶ Improve the quality of your development

work by reducing bugs and critical issues,
freeing up your team to work on those
great new features.
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 19

⟶ User Acceptance Testing

As part of your testing strategy, you must have a level

of user acceptance testing (UAT) — this ensures that
the features and changes you’ve made meet the user
requirements from the story and perform the desired function.

Build out a mechanism where “power-users” from each area

of the business that Salesforce touches (Sales, Service, etc.)
are involved in the DevOps process and are able to give
feedback on new features. This is critical to ensure
configurators and developers are building solutions that
help address the real needs of the business.

“ I don’t have to spend much time reviewing the

work or worry that, even after two days of reviewing,
it’s going to bomb. I get peace of mind knowing
the deployment will work.

Vijay Aswani, Salesforce Technical Lead, UCLA

THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 20

| CI/CD
Continuous integration (CI) builds on a Git-based workflow and
automates the process of testing and validating changes, making
sure that they can be deployed. Continuous delivery (CD) is about
releasing frequent, small changes to users via an automated
process and reducing the risks associated with big releases.

Taken together, CI/CD takes the pain and risk out of deploying changes
to multiple development environments and on to production. It promotes
an iterative and incremental approach to development, where you aim
to contribute frequent small changes and get immediate feedback from
your team and end users.

Using CI/CD to make regular, small

and automated releases helps you:

Avoid manual errors causing Tighten the feedback loop

problems with releases. and allow your users to drive
your development process.
Reduce the risk of individual
releases as your process Work on multiple projects
becomes ever more reliable. simultaneously and change
direction in response to
Reduce downtime by quickly feedback without losing
rolling back mistakes and the existing work.
unwanted changes.
Release the value you’ve
created to your users
as fast as possible.
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 21

It’s rare for an enterprise-sized company to adopt continuous

deployment, i.e. automated releases to production, due to compliance
requirements and risk management. However, your process can get
to a stage where it’s automated until the very last click of a button
so that your releases are near seamless.

“
Their [Salesforce Delivery] team decided to create several
CI jobs for each of the five levels of their deployment process.
With this new setup, issues can be caught earlier and isolated
to upstream environments, rather than reaching UAT and blocking
other work. Adopting [DevOps tooling] really started an evolution,
taking us to where we are today.

Sr. IT Analyst, Global Goods Manufacturer

An analysis of CI/CD processes,

and how to maximize their
effectiveness, is available
in Gearset’s free ebook
CI/CD for Salesforce.
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 22

82%
of Salesforce teams
are working
towards CI/CD
Source: State of Salesforce DevOps 2023
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 23

| Backup and recovery

Backup and recovery is key to mitigating organizational risk,
and the reputational damage that has the potential to arise from
a data incident.

A backup of your customer Key here is the relationship between

and organization’s data is essential your data and metadata, the latter
in case a disaster strikes — whether storing your data and providing
it’s accidental data loss, data the structure of your org. Many
corruption due to a third-party teams only consider the need
integration, malicious actions to back up their data, but it’s critical
of disgruntled employees, or even to protect your metadata too. Teams
a Salesforce platform outage. that have tools and processes
in place to monitor and roll back
But a backup solution is only changes to their data and metadata
as good as your ability to restore are then also in a position to restore
from it. Backups and org security complex data hierarchies to their
are fundamental to DevOps, orgs quickly, and before too much
as it ensures the business can damage is done.
quickly resume normal operations.

23
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 24

A smart backup solution will allow you to:

Monitor your org’s data for Use your familiar

changes or deletions along deployment process to
with metadata monitoring restore data and metadata

Deploy backup data Mask and delete records

to sandbox environments to comply with data
for testing protection regulations
(CCPA, HIPPA, GDPR)

“ If we had a complete failure, I’m confident our data

is safe in our Gearset backups and we’d be able
to restore. It’s like insurance — you need it, but hope
you never need to use it.

Chris Deutschmann, Configuration Consultant, Sage

For a detailed guide to backing up and restoring your Salesforce

org, read Gearset’s free ebook Backups for Salesforce.
THE COMPONENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL DEVOPS PROCESS 25

High-performing DevOps
teams typically restore
service in under an hour
Source: Backups for Salesforce ebook
 26

Charting
your Salesforce
DevOps journey
A quality Salesforce delivery model relies on a sound
understanding of the methods for delivering change. How a large
organization goes about handling both day-to-day changes and
long-term changes influences how successful they are in the long
run. This is a core responsibility of a Center of Excellence.

Establishing a Salesforce Center of Excellence (often referred to as a CoE)

should be a top priority. In fact, a 10k Advisors report found that 91%
of the most successful companies seeing max ROI on Salesforce have
a CoE established.
CHARTING YOUR SALESFORCE DEVOPS JOURNEY 27

DevOps falls into the responsibility of these core

responsibilities of a CoE:

⟶ Leadership
⟶ Governance
⟶ Change management
⟶ Tooling
⟶ Standards
⟶ Metadata management

You’ll bring the best DevOps practices to the fore by establishing an

effective CoE with a holistic view of Salesforce as a platform. This should
include a strategy for your DevOps implementation and a roadmap
for how the CoE will act as a force for change.

A Center of Excellence also brings in stakeholders from across the business.

For example, vision and leadership could be the responsibility of C-level
executives, configurators, and/or end users. Establishing a CoE that includes
a variety of stakeholders promotes a business-wide understanding of your
DevOps processes, tooling, and objectives for your use of Salesforce.

When it comes to change management, you’ll generally need to slow down

in order to speed up. Take time to understand the Salesforce org(s) that
you look after, understand the long-term strategy of CRM in your company,
and build a CoE with roles and responsibilities that support it. Continuous
improvement underpins DevOps practices and philosophy, and your CoE
should always be thinking about ways to continuously improve and make
sure that Salesforce both stays operationally relevant and can drive
business growth.

It’s inevitable that some employees will be resistant to change, which

you’ll have to accept. But, with coherent strategy and clear communication,
disruption will be minimized.
CHARTING YOUR SALESFORCE DEVOPS JOURNEY 28

Who to consider
when building your
DevOps process
Though your DevOps process impacts everyone at your
organization, there are three main groups that you should
consider when determining your approach.

1 The wider business

Your use of Salesforce should allow you to meet business-critical
objectives. The Salesforce platform has the ability to take an
organization to atmospheric heights, and your DevOps process
is critical to that.

Businesses should be looking to serve customers consistently

with more innovative and satisfying solutions — Salesforce
undoubtedly has the capability to do that. However, the ever-
changing commercial landscape makes it exceptionally difficult
to stay on top of consumer trends. The ability to collect, process
and store relevant data can allow you to make sound business
decisions that drive commercial success.

The customer experience should be at the forefront of any great

Salesforce implementation, as your business objectives ultimately
serve these customers. The faster and more efficiently you can
serve them with a relevant, coherent service and products that
meet their needs, the better. If you’re relying on Salesforce, then
you’re relying on your DevOps process to meet customers where
they are, when they are there.
CHARTING YOUR SALESFORCE DEVOPS JOURNEY 29

2 End users
As a leader in a Salesforce team, or an executive team responsible
for Salesforce, it’s your responsibility to be able to communicate
why and how Salesforce is changing in your organization.

As the complexity of your org increases, and with it the velocity

and number of changes, your end users must be included and well
informed to ensure the success of the features and functionality
being delivered. Make sure that you’re not building towards an
unattainable utopia. Build things that are useful and that are driven
by constant, reliable user feedback.

DevOps plays a key role in being able to drive this level of

engagement and change. A great DevOps process supports high
levels of change velocity. This keeps end users engaged, and
fosters belief that they are being supported in their operational
goals by the Salesforce development team. This is hugely
important to overall business success.

“ Previously, we had issues holding on to development

work too long which made deployments even more
complicated. Now, we’ve been able to build a better
relationship with our end users, which is a big win.

Alex Jones, Project Manager, Xaxis

CHARTING YOUR SALESFORCE DEVOPS JOURNEY 30

3 Salesforce team
Your Salesforce team needs the skills to deliver this level of change.
While some of these skills will exist, some team members may be
less familiar with new methods and technologies. Failure to address
this skills gap limits the success of your DevOps implementation and
overall use of Salesforce. 41% of Salesforce teams report that their
team lacking experience is a restricting factor for managing their
Salesforce releases.

Start with an evaluation of existing skills in the team. Moving

personnel into roles that are best suited to the business’ needs,
and that meet their personal goals, is a great way to drive success
of your process and, holistically, your organization. Pulling together
and comparing this information will take time and effort. But, through
planning and assessing these two things together in detail, you’ll
drive employee satisfaction, engagement, and ultimately the growth
and success of your Salesforce strategy.
CHARTING YOUR SALESFORCE DEVOPS JOURNEY 31

That being said, time needs to be set aside for learning and personal
development. Investing in your process is all well and good, but
neglecting the learning journey of your employees that are primarily
responsible for delivery of Salesforce will hamper the effectiveness
and ROI of your investment.

Fortunately, plenty of resources are available to get your team started.

Salesforce’s Trailhead is a great learning platform for technical and

soft skills. For learning dedicated to DevOps, you can take advantage
of free resources such as DevOps Launchpad.

You’ll also find value in your team attending conferences hosted by

Salesforce and the Salesforce community, where they can network
with teams solving similar challenges, and learn from experts in
their field. DevOps Dreamin’ is a fantastic example of a community
conference that builds specific knowledge and expertise.

There are no hard-and-fast rules for your DevOps journey. It will

develop as your processes, people, and technology matures. But
having a vision of where you want to get to, and the resources at your
disposal to get there, you’ll be able to drive towards ongoing success.

41%
of Salesforce teams report that their team
lacking experience is a restricting factor
for managing their Salesforce releases.

Source: State of Salesforce DevOps 2023

 32

Measuring
success
It’s critical to measure the success of your DevOps
processes, because:

⟶ It allows your CoE to understand what is/isn’t working

⟶ It encourages the visibility, collaboration and feedback that

underpins a successful DevOps culture

⟶ You can quantify deliverables to the three key stakeholder

groups (detailed above)

⟶ You can continuously improve

The 2023 State of Salesforce DevOps report shows that

teams with the highest performance metrics have mature
DevOps processes in place.
 33

Overall, 98% of Salesforce teams see ROI from

implementing a DevOps process, with 27% seeing
over $50,000 worth of savings a month, without taking
into account the nuances and business acceleration
achieved through digital transformation.

1S %

So what does the success and the impact of a great DevOps

process look like?
MEASURING
MEASURINGSUCCESS
SUCCESS 34

| Process
The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics
are the key metrics that help us to identify the efficiency
of our DevOps process. Along with examples, which
are considered “high performing”, they are:

Daily Less than 10%

Deployment frequency Change failure rate

Less than a day One day

Lead time for change Mean time to recover
(between work being (data/metadata issues)
completed and released)
MEASURING SUCCESS 35

⟶ People impact

Optimizing your processes and aspiring to trailblazing DORA

metrics is important. However, striving to do that needs to be balanced
by the human factors that contribute to those numbers.

For example, if any of these metrics indicate high performance but only
as a result of your staff regularly working 12+ hour days at their desks,
you’re unlikely to have a happy team. The 2023 State of Salesforce
DevOps report showed that teams are spending an average of 9 hours
each month deploying outside of their contracted hours. This
is not sustainable.

While having an optimal process is admirable, getting there should come

from iterating and improving with the resources available within the team.

Being mindful of the following, while continually assessing

the business requirements and goals, will enable you to identify
where to hire additional resource, address technical issues,
or tweak processes:

• Ability to collaborate
• Employee sentiment
• Staff retention
• Amount of overtime required
• Non-specialist consultant spend

These parts of your team’s culture will have a knock-on effect

on how successful changes to your processes and delivery will
be, but they aren’t mutually exclusive.

As markets and political climates change, many businesses will

be inclined to remain in situations that are sometimes suboptimal.
It’s incumbent on leaders to make sure they create and foster a culture
that doesn’t perpetuate negative behaviors at the expense of staff.
MEASURING SUCCESS 36

The 2023 State of Salesforce

DevOps report showed that
teams are spending an average
of 9 hours each month deploying
outside of their contracted hours.
MEASURING SUCCESS 37

⟶ Business impact

DevOps has a direct impact on the overall ROI of the

Salesforce platform and the overall digital transformation
strategy. While the DORA metrics can give you a great
understanding of your DevOps process’ effectiveness,
this view is too narrow.

Leaders and executives are obsessed with customers and making

them happy. Salesforce touches a large portion of an enterprises’
customer base. Therefore, effectively managing the platform will
directly impact the overall performance of the business.

Providing the right things are built for the right people
(which could be a whole other ebook in itself), you’ll
see the following impact:

Faster digital transformation of services

Increased revenue

Longer customer retention

Positive brand awareness

Higher customer satisfaction (NPS etc.)

 38

Building a
DevOps Solution
The path to maturing your DevOps process involves decisions
as to what solutions you should adopt. Once you’ve considered
strategy, culture, and formulated an idea of the journey you’ll
go on, it’s time to think about the tech you’ll use to help you.

Again, when it comes to solutioning your Salesforce

DevOps process you’ll need to consider both:

• Your existing technology stack

• The skills of your Salesforce team

Alongside these two concerns, there are plenty of considerations

and a number of ways you can make sure you pick the most
efficient solution that will deliver ROI and scale along with
your business.
BUILDING A DEVOPS SOLUTION 39

| The business case

To justify the spend on DevOps solutions, you need to begin with
a clear understanding of why you’re investing in revamping your
DevOps process, which has already been well covered in this ebook.
Any proposal for change needs to be supported by a business
case, especially when budget is being requested, spent, or there’s
interruption to BAU activities — which can often be the reality
of making changes to the DevOps process.

A compelling business case for any Salesforce-related

technology, people, or process change needs to demonstrate
a positive impact on at least two of the following:

Return on investment Skills and knowledge

Business system Team happiness

user satisfaction and/or productivity

Fortunately, DevOps directly or indirectly impacts all four of these

areas. There are also additional benefits that often mean that
the ROI of improving your DevOps process is significantly more.

The time saved by each member of your team could not only be put
towards backlog items, new tickets, or CPD. Those employees could
also learn more about the Salesforce platform and help leverage
it to drive the commercial growth of your business.

The possibilities are endless — with more time in your employees’

hands, and a platform that optimizes digital transformation.
BUILDING A DEVOPS SOLUTION 40

| Tooling
Technology plays a huge part in the ease of adoption,
scalability, and value derived from your DevOps process.
There are two key ways that large teams approach tooling.
They may decide to build their own custom solution, or
they work with a vendor to purchase a Salesforce DevOps
platform. Each has benefits and drawbacks, but there tends
to be a preference for working with vendors.

⟶ Build your own

Many large organizations with an However, it’s common to see

existing software development businesses underestimating the
team might initially see building complexity of the Salesforce platform,
an in-house DevOps solution as a which has a number of unique
shortcut to implementing DevOps features. Many IT departments have
for Salesforce — especially when embarked on building DIY solutions
there’s the opportunity to use parts only to discover that this approach
of an existing tech stack. ultimately fails to deliver on the
promise of DevOps.
For many organizations, building
a platform in-house can be seen
as a solution to retain ownership
of security across new processes.
It can also be a route to maintain
control of new technical solutions
and add customized features,
rather than introducing third-
party software.
BUILDING A DEVOPS SOLUTION 41

Common drawbacks of building a bespoke solution are:

It’s slow and takes significant resource

Susceptible to uncapped rising costs

Increased organizational risk from single-points of failure

Siloed knowledge

Significant ongoing maintenance efforts

These issues will be experienced when building your own solution

for any technology stack, but Salesforce brings its own unique challenges
that exacerbate them.

Salesforce makes multiple changes and releases a year that render the
maintenance of a bespoke solution constant. Should a member of the team
leave who has partially built the process or solution, that knowledge leaves
with them and your process could grind to a halt.
BUILDING A DEVOPS SOLUTION 42

⟶ Vendors

Even with a multi-skilled software development team, it’s clear that

building a Salesforce DevOps solution in-house is a resource-heavy
process that requires domain expertise and raises many key challenges.

Thousands of large Salesforce teams are choosing to implement

a purpose-built DevOps solution to meet their business
objectives, bringing with it a range of benefits such as:

⟶ Finer control on costs and team resources

⟶ Solves challenging Salesforce-specific nuances

⟶ End-to-end solutioning

⟶ Out-of-the box easy to use and scalability

⟶ Expert technical support

It’s important to understand that when you purchase a Salesforce

DevOps solution from a vendor, there are hundreds of thousands
of hours that have gone into solving the specific Salesforce
challenges involved. As a result, you’re not just buying the technical
solution — you’re buying quality services, domain expertise, and
deep knowledge that, without hiring directly from those talent pools,
you won’t find elsewhere.
BUILDING A DEVOPS SOLUTION 43

⟶ If you decide to buy

If you do decide to purchase a solution, there are some key areas

you’ll want to delve into when working with a vendor. You’ll also want
to involve the deep subject matter experts in the team, that have pain
points, to help you evaluate. And always, always ask for a trial.

Key areas to ask a vendor about when engaged in a sales cycle:

⟶ Salesforce domain expertise and insight

⟶ Ease of onboarding and low-code capability

⟶ Access to expert DevOps support

⟶ Proactive maintenance

Equip yourself with a suite of questions and evaluate these areas,

but also ensure you keep your specific requirements front of mind.

While the challenges that vendors solve are largely universal, make sure
you ask questions that relate to your organization’s use of Salesforce
products, alongside concerns with governance, security, and team
knowledge gaps that aren’t currently supported in-house.

For in-depth detail on this paradox, you can find more info
in Gearset’s Build or Buy whitepaper.
 44

Next steps
If you’re ready to see how investing further in your
DevOps process can streamline delivery of Salesforce
in your organization, arrange a consultation with us.
We’ll give you specific, tailored advice to help you
reach your business objectives.

Book a consultation

If you want to learn more about DevOps then visit

DevOps Launchpad for free training and certification.
Join the thousands of teams leveling up to accelerate
the growth of their companies.

Start the learning journey

 45

About
Gearset
Gearset is the leading Salesforce DevOps platform,
with powerful solutions for metadata and CPQ
deployments, CI/CD, automated testing, sandbox
seeding and backups. It helps Salesforce teams apply
DevOps best practices to their development and release
process, so they can rapidly and securely deliver
higher-quality projects.

Thousands of Salesforce professionals use Gearset, and have

shipped millions of deployments, run billions of automated
tests, and backed up billions of records. With inbuilt intelligence
that solves the fundamental challenges of Salesforce DevOps,
Gearset is a uniquely reliable solution trusted by more than
2000 companies, including McKesson, Accenture and IBM.

W: gearset.com
E: team@gearset.com
T: +1 (833) 441 7687