The Path to Continuous Deployment
Clean off the Shelf
Shelfware is the enemy of software success. Customers have a vision that they can't realize if they can't manage the regular deployment of transformation. When momentum is lost in the software release process, trust in the technology platform is the first victim. This leads to investment being lost and it creates friction with integrators and turnover of internal staff frustrated with failure. Copado was started by two release engineers who were tired of manually executing deployments and wanted to find a better way to manage enterprise class deployments. When you meet any veteran of major salesforce deployments and tell them you have a way to automate the process of deployment and continuous integration they instantly want to know more.
Copado’s mission is to enable faster, error-free digital and cloud deployments and upgrades with continuous integration (CI) technologies and agile cloud release management, all via an enterprise-class developer platform that is 100% native and fully integrated with Salesforce DX and Salesforce Clouds. Today, companies that use Salesforce and need help in optimizing their release management processes talk to us about best practices for their release management process. It is at this moment of digital transformation meets deployment that companies lean in and look at how to mature their release management process, so they can be confident in their ability to scale development on the platform.
Best Practices
Customers are looking for solutions to their problems, one which will help them to follow the software development best practices, to have a traceability system and reduce time in all the release management steps. Our best practices focus on trust, automation, optimization, security and escalation. We work with large enterprises familiar with the usual pain points, struggles and challenges of Salesforce release management (changesets / ANT). These companies usually have: (1) the means to afford the subscription, (2) resources with the appropriate skill sets / knowledge required to understand, adopt and endure the learning curve and (3) maturity to apply the change management and adoption of the new tool throughout the organization; plus the biggest delays/pains when it comes to release management on Salesforce.
We help teams understand and deploy the best practices for a successful release. The ability to manage user stories and make it easy to share with other developers is essential to building a solid development foundation. Here are a few key practices we have identified:
If you want to grow your development teams to manage for enterprise class releases, you need automation and the ability to compare code.
It is very important that developers have the ability to bundle user stories across multiple teams, so managing changes are essential for managing continuous integration and updates. This is important because every day that your code sits on the shelf, no one realizes the benefit of your innovation.
We find that businesses with teams of developers that need to focus on the business growth and not on the headaches of deployments and testing of new features appreciate the benefits of setting up a world class release program.
Copado isn’t just a toolset (developers lean towards that, e.g. command-line, ant tool, or sfdx), it isn’t just a project management tool (like Jira, that middle managers live in), nor a set of processes (manual or automated), it is the only solution that provides a true end-to-end - User Story to Production capability. Our reputation and referencability as the most comprehensive suite is our advantage. The referenceability of the product ensures that customers can trust the automation, optimization, security and escalation solution we deliver to hundreds of enterprise class customers.
The Payoff
The greatest benefit of DevOps is time, even though everything that Copado does is technically possible to do manually, having a tool that does it automatically and in a trusted and repeatable way is extremely valuable to someone who knows the pain and risks of a failed deployment.
Developers appreciate the benefits of building a foundation that will allow teams to scale, based on high confidence in their delivery practice and this results in better service to the business. Once a team is working then you start to realize the real saving of a release management process. Copado is a true investment; when using Copado the ROI will pay back the economic cost very fast.