Test as quickly as you build.

That’s the new normal. Testing used to be thought of as an afterthought and something relegated to one of the most forgotten parts of the product phase-gate process. Now the paradigm has changed in order to help teams get new ideas to market more quickly. How? By integrating testing throughout the DevOps process. 

Within many organizations, it has become apparent that with a finite amount of resources and an increasing need to shorten the release lifecycle, testing needs to be integrated with the Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) tools that teams are using. 

Related to this, we’ve been consulting with a lot of customers with the aim of helping them accelerate testing and bring this approach earlier and more frequently in the development lifecycle. What we have learned is that most teams have the experience and skills to make this happen. It’s really just about starting a dialogue internally to set an organization up for success and align priorities. 

Based on these conversations, here are a few best practices that we have developed to help teams start to think about the Salesforce DevOps planning process in a proactive way. By having these important conversations early and often, you can work together to release software faster and more reliably with DevOps in mind. 

Because at the end of the day, it’s not about creating more tests, it's about creating meaningful tests that truly protect the most important parts of your business.

Questions DevOps and QA teams should discuss during every Salesforce DevOps planning meeting:

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1. Should we test all new functionality early and at each stage in the deployment process, or wait until it reaches a higher level environment (such as a UAT or staging environment)?

2. Should we perform regression-based testing on all existing functionality and how often do we do this regression testing?

3. Do we only test this feature at the end of a release cycle?

4. How much time should we spend dealing with test data each week?

5. How much time should it take for a single line of code to go from Development -> Production?

Every organization has its own development and testing goals and objectives. That’s why it’s important to start an internal dialogue to discuss your development objectives and talk about creating a testing strategy that can support those goals. 

Learn how you can test as quickly as you build with Provar. Come say hey at our booth at Cactusforce! 

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We designed Provar to help teams build, test, and release software faster and more reliably with DevOps in mind. With Provar, you can bring testing earlier (and everywhere) in the DevOps lifecycle.

You can integrate Provar with industry-leading CI/CI partners like Salesforce DX, Docker, Apache Ant, Jenkins, CircleCI, Bamboo, Azure DevOps Server, GitLab, Travis CI, TeamCity, Bitbucket, Heroku, Gearset, Flosum, Copado, Blue Canvas, and AutoRABIT. 

Stop by our booth at Cactusforce to learn how! Or, schedule a 1:1 demo with a Provar consultant at any time! See you soon! 

By Jon Robinson, Head of North America at Provar

The Salesforce platform is very powerful, but as Spiderman was told: “with great power comes great responsibility”. And whilst we can laugh or grimace at these OrgConfessions, there is a serious point here. Salesforce has the potential to transform your organization.

Take a look at the root cause analysis we performed on the OrgConfessions and you will see some common themes. Most of these confessions could be avoided with better analysis, architecture, and governance which is why we built Elements.cloud.  

Confession #404

I had a contract recently to work on expanding out the architecture for a Salesforce org at a pharma company. I asked who was administering the current build – Intern, in college, only other job was a server in a restaurant.

Confession #169

User did the MyDomain Trailhead in Production. So our Prod login was changed to kittiesarecute.my.salesforce.com It took a tech call escalated to Salesforce Tier 3 support to undo.

Find Elements.cloud at Cactusforce!

Strongpoint has created a wide spectrum of tools aimed at both admins and developers at all levels of ability which can be leveraged to automate much of the manual processes that impede their productivity on a daily basis.

At Stronpoint we say that we help Salesforce resources by augmenting their ability to:

1. Get their Org in Order

2. Keep their Org in Order

3. Prove their Org is Order

To do that, we automate and provide "living documentation" of the Org by continuously indexing the meta data. From there, we provide up to date and accurate dependency mapping of all components in the environment. This enables automated risk assessment and impact analysis so that developers can have the confidence that they can make changes with confidence and mitigate any concerns regarding technical risk, organizational risk and regulatory oversight.

The net result is that we routinely have administrators as well as developers report to us that they save as much as 25% of their time and increase their delivery of innovation by as much as 200%.

We are absolutely committed to making it easier to adopt and benefit from the Salesforce Platform by helping admins and developers create great Salesforce documentation.

Strongpoint is proud to be a sponsor of Cactusforce 2019.

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:

1. If you want to grow your development teams to manage for enterprise class releases, you need automation and the ability to compare code.

2. 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.  

3. 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.