Ascertain your needs first
Do you need deployment tools for the Salesforce DevOps process? This is a question that most organizations ask themselves when they use Salesforce DevOps for releasing software applications. Experts in modern DevOps trends and software application development state that everyone might need these tools, especially if the company is small and the number of developers working on the project is small. You can always rely on the native tools that Salesforce offers you, like the changesets, to get your deployments done without hassles.
On the other hand, if you are a large corporation and have many Salesforce developers working on a single project, it does make sense to bank on a good quality deployment tool for your projects. Your developers will be working with many sandboxes, and they might even be using products like the Salesforce CPQ. It is here that tools for Salesforce deployments become essential.
To understand why these deployment tools are needed under Salesforce, you should know how changesets function, especially for release management. The above reason has been illustrated by the example below-
The changesets in Salesforce are easy for you to use, and they can be made for deploying changes from one production org to another. They can be created manually with the addition of components. This needs to be done one by one. However, there are some downsides when it comes to the above process-
- It takes some time for you to create changesets as they need to be added manually. There are mistakes in the deployment process, and fixing these errors becomes a time-consuming process.
- All the components cannot be deployed through changesets, and they include sales processes and the standard picklist values.
- The changesets should be recreated or cloned every time they are shifted to a different environment, for example, from developing quality analysis to production.
- The changesets cannot be fully integrated with systems for version control for monitoring changes between environments.
However, in the Salesforce DevOps process.Ā changesets are just a single example where the native tools of Salesforce fail. This causes problems for developers as the project becomes complex. Suppose you witness bottlenecks and issues in any junction of the software development lifecycle of Salesforce? In that case, it is time for you to consider using Salesforce deployment tools to make the project easier and faster.