Make the Most of Salesforce DevOps Center

The current state of the IT industry is influenced by massive technological advancements and one that could really use DevOps to break down silos.

Bidding goodbye to using time-consuming Change Sets, Salesforce launched its DevOps Center.

The Salesforce DevOps Center Product Manager, Karen Fidelak remarks that this DevOps Center is all about change and release management and introduces DevOps best practices to the entire Salesforce community.

The Salesforce DevOps Center is designed to enable the entire ecosystem to migrate to source-driven development at no cost.

Here is a blog post that will help you learn in detail about the DevOps Center released in the Salesforce UI. Also, explore how its extended features can help admins overcome the challenges of using change sets.

What is DevOps Center?

DevOps Center is a new release management tool in the Salesforce UI. It is a significant upgrade from change sets because it is designed to transfer some DevOps workflows from programmatic developers to admin teams and declarative developers. The Salesforce DevOps Center aims to democratize DevOps, encourage cross-team collaboration in the release process, and ensure a greater return on investment.

Functionalities Supported in Salesforce DevOps Center

1. Single UI for Click-Based Releases

The UI-driven interface allows Salesforce users to manage DevOps irrespective of their experience. It enables developers and administrators to work collaboratively on their release pipelines. Team members are also able to control releases, unlike change sets. Migrating to the DevOps Center won’t require change set users to recreate their package from scratch while moving between orgs.

2. Source-Driven Development

The DevOps Center enables teams to track changes by following a source-driven process. The Git-based workflow allows Salesforce teams to take advantage of version control and view the complete history of code changes made across the team.

Salesforce DevOps Center Terminology

Take a look at the terminologies specific to a DevOps Center:

1. Releases

Any changes are grouped into a ‘release’ and a release can be divided into one or more user stories.

2. User Stories

User stories are related to one or more work items. They are defined during the business analysis phase in collaboration with the end users.

3. Work Items

This includes the list of metadata items being changed. It needs to be created once and the item is pushed through pipeline stages from dev and sandbox orgs to production.

4. Pipelines and Stages

This is the order of orgs (stages) that the work item is pushed through to production.

5. Bundled Stages

One or more stages can be marked ‘bundled’ in the pipeline. At this point, all work items in that stage can be promoted simultaneously to the next stage.

6. Source Control

Currently, GitHub is the only source control system supported. The DevOps Center manages all GitHub branches and also handles the movement of metadata between branches and Salesforce orgs.

Why Should Admins Migrate to the Salesforce DevOps Center?

The DevOps Center brings together the low-code development approach of the Admin with the Developer’s pro-code approach. Since it allows all admins, developers, QA, and release managers to work on a single set of configurations and code, it tends to improve DevOps practices.

However, there are some limitations of the DevOps Center that should be considered before the migration is done, such as –

1. The center follows an org-based development rather than a packaged-based one.
2. There’s no Jira integration to keep Jira user stories in sync with DevOps work items.
3. It is difficult to assess whether a metadata item is in different work items in the release in the same pipelines or in different releases and pipelines.

How Do Partner Extensions Help Overcome Such Limitations?

The Elements extension package provides solutions to overcome the DevOps Center limitations. The extension helps you:

1. Manage releases with user stories and provides links to risk scoring, notes, documentation, images, process maps, Jira tickets, URL links, and ERD.
2. Integrate elements with Jira and manage work items linked to user stories from Elements or Jira.
3. Manage metadata dictionaries synced with orgs and sync Jira user stories, Element user stories, and DevOps work items.
4. Resolve metadata conflicts across releases, work items, and user stories.

Key Takeaway

The DevOps Center is available in public beta and General Availability (GA) since December 9th, 2022 for every org. Ensure that you understand the DevOps Center principles and make the most of this migration to streamline your DevOps processes.

The migration enables:
a. The IT teams track the customization of sales processes.
b. Admins to build automated customer support flows.
c. Developers to make out-of-the-box customizations using their preferred tools.
d. Release Managers for health businesses to deliver quicker and better patient experiences.
e. CIOs to quickly build apps and unlock customer data to deliver real-time insights.

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