No team can create their best work if the workflow is broken. In this post, we’ll cover some tips and tricks to help improve collaboration among Salesforce Development Teams. These teams are often made up of highly technical developers and less code based creators called Admins. Due to the nature of the team, they usually approach problem-solving from different angles; this can impact team morale and efficiency. So let’s talk about how Blue Canvas (or another Salesforce Deployment Tool) could help your team work better.
Introduction When it comes to getting your team on the same page, without the help of additional tools, it can be tricky to facilitate a truly collaborative approach. Development is a highly manual process, which can lead to inconsistencies in data, environments, and versions depending on who is working on the code.
Bringing multiple different people into a project can make it hard to maintain consistency and ensure that data isn’t getting lost in the process. This can often lead to frustration within the team, deployment failures, and missing or lost data.
For most teams, the development and deployment process can be improved by investing in your workflow. This can look like implementing best practices with the help of tools that integrate seamlessly into your workflow.
So, how can these tools help improve collaboration for your Salesforce Development team? Let’s get into it. 💪
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1. Common Collaboration Challenges in Salesforce Development
The most common challenges when it comes to Salesforce Development are likely to include:
Conflicts in changes - with multiple developers working in different spaces on the same project, they are likely to be overwriting each other’s work without intending to. When it’s time to merge files, there will, unfortunately, be a lot of editing required to make it work! Lack of visibility - Without tracking changes, it’s hard to know who did what and what’s not working. Manual Deployment Headaches - The process here is reflective of change sets, which can go wrong very quickly. Manually deploying changes leads to errors and delays.Difficulty Managing Multiple Environments - Without the help of automatic testing and maintenance, when you apply new code to different environments (ie, sandboxes, staging, and production), it will likely respond differently.
2. Best Practices for Improving Collaboration
If you’re building out a new workflow for your team, below are a few practical tips to help you improve your collaboration for Salesforce Development.
A. Use Git-Based Version Control We recommend Git, but there are multiple platforms that enable this. Version control is essential for tracking changes, rolling back errors, and managing conflicts. In practice, this looks like seeing who changed a specific class and revert if needed before something goes wrong.
A tool like Blue Canvas allows teams to track their Salesforce metadata and ensure nothing is going missing when they add snazzy new features to their systems.
B. Adopt a Branching Strategy A branching strategy can help you improve your collaboration for Salesforce Development by allowing you to work in specific branches (aka mini sections) instead of editing directly to the organization.
When it’s time to merge, you have the option to use pull requests vs pushing new code to ensure that nothing is going tobe overwritten or lost while you make updates.
C. Automate Deployments with CI/CD We’re all humans, meaning that we all make mistakes! So, when you’re manually pushing deployments, it can slow the process down due to simple and avoidable mistakes.
Integrating tools that provide continuous integration and continuous deployment helps validate code before you take it live preventively. From there, your code is pushed directly into your environment of choice to be thoroughly tested. Once you’re good to go, you can automatically deploy it to the following environment, making sure there’s no room for human error in the process.
D. Implement Automated Testing Before rolling out new code, it’s crucial to automate testing to ensure you’re not going to overwrite or break existing functionality or records when it’s moved to production.
Running unit tests in something like Apex can help prevent long-term mistakes from being made. Automatic testing can also double-check your merge fields, workflows, profile settings, etc. Why take a chance when you can test and be sure?
E. Use a Shared Development Workflow When it comes to getting your team on the same page, we recommend introducing a standard protocol for how you push code, review changes, and deploy phases. A great way to do this is with clear documentation for each level of change. We also recommend leveraging your version control tracking and automated deployment to ensure you’re avoiding errors where possible.
3. Tools That Help Improve Salesforce Team Collaboration When it comes to finding a tool that will work best for your team, we recommend getting clear on the features that mean the most to you. Almost all of these tools will help by offering things like automatic tracking and version history, continuous integration and deployment tools to automate testing in different environments, and even the ability to revert to older versions or histories quickly.
We compared 5 of our favorite salesforce deployers here .
We also recommended exploring Salesforce Ben's resources on helping your team achieve smooth deployments.
But you could consider a few other options:
Salesforce DX – This is Salesforce’s native development platform, and they enable scratch orgs, which are mini staging environments you can remove when you’re done with, so they are always clean and ready to go.
Slack & Jira – Both of these are great communication tools to help your team work seamlessly together in an office or remotely. Their integrations make it easy to keep tabs on what’s working and what isn’t.
4. Step-by-Step Guide to a Collaborative Salesforce Development Process A quick and easy guide to collaborative Salesforce developments and deployments.
Develop in branches; don’t make edits directly to your production! Test (and then test again) in sandboxes. Be sure you validate your changes with the intended outcomes before you merge. Track changes thoroughly, bonus points if you incorporate automatic tracking so there’s no room for manual error. Set up and run automated tests and code reviews so the risk is automatically lower when you push a deployment. Deploy with automatic or continuous integration/deployment software; it removes human errors and is much faster!
Conclusion With the help of integrated tools and well-documented protocols for review and implementation, your Salesforce development teams will be deploying new code left and right.
Want to learn more about if Blue Canvas is the right solution for your team? Explore what we do here.
