Tips and tricks to help you improve your team's salesforce deployments.
Everyone wants an end product they love, but customizing Salesforce for your team can be frustrating. We all want to wave a wand over the platform and have it work exactly how we want it to! Right? That sure does sound magical. Great news. With the help of a great developer, it IS possible! Unfortunately, it doesn’t often roll out like a magic wand. These developments are often rolled out in phases. These phases of development are part of a process called salesforce deployments.
The processes can often be held up when rolling out or “deploying” new code. Historically, deploying new code has required a lot of labor and manual steps. With such a time-intensive process, there is a lot of space for human error. Even simple errors can take hours to fix. So, let’s talk about how to leverage deployment software to improve salesforce deployments for your organization.
This post covers best practices and tools to help you deploy new code faster! Let’s go! 🚀
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1. Common Challenges in Salesforce Deployment After your development team is done coding, they need to deploy these new changes to your organization’s system. While everyone hopes this process goes smoothly, there can be some hiccups.
The most common hiccups in this process are:
Inconsistent environments - Different code from the sandbox to staging to live. Things start breaking when you push code from one environment to the next! Metadata dependencies & conflicts - Profiles, settings, and filters might stop working due to overwriting or changing code you didn’t know existed while adding new features. Manual processes - Manual processes are often slow-moving and come with user errors. While you can mitigate errors by involving multiple checks and approvals with new code, it’s not an efficient way to spend your team’s time. Lack of version control - If something breaks, how do you know what caused it?! It could have been 1 of the hundreds of spaces, commas, etc. Trying to manage deployments without version control and history can be really frustrating for the developers involved. While these issues are common, they can be avoided when finding the proper software to complement your team.
2. Best Practices for Smoother Salesforce Deployments If we had to put together a roadmap for a smooth deployment, here are a few of the tools/protocols we suggest to help it go smoothly!
A. Use Source Control (Git) for Versioning Git is a fantastic resource for version control because it allows you to track changes proactively. The benefit of using something like Git to track your changes is that debugging and rollbacks become a lot easier to work with when you have records of what was changed and where.
Want to explore tips and tricks to make the debugging process easier on your team? Check out this article.
B. Automate Deployments with CI/CD Leveraging automation to test code before you deploy it can help the whole process go smoother. Using a continuous integration (CI) tool to see the changes you’re making in real time can help prevent a lot of backward problem-solving if things aren’t going well.
A great way to leverage a tool like this is by setting up some automation rules to validate changes before they make it to the live version. If something doesn’t work, this process will help you identify that sooner rather than later. Ideally, tools like this will help you find those errors in the sandbox or staging environment.
C. Test Deployments in Staging First Before taking code live, add in a staged test. Let’s see if this works before we break the whole system. We recommend having a dedicated staging environment and maintaining it often with the same updates as your production environment. This way, any code you test there will react the same way it would if you push it to production.
This is a great place to leverage some automation tools and manual tests to ensure that the code will function well no matter what the end user does to it. Click once? Sure! Click 75 times because you’re impatient; let’s hope it still works! 😉
D. Manage Dependencies Properly Dependencies can make or break a deployment (and your data!). So, before you jump in, set up dependency tracking to ensure that nothing will go missing when you roll out a new feature.
Errors with dependencies are common with custom fields, flow operations, record types, profiles and permissions, and namespace issues. Using Git to manage your dependency tracking and thoroughly testing code before deploying it can help limit issues here.
E. Implement Rollback Strategies When a deployment goes wrong… what do you do? PANIC! No, that’s not helpful. Before launching a deployment, know how to roll back to an older code version or promptly remedy the situation.
Double-checking your Git tracking for version histories and control can effectively manage and deploy new code.
3. Tools That Make Salesforce Deployments Easier Now that you know what steps will help your team deploy code smoothly, let’s talk about a few solutions that integrate with your workflow to manage and prevent some of the common deployment hiccups.
A. Git-Based Deployment Solutions There are great tools to help you deploy faster in Salesforce, but we’re partial to Blue Canvas.
Not only do they offer version control and CI/CD, but they also offer one-click rollbacks, making it easy for the whole team to collaborate. We are Git-based and we work directly in your normal workflow, removing the need for change sets and manual tracking.
Not sure about Blue Canvas? No worries! Learn more about our metadata deployer .
B. Salesforce DX This is Salesforce’s native deployment solution! It’s also Git-based, making version tracking a breeze, and they work within what they call “scratch orgs” to run automated testing and deployment before you deploy for real.
Scratch Orgs are temporary environments that optimize your testing and functionality before you go live. Many people like this ability to spin up and discard new environments to test in because it limits the amount of upkeep they must maintain on their true sandboxes.
C. CI/CD Tools (Blue Canvas, Copado, Gearset, Jenkins) One of the best ways to improve Salesforce Deployment is to invest in continuous integration / continuous deployment software to help your team get ahead of potential downfalls.
We compared many of the best Salesforce Deployers here, so check out the complete list here .
4. Step-by-Step Guide to a Smooth Deployment Process Commit changes to source control (Git).Run automated tests to catch errors early.Deploy to a staging environment and validate.Perform user acceptance testing (UAT) with key stakeholders.Deploy to production using a CI/CD tool (e.g., Blue Canvas).Monitor for issues and roll back if needed .Conclusion Rolling out new deployments is a normal part of optimizing your Salesforce, but it can get messy fast! Using best practices and investing in great tools will allow your team to deploy code without a headache.
Interested in seeing what Blue Canvas can do for you and your team? Book your demo here .
