This post covers tips and tricks to help you and your team streamline deployments in your Salesforce development.
So many teams find themselves struggling to maintain smooth and error-free Salesforce Deployments.
Many find them stressful, time-consuming, and often filled with errors that slow down the process and can involve a lot of manual effort to implement change sets.
While it’s common for so many to struggle with seamless deployments, we believe that with the right tools, you can kiss goodbye to deployment failures, metadata conflicts, and environment inconsistencies!
Let’s get into a few Salesforce deployment best practices to help your team leverage automation and CI/CD tools to make deployments a breeze!
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1. The Challenges of Manual Salesforce Deployments When it comes to implementing new deployments, many teams are still relying on change sets or metadata migrations, talk about old school!
While these methods have been the industry standard for years, many teams are moving away from them and embracing new technologies to avoid things like:
Slow & Repetitive Processes – Change sets require customization for each use. One must manually select and match components, making them useful for one deployment only. Every time something needs to be updated or corrected, you’ll be back at the change sets again!
Deployment Failures – Despite our best efforts, we often miss some crucial information like dependencies, profile mismatches, and API version differences; these errors can hold up deployments and in some cases, lead to lost data.
Environment Drift – When manually processing deployments, theres risk of forgetting to update sandboxes and other environments, leading to more future issues when systems are out of sync.
Lack of Visibility – Running manual deployments often means you’re losing out on tracking and version control data to know what changed, when, and by who.
High Risk of Overwrites – While it’s likely not the intended outcome, developers often end up overwriting each other’s code, leading to a long process of correcting to create a smooth deployment.
While we’re all acquainted with one (or many) of these outcomes, there are a few things you can do to make deployments easier. Let’s get into our favorite technology enhancements to optimize your salesforce deployment processes.
2. Best Practices to Simplify Salesforce Releases Your team has a few options to help them seamlessly deploy new features to your workplace. Let’s explore a few of the ones we recommend.
A. Use Source Control (Git) for Version Tracking While it is possible to track changes in Salesforce, we don’t recommend that. Instead, we suggest using a tool that has Git-based version control. Having something automatically track changes ensures that nothing goes unnoticed.
We recommend automatic tracking because it allows:
A living history of changes needs to be recorded. Making rollbacks (if/when) they are required, a breeze.
Developers to avoid overwriting existing code by tracking who changed what and what updates were made.
Teams can improve collaboration by using things like branches and pull requests vs. siloing projects into 1 or 2 developers.
B. Automate Deployments with CI/CD Find a tool that will allow you to automate deployments with features like Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. This will simplify your releases with immediate data regarding what’s working vs. what isn’t.
Blue Canvas is a CI/CD tool, and like other CI/CD tools, we ensure you can:
Run automated tests before deploying (in all environments!)
Detecting missing dependencies before failures occur (no more “oh wait!” moments.)
Easily (think one-click) move deployments across environments.
C. Keep Environments in Sync If you’re regularly making updates to your workplace, it’s important to keep all areas of your development phases in sync.
How do you do that? Well, instead of manually tracking changes and moving code, using a tool that integrates with your development and deployment process makes it a breeze.
We recommend finding a tool (like Blue Canvas!) that allows you to:
Use sandbox seeding to replicate and easily update production data for testing.
Regularly refresh and deploy changes to keep every environment aligned.
D. Implement Deployment Pipelines One of the best ways to keep deployments smooth and simple is to deploy them in phases to multiple test environments.
We suggest a pipeline structured something similar to this:
1️⃣ Development Sandbox – Build and test features for your workplace.
2️⃣ Integration Sandbox – Merge and validate with current work and other projects.
3️⃣ UAT (User Acceptance Testing) Sandbox – Final approval from stakeholders along with final testing.
4️⃣ Production – Deploy only when everything is verified, ensuring a seamless deployment.
E. Monitor and Log Changes An easy to maintain control over your deployments is to track and document changes happening to your code.
We suggest:
Using tools that can audit your logs to track deployments.
Setting up alerts for failed deployments to quickly troubleshoot issues.
There are a handful of options out there, but here’s what works great for most people:
🔹 Blue Canvas – Automates Git-based version control and CI/CD for Salesforce. Learn more about what we do here!
🔹 Salesforce DevOps Center – Salesforce’s native tool for managing releases. This is Salesforce’s native development center; many teams enjoy it because it keeps the work centralized on one platform.
🔹 Gearset/Copado – Third-party DevOps platforms for deployment automation. These tools work great (though they can be pricey depending on the size of your team!) and can be a great fit for teams looking to ship deployments with less hassle.
4. How Blue Canvas Simplifies Salesforce Deployments Making your deployments easier is what we’re focused on here at Blue Canvas.
Some of the features that stick out to our users are:
Automated Deployments – No more manual change sets. The hardest part just disappeared!
Error Prevention – Detects dependencies before deployment. No more “oh no!” moments.
Version Control Integration – Tracks all changes with Git - AUTOMATICALLY!
One-Click Rollbacks – Quickly revert to a previous version if needed. It’s that easy.
Conclusion We’re hopeful that with the help of these best practices and a great CI/CD tool, your deployments will go smoothly! Remember, the right tools make it easy to eliminate stress, reduce failures, and deliver updates faster.
👉 Want to simplify Salesforce releases? Try Blue Canvas today ! 🚀
