5 Steps to Reaching Salesforce DevOps Maturity

Do you want to increase your team’s agility and progress towards DevOps maturity? Sticking with traditional development models will result in delays, missed deadlines, and costly mistakes. The key to success is fully embracing a DevOps direction – but where do you start?

In this article, we’ll uncover five practical steps that Salesforce developers and architects can take to reach the ultimate goal: Salesforce DevOps maturity.

What is DevOps Maturity? And Why Should You Measure It? 

DevOps maturity refers to how effectively DevOps practices are adopted and utilized within an organization. It represents the organization’s ability to implement and leverage DevOps principles, processes, and tools to achieve continuous delivery, improve collaboration, and drive business outcomes.

Measuring DevOps maturity enables delivery teams to benchmark progress, collaborate, and identify areas of improvement within the delivery workflow. No matter where you start on the scale, there is always room for improvement. 

To effectively measure DevOps maturity, it is crucial to assess the holistic characteristics of its process across all stages of the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC): plan, build, test, deliver, and monitor. Maturity cannot exist in isolation; a team might excel in the test phase but demonstrate lower maturity in the other stages, highlighting the need for tailored level-up recommendations in each phase.

Because of this, DevOps teams are assigned a maturity level for each phase in the SDLC, which guides recommendations for growth. These levels will be cumulated and averaged to assign an overall level to serve as a high-level benchmark.

The Five Maturity Levels

1. Base:  At the base level, teams rely on visibility and situational awareness to reduce risk.
2. Intermediate: Teams at the intermediate level have integrated testing and security seamlessly into their pipeline, ensuring end-to-end quality.
3. Pro: Once a team reaches the pro level, they leverage automation to optimize their DevOps process, enabling innovation with speed and quality.
4. Advanced: At the advanced level of Salesforce DevOps maturity, people, processes, and tech combine to maximize innovation and business value. 
5. Elite: Teams that achieve the elite level have created synergies resulting in resilience and adaptability, allowing them to scale, adapt, and disrupt efficiently.

Gauge your team’s performance with Copado’s free DevOps maturity assessment (more on this later).

End-to-End Maturity

Now that the framework for measuring maturity has been defined, let’s take a look at what maturity looks like across the five stages of the SDLC.

Plan

To establish a successful delivery practice, effective planning is crucial. This stage involves defining and consolidating processes, optimizing resources, and ensuring end-to-end visibility and collaboration. Elite teams follow a centralized process, delineate roles and responsibilities, and embrace agile methodologies for ongoing success.

Tips to level up:

• Consolidate and centralize tooling.
• Adopt agile planning best practices.
• Define team roles and responsibilities.

Build

In order to optimize the build stage, the main maturity practices involve continuous integration with version control, pipeline structure, and leveraging user stories as the central source of truth for related metadata changes alongside every other action that occurs relating to that feature.

Tips to level up:

• Integrate with version control and automate all branching activities.
• Provision individual sandboxes for each developer to use.
• Track metadata changes against related user stories.

Test

Testing is crucial to development, and this is a mindset that everyone should embrace. The global pace of innovation demands end-to-end quality built directly into your DevOps pipeline. High performing delivery teams embed and automate quality throughout the entire delivery pipeline. 

Tips to level up:

• Design and implement testing strategy.
• Adopt a “shift left” mentality (performing testing earlier in the development lifecycle).
• Automate and enforce test runs and quality gates.

Deliver

The deliver stage involves getting software solutions into the hands of end-users. During this stage, the primary objective is to safely and efficiently bring high quality software to end-users, prioritizing effectiveness and user satisfaction.

Tips to level up:

• Achieve continuous delivery by automating deployments.
• Implement a rollback strategy.
• Automate complex data merges and conflict flagging.

Monitor

Once features have been delivered and are in the hands of end-users, the monitor stage kicks in. This stage is ever-present through the SDLC and includes both application performance monitoring and also the monitoring of the DevOps process as a whole.

Tips to level up:

• Visualize your DevOps Pipeline with value stream mapping. 
• Build automated regression suites that run on a schedule.
• Define and track DevOps KPIs and performance metrics.

The Road to Maturity

Salesforce DevOps mastery is the perfect foundation for teams to quickly build, test, deploy, and maintain value-adding applications across the enterprise. By leveling up your maturity in each stage of the SDLC, organizations can drive continuous improvement and achieve unprecedented levels of success. 

Where Do I Start?

The first step on the path to DevOps maturity is to benchmark your current state of maturity and then define your team’s maturity goals. 

Copado’s Maturity Assessment can help you discover your team’s DevOps strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. This free, 10-minute quiz will show you learn how to accelerate your workflows, streamline your deployments and enhance collaboration. 

After identifying the steps needed to level up, create a roadmap outlining how and when these steps will be taken. Share this roadmap with the broader team to prepare them for the upcoming changes and make sure they understand the benefits.

Final Thoughts

Once defined and distributed, your maturity roadmap should be rolled out in phases. This enables assessment and analysis of improvements before progressing further. Reaching and maintaining maturity goals is an ongoing process, requiring continuous evaluation and improvement even after initial milestones are reached. 

Remember, DevOps is a journey, not a destination. As you build and refine your Salesforce development process, Copado can help you avoid common pitfalls and make the right moves every step of the way. After all, every traveler needs a companion.