Salesforce is expanding its DevOps Testing pilot and inviting people to take part in it – as long as a few conditions are met.
These include having existing, active users of DevOps Center; regularly deploying both declarative and programmatic changes; and having experience with Salesforce solutions testing tools like Apex Unit Tests.
What Is the DevOps Testing Pilot?
John Belo, Director of Product Management at Salesforce, posted on the Trailhead forums in September about the introduction of the DevOps Testing pilot.
He said the new product would let users make sure all changes flowing through their DevOps pipelines were thoroughly tested across all layers, including code analysis and end-to-end testing.
The new feature would also let users define Quality Gates to block low-quality changes from being promoted, meaning fewer “expensive” problems needing to be fixed in Production.
John said that those using the DevOps Center would be able to join their pilot program, starting in a couple of months.
On December 13, he wrote on LinkedIn that the DevOps Testing pilot was expanding, and the company was now open to more nominations for testing it out.
DevOps Testing is built on top of DevOps Center. It gives users a unified view of tests and test results from a range of testing tools – from Salesforce and partners.
You can also use it to automatically run tests upon key DevOps Center events and – as teased in the September post – block low-quality and problematic changes with quality gates.
“A Hell of a Leap”
Paul Battisson, Salesforce veteran and host of the CloudBites podcast, told Salesforce Ben that the DevOps Testing Center would be helpful when released if it does what Salesforce are claiming it will do.
He said: “It’s good to see the pilot getting expanded to a broader range of customers and use cases. One of the conundrums/problems for Salesforce/Salesforce customers in this space is accessibility to the tools and size.
“DevOps processes and structure is always couched in very technical language (for obvious reasons) and out of the box from Salesforce trying to go from change sets (which are the default deployment method and suck) to a fully featured setup using a pipeline and version control and everything is a hell of leap. And that’s before deciding which vendor you should use because there are a few out there as well as DevOps Center.
“Stuff like this from Salesforce is good. If it does what it says on the tin it will be another good option for lowering the barrier to entry for organisations wanting to start DevOps and improving their testing quality and consistency in particular.
“The fact it is free as well is a good thing as it means that for those just starting they can implement it without any additional concerns of cost and contract.”
Developer Relations Advisor Peter Chittum told Salesforce Ben it was positive that the company was investing in developer tools, but the bottom line is they need to deliver properly.
Final Thoughts
Like Paul says, if the DevOps Testing Center is all it’s cracked up to be when Salesforce releases it properly, it will be another solid option in the toolbox.
Those who want to participate in the pilot are invited to fill in this online form.