What’s Missing from Your Salesforce DevOps Process?

The majority of Salesforce teams have adopted core tools and processes for DevOps, and now momentum is gathering across the ecosystem to incorporate even more. But there’s still some uncertainty about what DevOps really is and how to keep moving forward. If Salesforce teams are going to keep up with business demand, these questions need answering quickly.

In this article, we’ll look at what’s involved in a complete DevOps lifecycle, the impact of uneven lifecycle adoption on DevOps outcomes, and how to maximize your team’s success this year with the ungated State of Salesforce DevOps Report 2025.

What Is the DevOps Lifecycle?

DevOps processes have swept across the ecosystem the vast majority of teams adopting version control (87%) and CI/CD (80%). These tools and processes bring massive improvements to the release process – the part of the Salesforce DevOps lifecycle that’s most impactful to solve first. Now, teams are looking to broaden their DevOps adoption for Salesforce for further improvements in quality and efficiency.

DevOps is often represented as an infinity loop to show the ongoing improvement and iteration that happens in a complete process: the DevOps lifecycle. The full DevOps lifecycle captures not just how code is built and shipped but how it’s reviewed, maintained, and improved over time. There are six key stages in the lifecycle:

1. Plan: Collaboratively define the goals and timelines of a story or ticket so that everyone’s on the same page about what’s being built and how.
2. Build: Build the requested feature, fix, or enhancement using Apex and/or no-code options.
3. Validate: Run automated tests and analysis to make sure that the development is functional, secure, and fulfills user requirements.
4. Release: Get a tested and approved package promoted to production quickly and successfully.
5. Operate: Make sure production is running smoothly and can be restored quickly in the event of downtime or disruption. While Salesforce handles infrastructure, you’re responsible for your data and metadata.
6. Observe: Proactively improve the design and performance of features in production using insights from error monitoring tools.

These stages of the DevOps lifecycle build on each other and work together to create a cohesive end-to-end Salesforce process. By focusing on the efficiency of the whole lifecycle, teams will ‘shift left’ to catch issues early, when they’re easier to correct, ship more robust changes quickly and securely, and proactively maintain and improve the codebase over time – preempting and resolving issues before users report them.

As well as those six stages, some principles and practices need to be applied throughout the lifecycle to ensure DevOps success:

• Security: Discovering security issues in production is the worst-case scenario. Catching late in a release is also very costly and disruptive. Prioritizing security at every stage of the lifecycle is the best way to safeguard your production org by helping you catch and resolve issues as early as possible.
• Testing: The later you leave testing, the more likely you are to have wasted key development time. Testing throughout the lifecycle means problems are caught early and fixed quickly, and you’re not scrambling to resolve issues on release day.
• Collaboration: DevOps is about building a collaborative culture as much as it is about the tools and processes involved. Work shouldn’t be siloed between teams and handed over without discussion. Without conscious and smooth collaboration as work passes through every stage of the lifecycle, feedback loops become longer, and DevOps can crumble.
• Automation: Repetitive steps should be automated to minimize the likelihood of human error and free up time to focus on the most impactful work.

Having any one of these missing from your DevOps lifecycle will cause your process to fail.

The Impact of an Uneven DevOps Lifecycle

Uneven adoption across the DevOps lifecycle means teams are holding themselves back from getting the full benefit of a DevOps process. For example, mastering the code, building, and deploying elements of the lifecycle means you can rapidly ship changes. But if you’re not testing thoroughly, you could end up shipping more bugs than fixes. And if you don’t have a proper process for the observe stage, then you’re likely relying on issue reporting from end users which slows down the improvement process.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be room for improvement and growth once all areas of the lifecycle are up and running, but getting all areas of the lifecycle implemented would put you ahead of most teams in the ecosystem and significantly improve your DevOps outcomes.

Here’s just a sneak peek at the impact of implementing more areas of the DevOps lifecycle:

• Observe: Teams without observability tools are 50% more likely to rely on end users to discover issues than teams with some form of observability measures in place.
• Operate: Teams without backup tools are 66% less likely to be able to restore following a data incident within hours – instead, these teams are most likely to report restore times of days or even weeks.
• Validate: Teams without static code analysis are three times more likely to report shipping bugs to production in more than a quarter of their releases.

Benchmark Your Team With the Latest Industry Data

The State of Salesforce DevOps Report is the largest and longest-running survey of its kind, uncovering DevOps trends and priorities, and capturing adoption statistics year-on-year.

Dive into the ungated State of Salesforce DevOps Report 2025 to find out how your team’s DevOps adoption compares to the wider ecosystem, which teams are seeing the best DevOps outcomes and why, and what to prioritize in 2025 to reach your DevOps goals.