Pipelines: A Fresh Approach to Comprehensive Salesforce Release Pipeline Management

Hi, recently we have introduced Gearset's new – ‘Pipelines’ feature in our DevOps process!

From last couple of months, we were working for this feature to introduce in our Salesforce program, which is successfully being used by our teams now at intellectAI .

Gearset Pipeline helps to visualize and control our release process from
start to finish; an end-to-end management of our entire release pipeline -
all in one place.        

In a nutshell, the Pipelines interface provides our entire team a complete visibility and control over the workflow. It provides an overview of the current state of all the environments (all changes that are happening) in our release pipeline, how much work there is waiting to be pushed, and provides us with the tooling to get these changes promoted through our environments quickly and successfully. It functions as the command centre and source of truth for our Salesforce release process.

Here are some of our key challenges where we've seen improvement through the use of Pipelines:

Challenge 1: Diversity of teamwork approaches

In our context, some of our teams operate in isolation, driven in part by variations in technical expertise, especially between administrators and developers.

Due to the necessity for custom code, our teams often consist of a blend of both low-code and pro-code professionals. This diversity occasionally results in internal divisions within the team, which, in turn, can lead to challenges such as miscommunication and conflicting strategies in release management.

Pipelines integrates seamlessly with our Git hosting provider (Bitbucket) and Jira, and any changes to pull requests and tickets are reflected in the Pipelines UI.

Challenge 2: Absence of clear visibility

We encounter situations in which teams occasionally perform deployments outside the boundaries of their established release pipelines, or in some cases, do not have a release pipeline in place at all.

With Pipelines, our entire release process is mapped out and it’s easy to understand the state of our environments at a glance.

Challenge 3: Individual Story promotion

Promoting individual stories is always on demand, and with our current set-up it’s a cumbersome task which we can’t accomplish frequently (as required).

With the help of Feature Branching model and Pipelines we can push individual stories (in nearly automated way) from one to environment to another, which will expediate our theory of ‘early test and fix’.

Challenge 4: Distinctive characteristics of the Salesforce platform

Salesforce presents various unique challenges, including intricate metadata dependencies, idiosyncrasies in its API, and challenges in tracking changes accurately. These intricacies can result in deployment failures, data overwrites, and merge conflicts.

These aspects of Salesforce development underscore the necessity for specialized tools that assist our team in deploying changes with all the necessary dependencies, automatically addressing deployment errors, and providing insights into how different team members' changes intersect with the same components.

Pipelines allows us to navigate through these peculiarities with ease, by helping resolve merge conflicts and giving us total visibility of who changed what, when.

What makes Pipelines special for us?

Pipelines is a huge help for teams (like us) who are expert with CI and Git-to-org deployments. We have already implemented this kind of automation into our release cycle, with ‘Feature Branching Model’ and currently working to tighten loops.

Now our combination of ‘Feature Branch + Pipeline + CI jobs’, has provided us more control on our DevOps processes across 3 core areas:

Deployments | Automation | Monitoring

These are the main features of Pipelines we can take advantage of (source: Gearset Pipelines):

• Visualization:?Get an overview of your entire release pipeline, with quick visibility of where your changes are in your release process, what needs to happen to move them forwards, and how much work we have in flight. In addition to the CI jobs and environments, we can see all the orgs and Git branches in our release pipeline, including developer sandboxes. We can set up a new feature branch, compare and deploy to it and open a PR to the pipeline - all within the Pipelines UI.
• In-app merging:?Merge branches painlessly with the purpose-built semantic merge algorithm that resolves conflicts. This algorithm is specifically designed to make metadata merge conflicts much less likely, plus we can run an additional validation to ensure the deployment is successful. Stories can be promoted individually or in a group and are then promoted to the next stage in the pipeline.
• Propagating changes:?Automatically make merged changes available for promotion to other environments in the release pipeline. Forward-propagate changes downstream through to release, and back-propagate changes into upstream environments that don’t currently contain them.
• Tight source control integration:?We can see the same changes and status, allowing our entire team to work together seamlessly.
• JIRA integration:?Automatically update associated JIRA tickets when a work item gets into each successive environment in our pipeline.

Incorporating Gearset Pipelines into our DevOps arsenal has not only addressed our challenges but has also propelled our team towards a more efficient and synchronized development and release process. It is a game-changer that has redefined our approach to Salesforce development, making us more agile, collaborative, and capable of delivering high-quality results.

If you have any questions or need further information about our implementation, please don't hesitate to reach out me, or our DevOps Architect Dileep Nuthalapati . All the best for your implementation!