Since the first U.S. DevOps conference was held in 2010 at the Mecca of Technology, Mountain View, California, enterprises have been rising to the challenge of tearing down the invisible wall between development and operations teams. DevOps adoption is leading to faster development and deployment of technical solutions.
The philosophy of DevOps is a lifecycle investment, so it comes as no surprise that enterprises using Salesforce, the global behemoth in customer lifecycle management, are accelerating the adoption of DevOps. Gearset surveyed Salesforce professionals working in industries worldwide, from startups to enterprises, regarding Salesforce DevOps adoption. Here are the key takeaways from the survey your business should know.
The Current Salesforce DevOps Adoption Rate
The overall findings of Gearset’s survey showed the acceleration of DevOps adoption. In fact, the majority of respondents had already adopted the following:
- Source control tools, adopted by nearly 70 percent of respondents
- Unit testing tools, used by over 75 percent of respondents
- Change monitoring tools, leveraged by almost 59 percent of respondents
- Metadata and backups, implemented by nearly 65 percent of respondents
If your business has not already implemented these critical DevOps tools, you are missing vital opportunities to ensure a more efficient roll-out of quality releases of your Salesforce deployments.
Projected for Significant Increase in Adoption
Gearset’s survey identified that many companies are planning to adopt more DevOps processes over the next year. The tools with the most significant projected increase in adoption include:
- CI/CD tools will see a 32 percent increase in adoption over the next 12 months.
- Static code analysis will be implemented this year by nearly 28 percent of respondents.
- Sandbox seeding with data will be adopted over the next year by more than 32 percent of respondents.
DevOps Driving Increased Productivity
Isolating your development and operations teams can result in slower delivery and less efficient roll-out. Opportunities for automation across company departments can also be lost because developers are simply unaware of them.
The Gearset survey offers the numbers that validate the fact that DevOps allows for improved quality of releases, increased productivity and better collaboration across departments. Among all respondents:
- 8 percent saw improved quality of releases.
- 6 percent of teams decreased deployment to under one hour (using third-party DevOps solutions).
- 10 percent of teams experienced better collaboration.
- 6 percent release multiple times per week.
- 8 percent release weekly or biweekly.
DevOps Adoption Obstacles to Overcome
While there are ample benefits to DevOps adoption, there are also obstacles to overcome when companies transition to the model. The top three challenges among survey respondents are:
- Ramp-up time was the top challenge for 21.8 percent of respondents.
- Adopting source control, 18.8 percent of respondents
- Steep learning curve, 17 percent of respondents.
DevOps Adoption Accelerates the Last Mile of Continued Delivery
When teams work in silos, the result can be a solution that is slower to market and a deployment that often is not quite ready to address all the real-world nuances that could be thrown at it. A poor release can be complicated to fix, and the time required to work through bugs is money down the drain, not to mention the breakdown of morale across company departments that can occur.
DevOps adoption will provide the best way to accelerate the last mile of continuous delivery for releases that work the first time, every time.
