Too Many Cooks: 7 Ways to Avoid Costly DevOps Mistakes
Large development teams expand the capacity of your DevOps team. Tools like Salesforce version control are critical to avoid costly errors that impact data security and productivity.
Why It Matters: Coding errors impact the structural stability of your applications, updates, and Salesforce environment. Eliminating simple errors has wide-ranging, positive impacts on your DevOps pipeline.
- Bugs become 150 times more expensive when found in production compared to when they’re found and fixed in the early development stage.
- Developers spend around 20% of their time fixing errors, which is a massive drain on ROI.
Here are seven ways large Salesforce DevOps teams can avoid costly mistakes:
- Invest in Ongoing Training
- Automate Where Possible
- Leverage Release Management Tools
- Emphasize a Continuous Focus on Security
- Utilize a Zero-Trust Strategy
- Encourage Collaboration and Feedback
- Review and Improve Processes
1. Invest in Ongoing Training
Your developers likely learned their craft from different sources, which means there will be variances in the way they approach a particular update.
Offering continuous training keeps your team members engaged, ensures adherence to internal coding standards, and keeps work consistent among team members.
Having standardized coding practices across your multi-developer team reduces conflicts that could impact eventual functionality of your update.
2. Automate Where Possible
Manual processes are prone to errors. And when these manual processes are highly repetitive and time-consuming, the chances for a costly error skyrocket.
Automating the integration of code changes, code tests, and other repetitive processes will reduce errors associated with fatigue and consistency failures.
Static code analysis, for instance, is a critical DevOps tool that empowers development teams of all sizes to produce clean code, every time.
3. Leverage Release Management Tools
The infrastructure of your development environment can be greatly influenced by the tools you provide your team members.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools and Salesforce version control tools give large development teams the automated support and rollback capabilities they need to confidently push through coding updates.
Reducing human error and speeding up delivery can both be accomplished with proper tooling and adequate training.
4. Emphasize a Continuous Focus on Security
Every stage of the application life cycle—from planning all the way through deployment—needs to keep data security top of mind.
Putting data security at the forefront of decisions reduces the chances that a vulnerability will slip between the cracks and make it into a live environment.
This is what’s known as a DevSecOps approach to Salesforce development.
5. Utilize a Zero-Trust Strategy
Overly permissive access leads to unintentional data exposure. Permissions to access system data need to be managed on a baseline of team members only getting access if they need it for their duties.
A ‘Zero-Trust’ Strategy cuts off internal threats to data before they ever have a chance to negatively impact your system.
This approach reduces the risk of breaches and enhances the overall resilience of your systems.
6. Encourage Collaboration and Feedback
Your team members are your greatest resource. And if they have an idea that could improve your DevOps approach, they need to be comfortable enough to voice the concept.
Encourage cross-functional teams to work together, breaking down silos between development, operations, and other departments.
Collaboration tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Jira can be used to facilitate communication and transparency.
7. Review and Improve Processes
Your approach to Salesforce DevOps should always be evolving. A static approach won’t be able to withstand evolving attacks and will be incompatible with updated tools and processes.
Collect feedback from the team, conduct post-mortems after incidents, and use metrics to identify areas for improvement.
Continuously evaluate your DevOps practices and processes. Iterative improvements ensure the DevOps process evolves and adapts to new challenges.
Next Step…
Optimizing your Salesforce DevOps pipeline positions you to scale your operations and expand your release strategy. Streamlining your development processes takes time and attention, but the benefits pay off in the long run.
Check out our ebook, Avoid Unnecessary Growing Pains: Safely Scaling Salesforce DevOps, to learn what you can do to expand and streamline DevOps processes.
FAQs
What are the main challenges of working in a multi-developer team?
Large development teams drastically increase your capacity for introducing new releases. However, juggling many people creates difficulties with communication, coordination, and consistency. Team members are likely to have differences in their style and technique when it comes to writing code. This can result in inconsistencies that impact functionality, stability, and even security. Having multiple developers working on a single update can lead to code conflicts, causing code integration issues and potential project delays. These problems create more work for project managers who need to pay attention to the distribution of the workload and manage dependencies between tasks.
Which DevOps tools can be used to reduce the impact of developer errors?
As with any aspect of data security, multiple layers of protection are best when targeting developer errors. Think of it in a before, during, and after mindset. Before your developer writes the code, give them the training they need and access to internal best practices. During the code-writing stage, provide a static code analysis tool that checks their code for errors in real time. This empowers them to clean their code as they write it. And finally, utilizing a version control system ensures that any code overwrites or incompatible code can be easily reverted, fixed, and re-released to the main repository.
What are the key metrics to track for identifying potential issues in DevOps processes?
It’s not always easy to find issues in your DevOps processes. It can take a bit of detective work to analyze certain metrics to find potential areas of concern. These metrics include:
- Deployment Frequency measures how often new code is released, indicating the efficiency of your DevOps pipeline.
- Lead Time for Changes tracks the time from code commit to deployment, highlighting potential bottlenecks.
- Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) assessesthe time taken to recover from failures, reflecting the system’s resilience.
- Change Failure Rate, orthe percentage of deployments causing issues, helps identify areas needing improvement.
Monitoring these metrics provides insights into process efficiency, reliability, and areas for optimization, ensuring a smoother DevOps workflow.
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