Salesforce DevOps: the year in review

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Okeydoke.

So Salesforce DevOps the year in review.

It has been a great year for Salesforce setups, what's happened in the ecosystem.

So what we're gonna do in this session is take you through the results of the state of Salesforce DevOps survey that we ran last year. So every year, gear set runs survey of Salesforce professionals responsible for Salesforce delivery.

And we take the responses from that survey and produce a report which we released in March of this year, where we dissect the respondent's results and see as an industry how we are tackling change management how we are deploying changes and the processes that we are building around effective Salesforce delivery So last year, the survey had over twelve hundred respondents, which is absolutely fantastic. And what that allows us to do is take that really rich data set add our expert analysis as the leading platform for Salesforce DevOps and give you some really valuable insights and some action that you can take as well as being able to benchmark your performance against the rest of the industry. So that's what we're gonna do today.

I'm Jack McCurdy. Ian's already done a bit of an intro about who I am there but if you want to learn a little bit more about me, you'll find me on LinkedIn, you'll find me on Twitter, and you'll find me on all of those, kind of places too. So We can't really talk about Salesforce DevOps with about without talking about Salesforce first. So If we take a look at Salesforce, it is absolutely no surprise to anybody that ninety seven percent of the teams that we surveyed said that their platform usage had evolved.

Over the course of last year when the survey, took place. The highest use of Salesforce cloud ware sales and service. So that's likely unsurprising for many of you too. They'll be the clouds that you will be most familiar with supporting your sales teams and supporting your customer service reps in delivering value for your customers.

What we'll also see here is that businesses are really, really trying to drive digital transformation. They're trying to put more power into their own customer's hands And that has seen a shift to increased adoption of experience cloud, which is really interesting to see, and I'll come back to something else that is relevant to Experience Cloud, a little bit later in the presentation. But we've also seen an uptick in revenue cloud and see QQ, and that has been mirrored by the solutions that you see Geerset Building and other vendors in the space building, to ports those customers that are on that journey of driving effective revenue growth and supporting their sales teams better as well. So revenue cloud, CPQ, usage also increasing that too.

And let's get the big buzz word out of the way. So artificial intelligence, we'll be talking a little bit about this later on in the summit as well with a fantastic panel session.

But unless you've been living under some kind of rock, you'll have noticed that Salesforce are all in on AI. So Lots of big announcements from Salesforce themselves with their platform enhancements, new products, Einstein GPT, the Einstein one platform, co pilot studio, All of these things are playing a really big part in Salesforce's vision of the future, but there's a lot of things that a lot of things, a lot of questions that remain about the effectiveness of AI, but ultimately we will find that data will underpin how we use AI. And we've also seen announcements and advancements in data cloud and a push from Salesforce, towards, new data cloud product as well, which will hopefully set the foundations of effective AI usage across Salesforce customers and across businesses.

In the future. But what we're seeing is that AI isn't quite entering that whole DevOps process just yet, but it's also important to remember that AI isn't just GPT tools, which, is kind of becoming synonymous or has been synonymous with the word AI this here as well.

There's a lot of skepticism still about AI, but plenty of memes, plenty of jokes, and plenty of wondermen about where we will go, and some of that skepticism is translating into these kind of statistics. So these statistics have been taken from Salesforce's generative AI survey of over four thousand people.

And they said that seventy three percent of the respondents, said that the biggest fear around adoption of AI, was security.

So One of the main concerns with CIOs and CTOs is being able to harness and leverage emerging technologies and stay ahead of the competition, serve their customers better, and also having a security mindset and maintaining that the business is that they're adopting are safe and secure and in line with what, in line with what they already do and are to the standard that their customer come to expect of them. You also see that some are worried that outputs are biased and outputs are inaccurate. And this is kind of reflected in how we might use GPT tools in the day, day to day world.

So those of us that are using AI or are thinking about adopting AI in business from the same report, these are the major factors highlighted by employees that they're concerned with to adopt it. And that number one statistic there is human oversight. So if you have used a GPT tool for information or what have you, you will often find that it gives us some pretty, pretty great results and some pretty great information, but none of us will None certainly nobody that I've spoken to will generate answers or presentation information or blog posts or LinkedIn posts or what have you and not do some kind of human validation to check that the output is being correct. So that level of human oversight that is needed to effectively use AI is kind of hindering, this is adoption a little bit, and those are the concerns that we have from employees.

So AI, we'll get that get that topic out the way, and hopefully that sets a little bit of tone for the panel discussion a little bit later in the summit.

So let's talk about DevOps adoption. So every year we aim to highlight the trends around DevOps adoption, and teams of all shapes and sizes are realizing the benefits of faster releases, the improved collaboration and the higher quality features that get built and shipped that reach their end users.

In the survey, we asked the respondents, which of the following components of DevOS processes do you currently use? And here we can see some of the results for the key elements, that bolts were either looking to adopt, hadn't yet adopted or were already using. And to me, it's really unsurprising that CICD tops the list at thirty nine percent of respondents saying that they look to adopt that this year. And the question remains, have they?

Yes. Yes. They have, is the answer. So we at Geerset have seen a twenty eight percent increase in the number of Salesforce teams utilizing CICD right now compared to this time last year.

So that is absolutely a goal that remains consistent, and folks are driving towards that with their teams as well. And security continues to be a key theme throughout this report, and I anticipate we'll do in next year's report too.

And data protection falls soundly in to that category. So just thirty just over thirty percent of respondents, we're looking to adopt better data security through adopting data backup tooling, and we've seen a thirty seven percent increase in customers using debit backup. So that is absolutely fabulous, and it's really great to see the data security and resilience is still at the forefront and continues to be at the forefront of Salesforce customers might.

Now if we move on to DevOps performance, we're gonna use the Dora metrics to highlight some of the key findings from this statistics. So, the Dora metrics are the DevOps research and acceptance assessment metrics from Google.

The industry standard, across software development. So deployment frequency and lead time, the top two there, those speak to our release pipelines velocity. And the meantime to recover, and the change failure percentage speak to the stability of your released pipeline. So I'm not gonna jump into all of those right now, but what we are gonna do is look at key one as it relates to that previous insight of customers looking to adopt CICD and deploy changes faster.

So we've seen steady improvements across the ecosystem in the last few years about deployment frequency. And the state of Salesforce DevOps report found that most teams are releasing multiple times a month. And that is really, really fantastic. So long gone are days where we might only deploy, once every couple of weeks, once a month, or even more frequently than that. That is not going to drive change in your business, and that is not going to give the users of Salesforce an optimal experience. So that is absolutely first and foremost.

Now if we stack that up against what we see a gear set, the medium team that uses gear set is releasing multiple times a day and the most elite teams releases hundreds of times a month. So there is absolutely fantastic and really high levels of acceleration that we can achieve through CICD practices, but that, of course, doesn't, doesn't mean that we can just release everything as, as soon as we can, but make sure that we ensure that those features that we are releasing our secure, safe, and stable. But that ability to be able to do so is becoming a key tenant of a lot of DevOps teams in the ecosystem these days, these days. So that's really great to see.

How do we get there?

All well and good investing in the tooling and the technology to be able to support faster workflows and more advanced workflows, where you can release those features your end users and increase the speed of your development. But training plays an integral part of any business, and that includes the Salesforce team, and that includes any new practices that you're looking to adopt. So we asked the respondents what training they've received and how it translated to DevOT's performance, And unsurprisingly, those who trained had healthier collaboration and were outperforming other teams as well. You might be thinking, have you had any Salesforce troubles training this year? The fact that you're here today, the answers to that question can be yes and that is a testament to you for taking your learning into your hands.

You are here, you are absorbing information, and hopefully, you're gonna be able to build some valuable connection to the people that you hear speak today, or through some of those respondents in in the chat. I would encourage you to do that two. So yes, you have received dev ops training, but if we look at the results from the survey, the areas that folks are looking for and seeking improvement in are also unsurprising based on what we've spoken about already. So CICD is the most frequently requested or sought after area for improvement when it comes to Salesforce DevOps.

The intention to adopt practices is there, and that's being reflected in the training needs of Salesforce professionals.

And what's really interesting here as well, that forty four percent of the respondents said the collaboration and teamwork whilst not dev ops specific, but leaning on your soft skills is an important area.

Of training that they would value as well.

And that is something that I am highly passionate about if, you read anything that I write or put out, on socials, etcetera. You'll see that that is a core facet of what I am passionate about is that culture and that collaboration and leaning on that offskills. So that's really interesting that folks are realizing that this dev ops mindset requires a cultural shift. It requires a shift in the way that we think about things and the way that we do things to successful.

And then the last top responded category, was the business value of DevOps.

So very often as Salesforce admin and Salesforce developers, we understand the impact that investing in DevOps and being able to release faster in more streamlined fashion with less errors can have, certainly less stressful for us for sure. But then translating that to the business so that the business continually invests their time and their money in helping you adopt these practices is getting lost in translation a bit. So harnessing that knowledge and that understanding of dev ops and the business value that we see from our customers from adopting these processes is certain something, that we can help share with you all, in the future through some of our case studies as well, gear set dot com slash resources. You can find some great studies about business value of DevOps and what teams are able to achieve there as well.

If we take a look at it, DevOps launchpad, so DevOps launchpad is a free training platform that is not dissimilar to Trailhead, actually. So if you're familiar with Trailhead, DevOps's launchpad is definitely for you you are not familiar with it already. So DevOps launchpad, saw a ninety percent increase in users over the course of last year. So this is wonderful.

So growing subject matter expertise area people are investing their time and their energy and learning from as well. So that is fantastic to see.

Interesting though, thirty eight percent of those folks developers and twenty one percent of those were admins, and that is reflective of a fallacy that I often see in our space. And you will often hear a response from a lot of admins are actually saying dev ops is for developers, and that's just not the case in Salesforce DevOps is a whole team responsibility, and there are some great courses on launchpad that will help identify that and show you as you as an admin, if you are an admin, release manager developer, how the role that you play in your team is crucial in enabling DevOps success.

The most popular course was an introduction to Salesforce DevOps, encouraging that folks are taking that next first step, and then we're seeing folks sign on to get their Debots' fundamental certificates, and we all love a certification. We all absolutely love them, and you can go and get your certification, today if you sign on to those courses at DevOps launchpad. So that's a really encouraging site as well. And we're also seeing a lot of registrants go for the introduction to Salesforce development course, which is also encouraging that folks are taking that extra step to learning a little more on diving deeper and setting the groundwork for their future learning and development too.

There's a huge number of resources out in the community.

I've listed a few of them here. Resources abound, Salesforce Bend, Very popular blog. You might be familiar with already. Bural site has some great courses.

Apex Arris has great blog content in courses too. There's community events that is Salesforce dreaming, the Salesforce world tours, the dreaming events, the events like this, that vendors put on for us help us learn a little bit more Salesforce Saturdays and user groups as well, a lot of places where you can enrich your knowledge and talk to folks in each to about how you can learn a little bit more. We're simply asking how folks do things as well. So I highly encourage you to use those channels if you're learning to dive in a little bit.

Okay.

So I've spoken a little bit about, security already and the importance of security, and the fact that Everybody in the system seems to be understanding that data security is super important. So a huge topic in the report last year, and it's just not going away. Which is a good thing. So things like continuous monitoring automated security checks, once believed or thought to be optional are no longer. So we've seen a transition, and that transition in the mindset is crucial to the reduction of vulnerabilities and increased data protection for your customer.

And this will help bolster trust. It fuels the adoption of wider DevOps practices as well. If your data is secure, if your metadata is secure, then you can increase your delivery speed, safe in the knowledge that if something goes wrong, which ultimately will, nobody's perfect and Nobody is gonna it's mistakeless, but if we have the systems in place that allows us to restore effectively, then we're gonna be up do that, and that will help us accelerate our delivery in the long run. So if we dive into a couple of these security incidents from this year, and we'll start to get a picture of why that's so important.

Now in April twenty three, News broke that several companies And I'm not talking like small mom and pop shops or small SMB customers. I'm talking banks and health care providers, leaked data from Salesforce.

I mentioned earlier about that uptake in Experience Cloud, and, or, once, once known as communities, and that investment in putting more power into your customers' hands and allowing them to self serve and creating amazing amazing online experiences for them, that's drive for digital transformation in a couple of instances led to data leaks. So those digital experiences were misconfigured and allowed access to data where it shouldn't have. So it's really, really important that We have through great DevOps processes, robust testing, vulnerability testing, and enable a security mindset throughout our release cycle.

And that once an issue is spotted, fixing it quickly is imperative. We want to repair irreparable degradation Dation, we wanna avoid irreparable degradation of trust with our customers as well. And this is what sporcle found. So sporcle are a online quiz hosting platform.

If you've never done a sporcle quiz, I highly recommend you get over there and, do one of their quizzes. I'm a big Harry Part fan, so I enjoy doing Harry Park, was his political quizzes for everybody on there.

They unknowingly introduced a production boat that impacted five hundred of their live quiz event hosts, which left them stuck, and they had no rollback ability, and they needed to find a quick fix. And when they did find the fix, they weren't able to push because of blocks work in the pipeline, and that's an unacceptable outcome as highlighted by their CEO in this quote as well. So what we wanna be really mindful of is that we have robust measures from a security perspective that allow us to recover quickly if needed, but also a great flowing DevOps pipeline pipeline that means that if we do have work currently in flight, that that can get out of the way so that we can ship those fixes when they happen.

And Salesforce aren't immune from their issues e either. So earlier this year, they broke for AWS, and as a result, impacted data accessibility for their customers. And whilst it's obviously disruptive, there is a compliance issue here as well. There are a number of regulations that states that you have to maintain access to your data at all times.

So data backup solutions are imperative, especially those outside of Salesforce. You can't have your data backup solution be inside Salesforce that's like Having a spare key to your car and keeping it in the glove box, is that analogy. And in the state of Salesforce DevOps report, we found that thirty one percent of those think that key security, enhanced security is a key benefit of DevOps two, and a robust and well tested disaster recovery plan, it will be beneficial in the long run. If you don't have a DRP, then there's a slide here.

This will be shared at the after the summit as well. So there's QR code here that you can run on the screen now, but it will be shared afterwards.

And there's also a range of regulations that I mentioned that you might need to comply with. So GDPR, but also the CCPA, socks, or HIPAA, as well, big big security implications around, those regulations as well. So these are the important questions that you need to ask, and the demands that these questions ask of you as a Salesforce team.

And these demands can present a little bit of hurdle to faster releases. If you need to evaluate these every step of the way, but it is possible for you to meet them while striving for continuous delivery. But it's so, so important, and adhering to those regulations and being secure is really imperative to that trust that I was mentioning between you and your customers.

Meta, for example, this year was fined one point two billion euros for GDPR breaches, which, whilst a lot of us won't be operating on that scale, just shows you the impact and the seriousness of these regulations that we need to adhere And if we go back to the AI conversation, AI kind of opens Pandora's box, especially if we're relying we're relying on data and security. So that's another big consideration of adopting those technologies.

The business benefit of dev ops are huge. Those are improving RC ROI, but leaders and decision makers want to know that the impact to the bottom line and what that is, and if that is gonna scale. So digital transformation is ultimately the name of the game, but transformation needs to be complete. So DevOps often needs gets pushed to the back of the line when ironically DevOps is gonna be the thing that allows you to implement that digital transformation faster, and that's why statistics like this are important.

So larger teams have been leading the way, and fifty percent said that they were adopting all the practices that we asked about. Over forty percent of teams that are adopting DevOps practices are seeing return on investment of over twenty thousand dollars a month with eleven percent seeing more than a hundred thousand dollars return on investment a month, which is absolutely staggering, in terms of statistic, and we're not just talking about developer hours saved, we're not just talking about, the impacts that that has and the other works that they can do We're talking about shipping business impacting value to your customers quicker, and the impact that that will have on the bottom line as well.

Imagine shipping a critical feature six months ahead of schedule because you've been able to do that through great delivery practices. That's going to have a serious impact on a business department, and those are all things that we need to think about when assessing, value of the DevOps practices.

And we can see here with the case study from Violia. Deployment time is now through the floor So they're saving a hundred hours every two weeks, and think about what you can do with that. Think about the other optimizations in the process or in other areas business or things that you can learn through saving that time. And that ROI for Volia has been estimated at over five hundred percent over the first year alone, but it doesn't just happen overnight you can't just snap your fingers.

So hopefully that's provided you with a lot of insight, and I wanna leave time for a little bit of questions. If we haven't, hopefully that is the case.

But this year have been memorable.

Over the last year and a half in my current role, I've seen the interest and understanding of DevOps really shift upwards. And not only folks are aware of the business benefits, and concepts, they want more, which is really, really exciting for all of us here at Geerset.

And really exciting for me as a professional in this ecosystem.

We're taking learning into our own hands. AI is really driving that reocity about what we might be able to do. So I can't wait to see what the survey for this year will find. Speaking of which, you can now take the state of Salesforce DevOps survey for twenty twenty three now. So If you do so, you'll be in with a chance to win a thousand dollar Amazon gift card, the survey closes in early January. So, at some point after the summit is finished, I encourage you to go and do that, but there's a quick QR code up here, which you can save, just now.

Thank you very much for listening to me.

I believe I am on time. And if there is time for questions, then Ian, I am happy to answer. Have you got answering any?

So thank you, Jack. That was fantastic. So I guess the first question is that the the the statistics that you Are they available in a report that people can access and download?

Yes. Absolutely. So the current state of Salesforce DevOps report is accessible from gear set dot com slash resources, where you can take a look and start to benchmark where folks wear at the start of last year. The little tidbits and insight that I've given you in terms of how things have happened over this year are just in the report, just in this talk that I've given, which we'll obviously be able to listen back to and the slides of which will be shared after the summit?

Yeah. I think the the benefits that you talked about are huge. I think someone posted in the chat that they'd saved over five hundred thousand dollars because there was no currency on there, five hundred thousand dollars or maybe it's pounds, which is even more by implementing dev ops. So I think that that seems to be what's driving that level of adoption.

But if we think about the the people who are at the very early stages, are you seeing that people are genuinely rethinking how they work and moving away from change sets?

I think on the whole, yes. I think it has been well known for a long time that as whether you're in the early stages of implementation or I've had an org that is either a couple of years old for for instance, You wrestle with chainsets enough, and the use of Salesforce accelerates within a business. You don't know by Salesforce to be a glorified spreadsheet and stay static. You buy Salesforce to continually improve and tweak it based on what business process changes you are you are having adapting the market and things like that.

And with those level of changes comes more changes to Salesforce and change sets quickly become, the it becomes realized that change says it's not the most optimal way to do that. So the interest is always always there in adopting a tooling that is better than change sets, and then benefits are realized when they think, what more could we do or how more secure can we make our processes? How much more do we need to think about as we look to either IPO or get bigger or be bought by a company that is public all those kind of questions, start to come to the fore a lot quicker than people think, which developing through change sets does not typically give us, the best resilience or security around.

So, yes, an answer to your question with a long long annotation.

But I've also heard you talk at sessions where it's not just about technology. You've also talked about its cultural mindset.

Yes. Something I talk about a lot.

The I think the biggest barrier for from a mindset perspective is actually the overcoming that we've always done it this way, fallacy. So we've always done it this way. We know that this works, we're a little bit scared make a change is the biggest thing to overcome, and the frustrations and the frustrations of current process get overlooked because they don't know they might be stepping into a change or a change seems change seems painful, but it's about understanding how much better things can be wants to change is implemented and getting business stakeholders, what point does what point does the current pain, really become an issue that really needs be solved.

And I think that's something that a lot of our Salesforce admins developers, platform owners, etcetera, understands, and the business owners will start to understand a little bit later. And then, becoming more transparent in your delivery processes is a huge thing, which is often something that I see commonly not not not so. So a lot of developers are siloed, the admins are siloed, and there seems to be this battle across Jira or whatever work work tracking tool that you happen to be using and breaking down, breaking down those silos and enabling streamlined communication between those things, it's not a and imploring on people that it's not a blame culture.

It's just how do we identify where challenges are not point a finger, and what can we do as a team to rectify those is that biggest mindset shift that I think teams struggle with most.

Yep. Fantastic. I think I think that's what that's what we're seeing across the across the industry. I mean, someone just asked a question here more of a statement that DevOps Center was introduced by Salesforce as the free replacement for for chain sets. And how's that going to impact it? I think we're seeing that it's getting people out of change sets into the correct mindset as you just talked about, and it's an important stepping stone to stay safe. Let's let's get everyone thinking about source control, thinking about what it takes to actually drive that pipeline in an effective way.

Thank you so much, Jack. I mean, great session today.