The State of Salesforce DevOps 2024

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Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for attending Gearight's DevOps Summit. And I am here today to talk you through the findings from the latest state of Salesforce DevOps report, the Salesforce DevOps report twenty twenty four.

As Eric, let you know, my name is Jack McCurdy. I am a DevOps applicator gear set. I've spent the last five years in the Salesforce ecosystem working with Salesforce customers to help them streamline their Salesforce delivery processes. And over that time, I've seen a really interesting shift in not only the tools and the processes that teams are adopting to help them deliver better quality cations on Salesforce, but also in their team cultures that are being formed through adopting these processes, which is really awesome to see, and I'm really excited to share the results of what is that now the third or fourth, that's not that's not that's not good that I can't remember, but we've been running this report since twenty twenty one.

And it's been really interesting see the insights from the ecosystem that are generated by the responses from our audience So as I mentioned, we launched the state of Salesforce DevOps report in twenty twenty one, and it's the largest report of its kind in the Salesforce ecosystem.

And we look at the results. We take all that great quantitative and qualitative data that is provided to us by the respondents. We look at those results and we're able to add our expert insight to it, given that that dev ops is our day to day. That's what we do here at gear set. So using all of those great responses, we distilled that all down and give that insight and some key findings from the report come out every single year, which is what I'm here to talk, about We look at a number of metrics throughout the report, some of which I'm gonna run through now, and you'll see from those metrics that the data really does represent the whole ecosystem much like Eric has been asking you in the chat to let us know where you're coming from.

This is a really good set of data from the ecosystem that we can draw a lot of findings.

So I mentioned that, you're tuning in from all over the world and all over the world has been represented in this report. It's the biggest turnout for the report that we've had in terms of respondents. So just shy of thirteen hundred people responded and a special shout out to Jason Props. Hopefully, you are on the call. If you are on the call, give us a wave here is a senior development systems associate that won the grand raffle prize. So congratulations to you, Jason, and thanks for participating, and hopefully a little bit of encouragement for you all to take the report in twenty twenty five. But yes, this is global survey.

So respondents from all over the globe, but it mostly follows Salesforce's own footprint. So Salesforce's customer footprint is predominantly North American, and then that extends through Europe, APAC, and Latin America as well. And that is what we see mirrored in the survey responses.

There's a Salesforce solution for every industry, and every industry is represented through the report as well. One thing that's really interesting about this year's particular report is that transport and logistics industry has been highly represented this year, and that's a really interesting indicative shift of the way that an industry that has been striving to transform itself digitally is doing so. So if you are here from the transport and logistics industry, I take my hat off to you and, I hope you are achieving great things in your Salesforce practices and on the Salesforce platform.

Not only is there a Salesforce solution for every industry, there's a Salesforce solution for every company's size. And we have respondents from every company size imaginable.

So once again, respondents from all of these categories, everybody from small, single admin shop, right up to the largest enterprises are represented through the survey as well.

Salesforce DevOps and Salesforce Delivery really does impact an entire organization.

So no matter what your role is in your organization, be you an admin developer, BA, tech team lead, manager, CIO, Salesforce impacts you in some way. And that's represented in the responses from the survey too. And it seems that this year, we are closer than ever to being able to debunk the dev ops is for developers' mindset. Something that has been super common in my career so far in the Salesforce ecosystem.

That's simply not true. So sixteen percent of admins and sixteen percent of developers both, both responded to the survey in that quantity, and that's a great notion to be able to debunk this year. So like I say, lots of insight and lots of varied responses from across the ecosystem that we are drawing our insights from here, which is fantastic.

So if you move into DevOps as a whole, DevOps best practices and adopting DevOps best practices is a gold standard for releasing on the Salesforce platform. DevOps is on the rise and we're seeing that year after year, and this year has been no exception to that.

Virging control is one of the things that underpins DevOps best practices and eighty six percent of our respondents had already adopted version control, or they're gonna plan to do so this year. So it's really encouraging to see that first step being taken by so much of the industry.

And not only that continuous integration and continuous deployment is the next step in that process. An eighty one percent of respondents adopted or plan to adopt it this year as well. So not only are people getting started, they are making pragmatic steps to adopt the next thing that they need to be successful.

And another number, frankly, quite rightfully so if you ask me, that's on the rise is the adoption of backup solutions for your orgs. Data backup is critical for protecting not only your Salesforce orbs data, it's also critical for compliance if you're adhering to regulations, and it's also really important for protecting your reputation in the event of a data loss incident. So that's a great number to see continually on the rise. I'd like to see it a hundred percent, but we're getting ever closer.

The main metrics that we look at when we assess a team's DevOps performance are the Dora metrics So Dora stands for the DevOps Research and Assessment Metrovix, which were developed by a research team at Google. And this is the industry wide standard, whether you're in Salesforce or other applications for measuring your success. So that's what we focused on when we asked our respondents how they were doing. And those four metrics are categorized into speed and stability metrics, and you can see those on the screen there. And teams that score favorably across the four of those, they're gonna be primed to deliver better quality features and respond with agility to business requirements, which if the last few years has shown us anything, which are ever changing and we need to be able to pivot, to turbulent markets.

Diving into the first one, deployment frequency. So the frequency of deployments allows us to fulfill users and business needs. So the percentage of teams that are deploying daily to production has doubled since last year, but put that hand in hand with teams who only release a handful of times a year, that figure halved.

So no longer are we seeing teams stagnate or release three times a year in line with Salesforce's own releases, we're delivering business value more continuously to our users is fantastic.

The trend in deployment frequency does remain a bell curve. The reason for that is and can widely be attributed to a lot of Salesforce teams still operating in sprint cycles. So it's very common across all the teams that I speak to and the folks that I work with they release in two weeks sprint. So that's deployment to production at the end of every two weeks. So that bell curve is, is explained.

And this deployment frequency will go hand in hand with lead time, which is the next statistic we looked at.

So DevOps best practice encourages shipping small, shipping often, that delivery of value to end users on a more consistent cadence and making sure that when we have a feature ready that it's good to go, let's let's put it in our business users hand straight away. Let's not let it sit in UAT for a while or other testing environments for a while when it's good to go.

So lead time for change and deployment frequency not only are you delivering that value faster, a second fold benefit is being able to have a tight feedback loop and type feedback loops are really important for being able to take on take on advice or queries or adopt to those changing business requirements quickly. And if we have a deployment frequency that allows us to do it and a low lead time for change, then we're gonna be delivering and innovating a lot faster than our peers elsewhere. And sixty one percent of teams do have a lead time of less than a week which is a vast, vast, vast improvement from when we started the survey back in twenty twenty one.

If we move on to the stability metrics, we're gonna start with the change failure rate. And so change failure rate is the best indicator of your release quality. So that is to say how many times do we deploy to production, and something breaks, or there's a bug.

And this is wholly indicative of the testing culture that a team has. There are many teams in the Salesforce ecosystem that have a really high testing culture and test everything and have dedicated QAs, and there's teams that don't put the same level of investment into testing as others and change value rate is is a really interesting one because eleven percent of those teams found bugs more often than not, and eighteen percent of teens are in a productivity danger zone too. And why I say productivity danger zone is if bugs are being shipped to production, that will stop the ability for you to work on those critical value add features for the business.

Not to be all doomsday though, so these results have also improved significantly over the years. And what it also might show us is that with the rise of a ability tooling over the last few years as well in the ecosystem, it means bugs that might not have been caught are being caught now, which is great, and bugs are being caught faster. So not all doom and gloom, but that is what the statistics are telling us.

And we're not gonna catch every bug. We're just we're just not there's not not a world in which that's gonna happen, but we do wanna make sure that when we do need to fix things that we can. And there's a similar pattern to change failure rate when we look at time to recover.

But a large minority are struggling and recovery times are actually longer than last year, which is another interesting finding, and I'm going to come back to that a little bit later when I dive into the key findings.

Just like your favorite favorite sports or what have you there are elite teams when it comes to Salesforce delivery and Salesforce DevOps. So what do those teams look like?

An elite team is one that shows both a technical maturity in their tools and their processes, but they also show cultural maturity.

And by cultural maturity, we measured that by those that rates their collaboration levels as excellent within their organisations.

And now without them both, you can't maximize the return on investment of your DevOps practices. You can't you can have all the best tools in the world all the bells, all the whistles, and a great process, but without a great collaborative culture to use them all to their full potential, you're gonna be falling behind. And only eight percent of total teams sit in the elite category outperforming non elite teams across those Dora metrics that I've just been talking about. They build faster, they release faster with fewer bugs. And when things do go wrong, they have a solution in place to get them up and running quickly.

So how do you become and the lead team. How do you make that shift?

Investing in training? That is the number one thing that I will advocate for. Always is upskilling continual improvement. You have things like Trailhead, which are obviously fantastic and have just come on leaps and bounds.

And specific training platforms such as DevOps, launchpad, and training regularly will improve your performance.

Regularly engaging in training not only gives you more knowledge, but it also gives teams a confidence to to continually improve. It gives them the space and the freedom to try new things and try out what they've learned to contribute to improving their Dora metrics. And eighty four percent of teams that we surveyed received some form of training on releases with most of them doing it monthly.

And to come back to that return on investment piece and tying that all together, more frequently trained teams do have better success metrics And in fact, fifty percent of those that trained once a month are fifty percent more likely to report an return on investment of fifty thousand dollars a month. Or more. So that's really cool.

With that said, those are the metrics that we've looked at, and those are gonna underpin the key findings which I am about to jump into. Those statistics provide the backbone and help us identify these key trends.

And we'll jump into those right now after a sip of water.

So keep finding number one.

I've kind of eluded it to it a little bit earlier in the respondent stats, but everybody is in on the action and Salesforce DevOps is being democratized.

DevOps is designed to break down silos and increase visibility across the whole software development life cycle, but the ecosystem in general is usually split by role, admin developer architect BA, some of the ones that I've already covered there. And the key finding is that this isn't the case anymore. Much akin to another similar notion in the ecosystem is that architects can come from anywhere an admin can become an architect, a developer can become an architect, BA can become an architect. And that's being mirrored in this report too. So everybody can be involved and should be involved in the DevOps process.

DevOps tools are no longer code heavy.

One of the one of the challenges, like I mentioned earlier, there's the notion that DevOps is for developers, and that is largely attributed to heavy use of command line interfaces and command line tools as well as version control, which is a brand new world for admins who are typically declarative developers, but I recall my time. I was I was Nae previously at Giercer. I spent three years doing that and speaking to teams of all shapes and sizes, and there was a distinct separation between roles. So an admin would be responsible for some work and a developer responsible for others yes, that'll still be the case when it comes to coding and what have you in creating Apex or lightning web components versus flows, etcetera.

But that distinct separation in terms of that development is really merging together. They are all following the same process to deliver those changes that they are responsible for because Devox is now accessible to everyone regardless of role or responsibility, and a staggering seventy three percent of teams report that all metadata changes are deployed in the same way universally. And that empowerment of everyone across the team is critical to the ROI that I was mentioning earlier.

And we asked the hard to hate in questions here at Gearsat it's metadata that's being left out rather than separation of roles. So if metadata is being left out, with what is it and why? While only one percent of teams report that they still split their releases based on that role type, The majority of teams reported it was specific metadata inclusions. There was a whole bunch of responses to this question, but these three were the most frequent And it's our old friend or old foe, depending on who you asked, is the profiles and permissions was the one that got left.

Which brings us to the key finding number two is that migrating to permission sets remains a high priority.

So for context, last year, Salesforce announced that they were sunsetting profiles, spring twenty six was the was the end of life date that they gave for that, which is no longer gonna be the case. They have, reversed that decision. However, the majority of teams are actually still planning to make that shift anyway. Eighty percent of Salesforce teams are still planning to do it by the original end of life day as well. And those with unified processes, are more likely to have done so already or plan to. So those teams that do deploy all their metadata in the same way already.

And if you're wondering about those elite teams that I mentioned earlier, they're twice as likely as other teams to have already made this migration or having better idea of when they will do it, if they haven't done so already, which suggests that fantastic collaboration and communication that I was mentioning.

And if you're wondering what is the benefit of migrating to permission sets anyway is And I love this slide because it really really does demonstrate the challenge that profiles bring to Salesforce deployments, you know, profiles are big blocks of metadata that are hard to work with. They can be overwrite fairly frequently.

Lots of change is happening on any any one profile at a time. They're they're a real they're a real pain sometimes, and permission sets really give us a more flexible way of securing our Salesforce org and making sure our permission model is really secure, as well as having the added benefit, they're much easier to deploy as well. And teams that operate primarily on permission sets report that drastically shorter deployment times. So there is a real correlation between this shift and DevOps as a whole and being able to speed up our releases and get those tighter feedback loops that I've mentioned.

With all our talk of permissions, permission sets, profiles, access and security, that takes us to the next key finding about compliance compliance requirements are on the rise universally across the ecosystem.

Last year, we found that more businesses are relying on Salesforce for more processes, and ultimately that means more data. More process means more data as Or it expands the data diversifies, and your team will be subject to adhering with more regulations. So these could be things like GDPR, socks compliance, HIPAA, things of that nature. And most Salesforce teams, eighty two percent of those, in fact, already have to comply with one framework, and just over fifty percent are working towards another framework.

But rarely are teams flagged in compliance or audits, which is excellent, and that's especially excellent for those that are seeking to comply with more regulations.

Another, there's an age old adage, which doesn't necessarily hold true when it comes to comes to compliance. The the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And there's strong positive correlation between the size of Salesforce teams and the number of frameworks that they need to comply with And the more you have to comply with, the higher likelihood is that you'll fall short at audit time because you're managing many more moving pieces. But and it's a big, big, but the largest teams themselves actually show an impressive spike in audit performance, and those teams are the most likely to say that they benefit from their compliance training, highlighting once again just how important training regularly is to your organization and to your own jobs.

And data management tools are the key to compliance. How do you how do you make managing your easier, and it is data management tools. And for teams that are struggling in this area, an investment in a great data management tool is a sound investment and a necessary investment.

And they are the most valuable things for keeping orders compliant.

With data backup itself being the most significant by some margin here as well. We gotta keep our data safe and gotta keep our data protected to adhere with the regulations that are posed upon us, those that don't have a backup solution and have compliance requirements that's what you need to do next. You absolutely need to get on that. And anybody with those compliance requirements on the horizon, I suggest that you do that too.

And the final key finding here is that Salesforce specialist backup solutions offer the best protection Critically, not all solutions deliver the required results. Backups not only protect your data, but they give you peace of mind when they're, when you're looking to increase and improve on those door metrics, if you're looking to move faster and if you're looking to deploy more frequently, you want to be able to confidently make a change that you are protected in the event that things go wrong.

And eighty seven percent of teens have a or plan to adopt a solution, like I mentioned earlier, and there's a range of options out there from Salesforce specific tooling, your generic third party tooling, as well as Salesforce's own native backup and restore, and running a Salesforce data export.

In order for a solution to be worth its salt, your backup solution needs to do what it says on the tin. It needs to be able to back up your data and it needs to be able to back up the metadata too, and it also needs to be from an adequate recovery point. And this is how often Salesforce teams are backing up their orgs.

It's really important that if you do end up in a data loss incident that you are able to recover from not too long ago, and we're talking at least yesterday. So teams that are using Salesforce specific solutions are most likely to be backing up at least once a day, if not once an hour, and that puts them in a prime spot in those recovery situations that they don't lose a lot of their data, especially if you're in a high turnover if you have high turnover sales force objects like, leads or cases and things like that, a weekly backup just isn't gonna cut it in that scenario. You could be losing whole ton of valuable data, and there are still folks out there relying on data export.

For their data backup. And Salesforce only allows you to download a CSV of org data once a week maximum So those using and relying on data exports definitely should be looking away from that method. And looking at something more robust for their needs.

And your backup is only as good as your ability to restore from the faster that you're able to restore, the less the business is impacted, the less your team is siloed away and having to restore data and not focus on other critical features and improvements to the system. And those that had experienced a data loss using a third party solution did recover quicker than those using generic tooling. The reason for that is that Salesforce data models are nuanced and complex as is the metadata that supports it. And third party tools are Salesforce specific third party tools are designed specifically to overcome those challenges and even outperform Salesforce's native solution when it comes to restoration.

I appreciate that generic third party tooling can be appealing or larger companies if they have a large tech stack. So if you're looking to back up, Microsoft, for example, as well, or other databases and other platforms, then that can be an appealing option, but Salesforce's nuances and complexity is just too much where the generic tooling to handle.

And then data exports. If you are still in that camp, data exports are at the mercy of the data loader, and I'm sure that everybody here has wrestled with data loader at some point in their career.

The most important thing to mention finally is that a backup tool won't stop you experiencing data loss, it will help you when you do because it is inevitable that a data loss incident is going to happen. And what's most interesting to see is that those with a Salesforce specific solution are actually less likely to experience a data loss in their first place. And this suggests that they have a great culture of security, data protection, and testing, all those great dev ops practices that we've talked about and we have alluded to throughout the report.

And finally, it wouldn't be a gear set summit without speaking to Geerset and some of our customers. So thirty two percent of the respondents were, in fact, Geerset users and gear set users are also in the lead. Gearet users lead the door metrics by a significant margin, and I think that is really down to the great partnership that we build with our customers to build a platform that really does excel in the key areas of DevOps. Building a platform for sustainable growth as your DevOps requirements change and you iterate on them. I'm not gonna do any more of a sales pitch you can try gear set free for any time, from the gear set website, or if in fact you're looking for tailored advice, you can book a meeting with the team directly.

With all that said, I hope you have enjoyed learning a little bit about what this current state of the ecosystem is it comes to the DevOps landscape. You can download the full report now, so there's a hand QR code up on the screen right now. Or if you head over to the gear set website as well, the report will be available under the resources