A survey of 1,296 DevOps professionals building and deploying applications on top of the Salesforce software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform finds 53% work for organizations that have embraced continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms, with another 28% planning to adopt.
Conducted by Gearset, a provider of a DevOps platform for building and deploying custom SaaS applications, the survey also finds 59% of respondents working for organizations that either have already adopted or are planning to adopt version control, while 54% have implemented automated testing.
A total of 27% and 23% plan to implement version control and automated testing, respectively, the survey finds.
Nearly three quarters (73%) of respondents also reported that all metadata changes are built and deployed the same day, but only 22% said all of these changes are built and deployed the same way.
Overall, more than half of respondents (54%) said DevOps teams have improved release quality, while 46% report improved collaboration. Only 38% and 33% said more frequent releases or reduced lead times, respectively, is a factor in justifying their return on investment (ROI) in DevOps workflows.
Additionally, a full 82% of respondents noted their organization is already compliant with one or more security frameworks, with 52% working towards adding at least one more framework in 2024.
David Rant, engineering lead for Gearset, said the results suggest that organizations are moving beyond simply accelerating application development to focus more on improving the overall quality of the applications being deployed.
In fact, 57% of respondents said their DevOps teams are seeking release management training, while half (55%) are aiming to build a strong DevOps culture.
That culture increasingly consists of both citizen and professional developers that are collaboratively building applications, noted Rant. While professional developers typically have a greater appreciation for the value of best DevOps practices, it’s clear that citizen developers helping to build applications are embracing them as well, he added.
It’s not clear just yet what impact the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools for building and deploying applications might have on DevOps workflows in Salesforce environments, but as these tools are adopted the overall pace at which applications are built and deployed should increase. In fact, as that pace increases, the need for best DevOps workflows to effectively manage that increased pace of development should become more apparent. It’s generally expected that thanks to the rise of AI, the number of applications being built and deployed in the next few years will far exceed the number built and deployed over the past decade.
Many of those applications will also become increasingly complex as workflows span the multiple SaaS application platforms that organizations adopted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Most of those applications, naturally, are being built with low code tools. These days professional and citizen developers alike are using these tools to build applications faster. In many instances, these applications would never have been built, because the backlog of applications that need to be built using procedural code tools is simply too high.
The challenge and the opportunity now is determining how to ensure those applications are of the highest quality possible as the frequency at which they are built and deployed only continues to increase.
