DevOps, Technical Debt, CI/CD, Agile, BA, BI, Scrum, SaaS, AI, Machine Learning. When embarking on a journey into a development paradigm the new jargon can be almost debilitating. We have all been part of that meeting where someone will say every new bit of jargon, at least once, and still fail to actually say anything. As with any workflow or process that a team decides to enhance, learning what this jargon actually means can be the defining factor between success and failure. I would like to dive into the first 3 bits of jargon from my list to give a nice clean definition.
Salesforce DevOps Pipeline
The big one DevOps… Development Operations… To put it simply it is the systematic approach to increase collaboration and development with the goal of providing a better end product quickly. The common pitfalls in DevOps are manual testing, manual deployment, and manual issue tracking.
These can all be solved with the automation of processes, communication, and feedback. Automation can be achieved with the implementation of tools from your IDE to code repository to your automation server and everything in between. Communication is always key and the utilization of a strong issue and project management tool will help the Developers exchange ideas and Project Managers track progress.
Salesforce Technical Debt
Technical Debt evokes images of spreadsheets, upon spreadsheets, upon more spreadsheets, but I promise it is not nearly that intimidating. When writing code the fast route may get you to the final product quickly but it may cost you time in the long run when you need to refactor your code to account for the shortcuts you took earlier. Technical debt is this theoretical amount of time you will need to invest in the future because you saved it now.
As with financial debt, some technical debt can help you accomplish a goal, but too much sets you up for ruin in the future. As your technical debt builds so does your level of resource investment in the future, and those resources being tied up in fixing past mistakes will prevent you from taking your code to the next level. A couple of major sources of technical debt are poor design and lack of standardization. How many unused methods exist in your code, do the comments add value if they even exist? Much of this can be solved with solid tools.
Salesforce Continuous Integration and Delivery
CI/CD is just continuous integration and continuous delivery (or continuous deployment). Of the jargon, you will encounter none can be as easily defined by the long script version as CI/CD. This is the backbone of a great DevOps pipeline. More improvement, more quickly. Solid planning, strong code, clean comments, clear feedback, and rapid deployment.
From IDE to CI/CD CodeScan is the premier tool to streamline the DevOps pipeline for your Salesforce organization. By automating a major portion of the code review process with the largest set of APEX, VisualForce, LWC, and our newest addition Meta Data rules you can write better code, faster while minimizing your technical debt.