As your organization grows, so does the need for innovation within Salesforce. Customizations, for example, are an easy way to improve the user experience and help you make the most of your investment in the platform. To implement changes, developers and admins can take advantage of change sets, Salesforce’s native tool to move metadata customizations between sandboxes and production environments.
In this new age of DevOps-focused development however, and particularly with the recent launch of Salesforce’s DevOps Center, the limitations of change sets are becoming more apparent. Many developers find them cumbersome, slow and lack the ability to comply with best practices for Salesforce release management. Some of the things you can't do using Salesforce change sets include:
- Deploying all metadata at once
- Merging code with other developers
- Rolling back changes
- Tracking who made changes to an organization
What's more, change sets don't support certain metadata components. Utilizing unsupported metadata requires manual deployment, leaving greater room for human error, or implementing an integrated development environment (IDE).
Streamline your change set management process
Salesforce change sets often make deployment a slower process than it should be. Relying solely on these tools may not work for your team, but there are solutions you can proactively put into practice to help overcome common Salesforce obstacles throughout your development cycle.
Here are a few tips on how to compensate for some of the limitations of change sets:
1. Plan deployments in advance
Developers can't deploy metadata components all at once, and they can't merge code from various organizations into a single deployment unit. These Salesforce obstacles can make deployment more of a slow, manual process rather than the streamlined task it should be. Making changes on a regular schedule can give you time to account for lengthier cycles.
2. Implement a documentation solution
The right documentation can help keep everyone on the same page and prevent frequent errors. With tracking highly limited within change sets, implementing your own documentation method can help ensure each modification is noted and changes between developers won't get overwritten by mistake. Whether it's a tool or a simple spreadsheet, it'll serve as a centralized storage log that's easily accessible by your team.
3. Test, test, and retest
Validation isn't automatically required to deploy change sets, but it's still a good idea to make it part of your quality assurance process. Validation helps ensure your changes are in sync with your production environment. Skipping this step can leave room for errors. Add validation to your list of processes to ensure completion before any large or small customizations and updates go live.
4. Make Own part of your release plan
Sandboxes are essential to Salesforce development. They help avoid errors and provide safe, isolated environments for testing changes and training new team members. With help from Own’s sandbox seeding solution, you can make release management simpler. Our leading solution lets you seed with precision, anonymize sensitive data, reuse seed templates to streamline repetitive tasks, and more.
Request a demo to see how our cutting-edge sandbox seeding solution works.
