Too Many One-Trick Ponies in the Salesforce Corral
We all know there is much more that goes into a successful Salesforce Industries project than just coding. Critical aspects of projects that help them succeed include a solid DevOps/CICD process and sound design, including best practices reviews, regression testing, performance testing, and stress testing.
These aspects have led to an overwhelming number of tools designed to support Salesforce Industries projects. While this abundance of options seems beneficial initially, many of these tools are One-Trick-Ponies, forcing teams to install and manage many tools.
Typical Salesforce Industries Project
Stratus Carta is recognized as the go-to advisor for Salesforce Industries customers worldwide, and the team is routinely called in to help customers with complex challenges. Working on a large set of projects, we see teams struggling with tools.
A good example is working with a recent customer who is trying their best to cover all the bases. They were using a commercially available DevOps tool that they had to purchase and train their team to use. However, this tool did not have any testing support, so they were using another tool for regression testing, but that tool did not support performance testing. None of these tools looked at their code best practices, so they deployed yet another tool to review the code base, and none of these checked their application against Salesforce and Salesforce Industries best practices.
The Pitfalls of Tool Overload
Complexity and Confusion: In the example above, the customer had deployed three tools, each incurring its own costs, along with time and costs of training staff. Depending on the role, some staff needed to be trained on multiple tools. Even after the expenses and training, they did not have a solution to check for best practices or performance testing. Juggling multiple tools increases complexity, leading to confusion among team members and creating a fragmented experience. This leads to a slowdown of team onboarding, increases the likelihood of errors, and makes troubleshooting more challenging.
Integration Nightmares: Integrating a plethora of tools can be a nightmare, especially on the Salesforce platform. Many tools that target the Salesforce customer base are Salesforce managed package apps which much be installed into the Production and sandbox environments that they need to run against. Many customers have several managed package apps installed to support their business needs; adding these tools to the mix makes the orgs even more complex.
Maintenance Overhead: Maintaining a large suite of tools requires significant effort. Keeping tools up-to-date, managing licenses, and addressing compatibility issues can become a major drain on resources, taking time away from actual project work.
Cost Burden: Each tool comes with its own cost, whether it's a subscription fee, licensing cost, or the expense of training and support. The cumulative cost of multiple tools can quickly add up, straining budgets and impacting profitability.
Platform: Salesforce is a fantastic platform for business processes, leads, sales, quote-to-cash, order management, etc. It is designed to provide value to your customers, sales, and services teams, not to maintain a suite of tooling.
The Benefits of a Streamlined Approach
As mentioned, the team is routinely called to help customers with complex challenges. These challenges cover all areas of Salesforce Industries projects, ranging from DevOps to poor design and non-adherence to best practices, performance tuning, and testing.
To support these requests, we needed a streamlined approach to tooling. To achieve this goal, Stratus Carta has partnered with TestRunner to design, build, and enhance the ITAS framework that supports all of the tooling needs of a successful Salesforce Industries project in one framework.
Framework: ITAS was designed for speed and scalability using multi-threaded servers dedicated to the task. Not being on the Salesforce platform allows the tool to run complex operations without worrying about hitting Salesforce Governor Limits that impact other tools, or even worse, consuming platform resources that would be better served for customers and sales/services teams.
DevOps: TestRunner ITAS supports DevOps for Salesforce Core (Platform, Sales, and Service), Salesforce Industries (including large/complex Enterprise Product Catalog components), and OmniStudio. In addition to supporting all aspects of the DevOps process, the DevOps module regularly monitors all of the Salesforce Orgs and their respective repositories, ensuring they are all aligned.
Org Assessment: As ITAS has access to all underlying components, the Org Assessment module runs a suite of rules against these components and benchmarks them against our catalog of rules, built over years of Expert Services engagements. Any deviations detected during the check are automatically flagged, allowing projects to course correct early in the development cycle.
Testing: Testing can be the most impactful phase of any project. ITAS supports Regression Testing, Performance Testing, and Scale Testing.
Regression Testing: In fast-paced development environments, regression testing is crucial for supporting frequent releases and changes. It allows for early detection of issues, reducing the time and cost of fixing issues later in the development cycle. It also provides the confidence to rapidly iterate and add new features without fearing the introduction of regressions. With testing support being part of the overall framework, automated regression testing can be triggered as part of the release cycle, ensuring confidence in every release.
Performance Testing is key to ensuring that the code being delivered meets the business needs from a feature perspective and performs well. Regression tests can be quickly converted into performance tests, significantly reducing the time required to create and run tests.
Scale Testing: By reusing the performance test scripts and combining them into larger test bundles, ITAS can replicate the projected loads and user applications under various load conditions, whether it be to support Black Friday events or major product releases. This ensures that everyone has confidence that the application will meet the business's needs.
In Conclusion
Utilizing ITAS can create a streamlined and cost-effective approach to supporting your Salesforce project environment. This will empower your team to focus on what truly matters – delivering exceptional results for your clients.
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