Copado is the new standard for quality-driven Salesforce delivery. It is the only DevOps platform to fully integrate AI-driven Robotic Testing into every branch of code you deploy. It provides a unified framework for managing development, testing, and automating manual tasks across different clouds such as MuleSoft or Heroku.
Copado in Salesforce is an AppExchange package that helps you implement DevOps for Salesforce. It allows us to manage the entire planning, development, and delivery lifecycle from within Salesforce. It empowers admins, developers, and architects with a shared platform to plan, build, test, deploy, and monitor changes across teams.
The Copado DevOps platform allows you to ensure industry best practices, increase the predictability of releases, improve overall software quality, and deliver features faster. It has a single system of record that provides visibility and traceability over all changes and operations with a seamless Version Control integration.
The features that make Salesforce easier to work with than any other traditional IT systems also make DevOps for Salesforce a little bit different from other platforms. It requires a special approach. As a SaaS (Software as a Service) system, Salesforce manages infrastructure so traditional DevOps tools and techniques that are focused on infrastructure add little to no value to what Salesforce already provides. Since Salesforce is a low-code platform, it doesn’t need DevOps tools that are specifically designed for traditional code-heavy development. Even though the tools used for traditional IT systems to maintain infrastructure are irrelevant, DevOps concepts are still required.
DevOps emerged as a way to replace conflict with cooperation between the Dev (focusing on innovation) and IT (focusing on stability) operations teams. The tools and techniques of DevOps help teams collaborate more smoothly as they work towards the shared goal of benefitting the end users.
Three ways of DevOps:
Delivering an application is only the beginning. Once the app is running in production, we need to make sure it’s working and gather feedback so we can improve it. ”Three ways”(The DevOps Handbook, Gene Kim and co-authors) of DevOps: Flow, Feedback, and Continuous improvement.
- Flow refers to left-to-right movement of changes from Development to Production. The goal is to deliver value to end users with increasing speed and regularity, working towards a steady flow.
- As we move faster, we need to gather feedback in the form of development metrics, production monitoring, and end-user feedback. Feedback is not just information; it’s food for learning. Just like learning, DevOps is not a journey you ever finish. This is a right-to-left movement of Feedback to Development.
- The Third Way is Continuous Improvement, striving always to improve not only our work but also the way we work.
Development lifecycles have often been compared to an assembly line, beginning with Development and ending in Production. But DevOps is better illustrated with a circle or infinity loop, to show that it’s an ongoing process.
(fig: DevOps Development Lifecycle)
Requirements:
To start working with the Copado DevOps Platform, you need the following licenses and permissions:
- The following permissions sets: Copado User, Copado Functions, and Job Engine.
- An Admin or User license
- An account of the Copado DevOps Platform solution
Getting started with Copado on Salesforce:
- Sign up for Copado on the official Copado Website: https://robotic.copado.com/signup
- Install Copado in your Salesforce Org: Follow the installation instructions provided by Copado. Usually involves accessing the Salesforce AppExchange and installing the Copado application.
- Configure Copado: Set up your release processes, pipelines, and other relevant configurations.
- Connect to your Salesforce Environment: Ensure that Copado has access to your Salesforce metadata and configurations.
- Set up release pipelines: Define and configure the stages within each pipeline to match the organization’s release processes.
- Version control Integration: If using any, integrate Copado with your chosen version control (eg., Git). Configure mapping and branch strategies.
- Start Release, Monitor, and troubleshoot: Follow defined release pipeline stages. Monitor using Dashboard and Tracking features provided by Copado. Troubleshoot any problems that may arise during the deployment process.
(Regularly review and refine release management processes based on feedback and evolving requirements.)
Advantages of using Salesforce Copado:
- Deployment monitoring and tracking: It provides features like Back promotions, User Stories, Sprints, Worklogs, Conflict Resolution, Data Uploading, and Version control which helps in day-to-day deployment activities. It makes it possible to deploy on multiple destinations in orgs making parallel working efficient.
- User-Friendly Interface: It provides an interactive UI that is easy to understand Continuous Integration.
- Collaboration: It provides collaboration features like chatter, comments and annotations, hub, notification and alerts, task assignment, release board, audit trail and history, and collaboration tools that facilitate communication and coordination among team members which is crucial for cross-functional teams.
- Agile planning tools: Copado includes built-in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools and also integrates with popular tools like Jira and Azure DevOps.
- Version Control: It provides a history of changes which is essential information for debugging and decision making. It tells us precisely what changed, why, when, by whom, and what else changed at the same time. It is an essential part of Software Development. The most popular version control tool is Git.
- Continuous Integration: When the code changes, the CI tool can quickly re-run unit tests and alert to a problem. It also provides many general-purpose CI tools that can automate processes for almost any type of code or platform. The main function of these versatile tools is to trigger jobs and track their status.
- Scalability: Copado is scalable and can be run by both small development teams and large enterprises. It adapts to the needs of organizations with varying complexities.
- Audit Trails and Compliance Reporting: Copado provides audit trail features and compliance reporting which helps organizations maintain transparency and meet regulatory requirements.
Salesforce and other SaaS applications can manage the software delivery lifecycle using Copado which provides an end-to-end, low-code DevOps platform, it offers a complete solution to organize, monitor, and perform your DevOps processes.
Some basic knowledge about how the Salesforce platform works is required to understand and integrate the Copado DevOps package in Salesforce seamlessly. For Salesforce companies wishing to streamline their processes, Copado is the perfect tool. It is user-friendly which makes it easy to learn even for beginners.
Copado’s automation tools enable teams to enhance collaboration, accelerate deployment, and gain insightful information about their Salesforce deployment processes.
One of the most important features Copado provides is Version Control. Having a history of changes provides essential information for debugging and decision-making. It leaves room for more creativity and experimentation without fear, knowing we can always get back to the way things were without any complexities.
Additionally, it adds worth to each step of the DevOps process. In the development model, Copado orchestrates Quality, Security, Governance, and Customer Experience.