Reduce deployment times by 50% for a fintech in a few months

Summary

The Customer is a fintech company providing expense management solutions. Venture-funded companies use their solutions to track spending. 

Need

The Customer found that their Salesforce development work was becoming harder to deploy as the business grew. Code deployments happened once per week, and they took a long time to complete.  One of the Customer's most significant challenges was packaging the weekly release. They manually looked at the changed components to construct a package.xml file, retrieve the metadata from their UAT org, and deploy it to their production instance using the Metadata API. On top of that, end users were making changes directly in production. Sometimes, the release managers' changes from UAT to production would overwrite the manual changes end users made.

There was a disconnect: End users didn't realize how Salesforce development worked and thought no one would ever overwrite their changes in production. Salesforce developers believed end users would not make changes in production. Therefore, Salesforce developers needed to know all the changes that end users were making directly in production to prevent overrides from happening. They also had to patch up the problem that end users that weren't part of their Salesforce team were making changes directly in production.

The processes that worked when they were a small company would not work for their next growth phase. Little by little, these issues caused their development velocity to slow down. That's when our Customer decided to focus on cleaning up their Salesforce change management process and turn to one of our Consultants.

Solution

Based on their use case and problems, our team decided to use Flosum for their Salesforce change management process.

Give eager stakeholders a way to get their changes to production without making them directly in production

Our team provided a solution where the Customer's stakeholders would no longer need to make changes directly in their production Salesforce environment. Instead, our team devised a process where stakeholders would have their sandboxes and make the changes they wanted there. Then, using Flosum pipelines, the changes could move through the rest of the sandboxes.

But what are pipelines?

Automating deployments with pipelines

Our team audited the deployment steps that the Customer took to get code from a developer sandbox to their production environment. 

Then, our team leveraged Flosum to build an automated pipeline that would validate and deploy metadata changes that mimicked the manual steps they would have taken to get their code to production beforehand.   

Improve code quality with Apex PMD

Our team implemented the Apex PMD service, which helps enforce a standard for the Customer's Salesforce codebase.                                                                                          

Slack Integration

The Customer preferred to get Slack notifications about the status of their deployments. Which ones failed? Which ones were successful?

Our team used webhooks in Flosum to post to one of the Customer's Slack channels specifically for deployment updates. 

Transformation

Our team gave the fintech company the ability for the Customer to see the gaps in their change management process and how Flosum addressed them.

What were some of the results?

"We sped up the process of packaging and deploying our code by 50%." - Developer Lead

The Customer can catch overwrites to production by seeing the changes before deploying to a new environment.

Before deploying metadata to a new sandbox, they could detect if their changes would overwrite any existing metadata and resolve potential overwrite issues.

They can now keep sandboxes and production in sync, reducing the number of times sandbox refreshes occur.

Before our team came in and improved the Customer's change management process with Flosum, the Customer had to refresh their sandboxes frequently because they would become drastically out-of-sync with the Salesforce production instance. Now that sandboxes reflect their production instance, the Customer felt confident that testing a new feature in a sandbox environment would work in production.

The Customer now sees an increase in deployments that succeed the first time.

Because our team ramped the Customer on Flosum's features (ex: Impact Analysis), they can catch potential deployment issues and resolve them before validating against their target environment.

The Customer can now roll back changes if necessary.

Whether it was a partial or complete rollback, the Customer said they were "a nightmare" to do in Salesforce before our team implemented Flosum. Now, the Customer is at ease knowing that if a deployment ever causes an issue in production, they can roll it back either partially or entirely.