At a time when economic and competitive pressures are pushing enterprises to implement faster go-to-market strategies, Salesforce has released a low-code product that it says will help enterprise developers ease the change-and-release management process while writing applications on its platform.
Dubbed DevOps Center, the new product—first announced at the company’s TrailheaDX conference in June 2020—is designed to help enterprise teams collaborate while building, testing and deploying applications or automations within Salesforce, said Karen Fidelak, senior director of product management at Salesforce, in a blog post. It’s now been released for general availability.
“Businesses are facing economic headwinds, creating tension between speed-to-value and the security of the application lifecycle across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT. CIOs and their teams must help their companies do more with the tools and resources at their disposal,” Fidelak added.
DevOps Center automates change-tracking
DevOps Center features include automated change-tracking to accelerate releases, “seamless” integration with source control, and easier ways to deploy changes, Salesforce says.
DevOps Center, according to Fidelak, offers “modern” development practices and helps manage changes to applications without Change Sets. Change Sets, which are repositories used while deploying multiple versions of a software program, record all the changes among versions and their metadata.
Instead, DevOps center tracks and deploys the associated changes with Work Items—a new capability specifically created to track changes as development progresses.
“Changes are tracked automatically as you make them in development environments. Developers can view a list of changed metadata components in DevOps Center and select the ones they want to migrate,” Fidelak said in a separate blog post, adding that this eliminates the need for developers to use spreadhseet to track changes among different versions of software.
The DevOps center also helps enterprise developers adopt source control management or source control best practices, the company said, adding the new product takes care of source control once a developer signs into GitHub.
Source Control is the process of tracking changes made to the original code and is often used when applications go through changes via multiple iterations or versions.
A tool to bridge citizen developers, tech pros
The new DevOps Center, according to Salesforce, is designed for hybrid or fusion teams that may have low-code or citizen developers, as well as professional and advanced developers using command-line interfaces (CLIs) or GitHub directly.
“This means that one can do their work inside or outside of the DevOps Center UI-based application, and things stay in sync,” Fidelak said.
If one member makes a change via CLI to the code, then the DevOps Center will pick up these changes and reflect them inside its user interface so that citizen developers can see the changes and act on them as required from within the Center, he said.
Alternatively, developers working from inside the DevOps center can access the source control repository and make changes to the original code, the company said.
“You no longer need to either push low-code users to adopt the CLI and processes they may be uncomfortable with, or just live with knowing that changes that are being managed with Change Sets that are not part of your source control repository,” Fidelak said.
Further, the new DevOps Center allows enterprise developers to visualize their deployment pipeline and deploy changes faster from one stage to the other.
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