💃 Appease the Deployment Gods with Gearset 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! What does your deployment pipeline look like? Are you still wrestling with traditional change sets or have you stepped up your game? Do you have to pray to the deployment gods each time you promote a feature?

Let's look at how to appease these gods in the world of Salesforce!

Agenda for today includes

• Ditch Change Sets

• Gearset to the Rescue

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Ditch Change Sets

Before we go HAM on change sets let's talk about the positive side:

• They come at no extra cost

• Learning curve is low

That's about all I can think of, actually. While change sets are cheap and fairly easy to use (for very small deployments anyways) they quickly expose their challenges in a real-world enterprise environment and that $ savings quickly evaporates.

Not only does it feel like an old-school way of deploying ... it feels dirty. I seriously have to toggle a drop down this much and check all these boxes? How do I know if I have everything included? What happens if I forget something? You mean I have to track this somewhere as I add/edit metadata? Like an Excel sheet, text document or literally read Richard the Admin's handwriting from a Post-It Note that includes his changes? Ewwww - this is the 21st century dammit.

Most modern Salesforce tech teams have adopted an agile-based release strategy using a git repo as their source of truth. Combined with robust automations driving their testing & CI/CD pipelines. These are not features change sets can touch.

Gearset to the Rescue

Gearset has literally helped save me HOURS of deployment time. It's modern UI provides a nifty comparison tool that allows you to compare two orgs, repo/org, repo/repo. The compare will actually show the differences between your source & target so you can be sure you're deploying the right stuff. Even still, if you promoted a bug you can easily rollback a deployment!

This is all great, but speaks nothing of the automations provided. Here are just a few of my personal favs:

• Automated Change Monitoring - this is super useful for catching admins making changes directly in prod.

• Automated Testing - Catch test failures, track code coverage, debug errors before they become a crisis.

• CI/CD - Hook Gearset to a git repo and keep your entire org stack in sync. Unleash faster release cycles!

• Pipelines - OMG. If you're into Salesforce & modern release management then you'll probably have a nerdgasm over this.

Daily Principle

From Seneca, we get the advice to think of goal setting like a painter. Goals are like the likeness the painter aims to paint. They are what we are aiming for - “the chief purpose.”

Only after we have our goal, can we we then “set in order the details.” If the goal is about deciding what target we are aiming for, the plan is about deciding what we need in order to hit that target.

Once the plan is determined, we can begin executing in order to achieve the goal.

and now....Your Daily Memes