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THE CHALLENGE
Development organizations in the enterprise face a conundrum. The mandate from the business to build and deploy faster is leading to code being released into production with more bugs and exploits. As technical debt grows, productivity and innovation suffer as teams are in a constant state of fixing rather than innovating. They’re playing an increasingly risky game of whack-a-mole.
START IN THE IDE
Many leading-edge development teams have embraced this new normal in the software development lifecycle by shifting governance and security left in order to stop poor code and other vulnerabilities from entering the release workflow.
They are in essence adding guardrails to the IDE – preventing issues from rearing their ugly (and costly) heads later on in the process. This logic follows the age-old adage of prevention being better than the cure…
The shift left movement is gaining steam. In a recent GitLab survey of enterprise development teams, 57% said their organizations have either shifted left or are planning to do so this year.
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SALESFORCE TEAMS LEADING THE CHARGE
One corner of leadership for the shift left movement is Salesforce teams at select large companies. As Salesforce continues to expand its influence across the business, these teams are being pushed to build and deploy faster. As such, many have identified the need to insert quality and governance into the earliest stages of the development process.
An increasing number have turned to scalable governance automation as a means to move beyond resource-draining manual review and remediation. These leaders are fulfilling the promise of shifting left into the IDE in both concept and practice. The result is the development hygiene and agility needed to crank up productivity while lowering technical risk.
QUALITY CLOUDS STARTS IN THE IDE
Many of these top Salesforce teams have turned to Quality Clouds to enable the earliest possible governance in the IDE. By equipping their teams with Quality Clouds’ developer-level gating toolset, developers now run local, on-the-fly checks of their VS Code based on the dynamic rulesets centrally defined and controlled by team leadership. Code violations are flagged and remediated by the developer or tagged for write-off by management. Only then can approved code be committed into the org environment – providing a newfound level of governance and security.
SHIFTING TEAMS DEVELOPMENT LEFT
Governance automation further enables productivity by accelerating the learning and competence of expanding development teams. As ApexHours explains, a developer’s learning journey is self-paced in the initial stages but moves to a tools focus (GIT, etcetera) once they become reliant on a team dynamic.
By introducing the Quality Clouds toolset, companies ensure they achieve conformity in team competence and performance as they scale.
SALESFORCE DEVELOPMENT PIONEERS LEAD THE TREND
Shift-left automation from Quality Clouds has been adopted by the likes of IHG, Linde, and CaixaBank. These teams have broken the cycle of rising technical risk and slowing productivity that previously held them back from meeting accelerating growth plans. Their teams now operate at peak efficiency and performance – focusing the bulk of their efforts on innovation rather than a compounding maintenance cycle.
Timo Schmitt, Head of the Salesforce Center of Excellence at global chemical giant Linde Group, says it best: “We just spent too much time fixing problems instead of innovating. The infrequent and error-prone releases hampered the ability to scale.” He adds that post-implementation of Quality Clouds, “the Salesforce CoE team became the most agile and effective DevOps team in the organization.”
If you are ready to bring quality and governance automation to your Salesforce IDE, we invite you to reach out for a demo.
K.C. Watson has 25 years of go-to-market leadership experience at high-growth software and SaaS companies; currently running platform ecosystem alliance efforts at development governance leader Quality Clouds. Following two decades in Silicon Valley, K.C. now resides with his family in Madrid, Spain.
