Linde’s small team maintains a complex Salesforce setup with 3 orgs and more than 25 custom apps. It’s currently used by over 10,000 users in over 50 countries. From the start, the team had ambitious plans for their Salesforce implementation, with a wealth of ideas for both internal and external business use. Using an agile philosophy they were running parallel projects with their own timelines and lifecycles. However, they soon stumbled upon issues deploying changes from the various projects to Salesforce. There were many conflicts, projects ended up blocking each other and eventually, their release cycle slowed down to quarterly. Linde resolved to find a solution to this. Using automated release management and testing, they solved these issues and sped up their releases first to bi-weekly and then later to continuous delivery. However, they were then faced with new problems. All the extra speed meant that quality was suffering due to a lack of time to manually review the increased amount of code being deployed. Lots of technical debt was mounting in the background as a result. This started to hamper productivity as more time had to be spent on fixing issues rather than delivering the team’s signature innovations. These issues with quality were increasingly holding back the development speed. Another solution was required. In order to stabilize their pipeline, Linde needed visibility over the quality of what was entering their pipeline and their existing orgs. Looking at the marketplace, Quality Clouds stood out to them with its tailored automation and holistic approach to development governance. The fact it could be used within their orgs and their git repositories made it an obvious choice for their needs.
We just spent too much time fixing problems instead of innovating. The infrequent and error-prone releases hampered the ability to scale.
Timo Schmitt, Head of Salesforce Platform
Solution
Linde’s release team found their lives made significantly easier by the introduction of new quality gates which let them check committed code against security, maintenance and structural best practices before deploying to other instances. This led to increased quality in releases while at the same time significantly reducing the team’s expended effort.
As forward thinkers, Linde had previously developed their own list of best practices which Quality Clouds let them effortlessly check for in their code. Not only did automation provide greater coverage than manual reviews ever could, it also provided a higher accuracy.
The ability to check feature branches in their git repository has proved especially useful, with it making Linde’s parallel project approach much easier to maintain. Ever pushing for a more integrated approach to deployment management, Linde even brought Quality Clouds to work together with Copado. The resulting publicly available integration has enabled developers to scan git branches within their own user stories. This has further ensured the speed of Linde’s continuous delivery pipeline.
Benefits
Quality Clouds has freed up countless hours for Linde’s team. They now spend more time building and innovating rather than manually reviewing errors. Being able to reduce the technical debt by easily identifying critical issues has led to their pipeline remaining agile and efficient. Simple and quick monitoring of their configuration means quality issues are found before they get into production, which is when they start to have serious cost implications. Linde has now been empowered to build the sustainable and mature DevOps pipeline they originally envisioned. Their delivery performance has substantially improved, increasing flexibility and ensuring their place as the company’s most effective DevOps team. They are now fully equipped to make the most of their Salesforce platform and scale their growing business with confidence.
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