Salesforce DevOps Center is exactly what I wanted

This is a few months late, but I finally got around to reading up about Salesforce DevOps center and I think it’s amazing. It was announced at TDX last year, but reading more about it makes me realise everything that I miss while using Salesforce DX. It is still in private beta but from the looks of it, we should have access to it later this year.

While DX is great from a developer perspective, the process of launching a scratch org, making changes and selecting what needs to be pushed to Git was never simple enough. I feel that Salesforce team picked the right elements of the DX process to enhance with a UI. What we don’t know is what all features will be available in the free tier. Perhaps it might be limitation on the number of changes that can be pushed? We don’t know for now.

So what can an admin do with it?

1. Define work items that needs to be worked on.
2. Maintain status of the work items.
3. Launch your sandbox.
4. Pull in changes made in your sandbox from a work item.
5. Select the changes that need to be pushed to Git.

You can see a video demo of the same in the trailblazer community.

What this means for you and me

As an admin or an analyst that is part of a dev team, this adds a native functionality to add the work items that need to be taken up in a sprint. The transition from Jira-Confluence to Salesforce DevOps Center will be bumpy because of the automations companies have set up in Jira and its use across the organisation.

The other factor is the CI/CD part of it. Once the code is deployed in git you can use the existing pipeline to move those changes to QA, UAT or Prod as you do today. Else you can continue to use DX to manually push the latest commits in git to these orgs. Yes, that means Change sets are not as relevant as it used to be and there is a risk of it being removed completely in a few years.

Third thing to keep in mind is that each developer or admin who needs access to the DevOps center will need production license, albeit a limited one. This is something most companies do not budget for as of now.

---

For more details read the official quip document which has a thorough QnA. Also join the official trailblazer community for the functionality.