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Salesforce is rapidly expanding and gaining traction among companies across various sectors. It provides all the essential functionalities a business can utilize to drive growth. Examples of what Salesforce can accomplish include lead management, executing efficient marketing campaigns, handling and storing customer information, and enhancing communication.
Are you interested? You should be. Creating and launching a Salesforce application can be challenging. It requires careful planning, teamwork, and thorough testing to ensure the application meets the needs of both the business and its customers.
This is where Salesforce Development comes in. It offers a straightforward process for designing, testing, and launching Salesforce applications. This process includes gathering requirements, design, coding, testing, and deployment. With so many parts involved, it's easy to see how problems can arise.
This blog post will provide an in-depth examination of the Salesforce Development Lifecycle. You will learn about various models and methods, as well as the primary challenges that businesses and developers may encounter during this process.
Whether you are an experienced Salesforce professional or just starting out, you can expect to gain valuable insights and practical tips for your next Salesforce project. Now, let's get started.
What Is Salesforce Development?
Salesforce development involves creating, customizing, integrating, and enhancing the capabilities of the Salesforce platform to develop cloud-based applications tailored to specific business needs.
Salesforce supports the creation of applications using multiple programming languages and integrated development environments, including Apex, Visualforce, and the Salesforce Lightning Platform.
Businesses can utilize these programming languages to develop custom applications, user interfaces, and business logic, as well as to integrate with third-party applications or systems.
Thanks to its multi-tenant architecture and user-friendly interfaces, Salesforce enables businesses to incorporate ease of use and adaptability into their ongoing operations. Adhering closely to the Salesforce development lifecycle is essential for achieving an optimal Salesforce application as the final product.
Salesforce Development Lifecycle
The Salesforce Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is a structured framework that outlines the key stages involved in the development process. It provides a systematic approach that encompasses all the necessary elements, from the initial development to the final implementation of applications and functionalities on the platform.
Stage 1: Prepare The Development Plan
Before starting the development phase, it is essential to create a plan that outlines what you need and conduct an analysis. Involve your Product Manager to gather specifications and identify any challenges. Once you have a clear concept for your project, discuss it thoroughly with your team or development partner. As your team progresses, they will need various development and testing tools, so identify and organize these essentials.
Stage 2: Get Moving With The Development
Begin by focusing on development while adhering to the established guidelines. The Lightning Platform offers valuable tools, including the Custom Object Wizard, Flow Builder, and other helpful user interface elements. You can also access programmatic tools, such as the Source Code Editor, Developer Console, and Visual Studio Code. Ensure the development process takes place in an environment with a copy of the production organization’s metadata but without any production data.
Stage 3: Test
Complete your tasks on time and check each step to ensure everything works correctly before connecting it to user systems. Use the same environment you used for development during testing, but keep the integration and development environments separate.
Stage 4: Build Release
At this stage of development, it's essential to bring all parts together and finalize what you have created and changed. Once you finish the development phase, merge everything into a single, clear structure. Create a unified release package that includes your customized logical bundles for deployment. Focus on what you have prepared for the release.
Step 5: Test Release
Verify that your deployment is ready by testing it in a secure staging environment that closely resembles production. Use data similar to what you have in production. Ensure the testing environment is connected to all external systems to reflect production integrations accurately. Run thorough tests to identify any issues and check performance. Finally, gather feedback from experienced users during the user-acceptance testing.
Step 6: Release
After testing, if your team is confident in the quality, start deploying customizations in your production environment. Ensure that your employees understand the entire system and the changes that have been made. If the release has a significant impact on users, consider creating a training environment that utilizes real-time data.
Dealing with this can be challenging, but working with a Salesforce development partner can make it easier. These partners have extensive experience and knowledge that can help lower release management risks. They also provide essential support after the release.
Salesforce Development Models
The term “Salesforce development models” refers to various methodologies used in designing, building, testing, and deploying applications on the Salesforce platform.
Salesforce has two categories of Development models that support the source origin:
Org Development Model
The Org Development model offers tools that give users more flexibility and scalability. It has a unique approach to deploying solutions and offers new methods for managing, tracking, and implementing changes in testing environments, ultimately in their live organization.
The Org Development model utilizes a source control repository to keep all changes and files associated with projects. This repository bridges the gap in maintaining alignment across environments. After externalizing changes for each release, your team will understand that the Source Repository reflects their deliveries, ensuring consistency as environmental adjustments are made. With this consistency, developers can progress effectively throughout the development, testing, and release processes.
Let’s examine the release artifact, a compilation of changes required for the production organization. The development team can use change-tracking tools to monitor changes made to different components. They can compare these changes with those made through the organization's setup UI, which helps identify who made each change.
Additionally, the Salesforce Extensions for VS Code are the perfect choice for extracting metadata from development environments. By leveraging these extensions, you can commit changes to source control and set up an automated workflow for testing and deploying to production. This method also addresses another issue: the continuous generation and deployment of change sets that result from inconsistencies and errors between environments.
Package Development Model
Overseeing team member adjustments can be challenging for firms that frequently undertake large Salesforce projects with complex requirements. To overcome this, they should investigate a development model that efficiently manages all changes and streamlines the development process from start to finish.
The Package Development Model is ideal in this case, as it offers several benefits:
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Enhances teamwork and management of groups.
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Facilitates the handling of modifications.
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Optimizes automated testing and supports continuous integration.
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Enhances the efficiency of the release process.
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Enables modular development and outlines dependencies across different packages.
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Enhances Version Control System (VCS) synchronization through change tracking
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Offers better clarity and oversight in managing changes within the production organization
Benefits of Salesforce Development for Your Business
When Salesforce development is completed correctly, you will receive many benefits. Some of them are listed below:
1. Empower Your Sales and Marketing Team
Salesforce development enables organizations to create intelligent calendars, reports, dashboards, and analytics, ensuring that sales and marketing teams are informed about real-time performance. As a result, teams will be better equipped to recognize and capitalize on opportunities, finalize more deals, and increase revenues. Additionally, with guided selling, users will understand when and how to take specific actions to close the deal successfully.
2. Ease of Managing Orders
By offering a centralized processing, automation, and tracking platform, Salesforce enables businesses to handle orders more efficiently and effectively. The platform's ability to customize workflows and integrate with other systems facilitates smooth order management tailored to each business's unique requirements. This enhances both efficiency and precision while minimizing mistakes.
3. Identify Growth and Decline in Your Business
Salesforce covers all aspects of your business, addressing potential opportunities and areas for growth. During strategy development, teams can consult market performance data and outline the necessary actions to achieve success. Furthermore, reports and dashboards enable teams to anticipate upcoming periods of potential decline in their business.
4. Develop Applications that Users Love.
Salesforce offers numerous customization options that enable teams to develop an application that customers will appreciate. With its comprehensive features, including multi-tenant cloud architecture, process automation, data analytics, performance management, UI/UX management, and customer support, creating an application that signifies business success has become effortless.
5. Keep an Eagle’s Eye on Competitor’s Activities
Salesforce CRM analytics enable companies to track their competitors and gain insight into their sales, marketing, and customer engagement strategies. By examining data on rivals' performance, businesses can assess their effectiveness, pinpoint areas that require improvement, and inform their product development and pricing strategies, thereby gaining a competitive edge in the market.
6. Improved Decision-Making
Salesforce empowers your teams to visualize their current market position and their desired future state. With timely data storage, management, and updates, your team will have additional opportunities to analyze existing market trends and respond appropriately.
Challenges Faced in Salesforce Development
Even though you are clear on how your Salesforce development process should proceed, you might still encounter some setbacks.
Here are some potential challenges that can restrict you from getting benefit from Salesforce development effectively:
1. Lack of Expertise
Salesforce development requires skilled developers with expertise across various horizontal and vertical aspects of Salesforce. While having such talented individuals on your team isn't always essential, investing in Salesforce is beneficial. However, you can hire Salesforce developers or seek assistance from a certified Salesforce development partner to realize a return on that investment.
2. Difficulty in Customization
Every company has unique processes and specific features it desires in its CRM. Salesforce provides numerous customization possibilities that simplify the development process. Nevertheless, it will take time to determine which tools can meet your existing needs, and navigating this process on your own will be quite time-consuming.
To maximize Salesforce, it is essential to have an individual who embodies both traits. The first trait is thoroughly comprehending the business requirements and the technical skills needed to customize Salesforce accordingly.
3. Inadequacy of Support From Salesforce
Salesforce offers free support to customers, but it may take up to two days for a response. This delay can affect how quickly you complete your tasks. If you encounter difficulties while developing, you can access resources such as the Trailhead Video Library, User Community, and Guided Journeys for assistance.
If you require further assistance, you can contact the Salesforce Support team. They will provide guidance and address your issues directly. Alternatively, you can seek help from the employed Salesforce team. A Salesforce team typically comprises Salesforce Developers, Business Analysts, Quality Assurance Analysts, Consultants, and architects.
4. Lack of Clarity on User Permissions
Lacking sufficient knowledge may lead you to assign administrative rights to users who don’t require them. For instance, Salesforce differentiates permissions across various roles and profiles to ensure the security and confidentiality of data.
Using Salesforce as your Customer Relationship Management platform helps you gather and organize all critical information, including details about your business activities, customers, revenue, and prospects.
Managing users in Salesforce requires expertise, including customizing user permissions and accurately setting up profiles and hierarchies. Unfortunately, many organizations fail to recognize the importance and complexity of this area and its effect on data integrity.
The Final Words
Salesforce development can significantly boost your business's growth and overall success. Nevertheless, collaborating with a proficient development partner is crucial for effectively managing the complete development lifecycle, ensuring your applications are bug-free, user-friendly, and aligned with every facet of your business.
Our team has extensive experience in the Salesforce ecosystem, having completed various projects across multiple industries through our exceptional Salesforce development services. Therefore, if you want to enhance your current processes or have an idea that needs to be developed into a functional solution, our specialists are eager to explore your thoughts.
Schedule a call with us today!
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