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Salesforce is the industry leader in Customer Relationship Management platforms now, which offers plenty of opportunities for the organizations to enjoy a more customized and time-saving customer service experience. Growing more than just a CRM, Salesforce is not an end-to-end enterprise administration platform, which offers Sales Cloud, Operations Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and SF DevOps provide a complete cultural shift in enterprise development by ensuring development-operations collaboration well.
All the specialty positions in Salesforce are now highly in demand, including the Salesforce Administrators, SF DevOps developers, Salesforce Consultants, and more. Here, in this article, we look at the role of Salesforce Developers in the highly competitive enterprise application development environment.
Who is a Salesforce Developer?
Even it does not need to have a master’s or specialized degree to become a successful Salesforce Developer. The professional must have a fair understanding of the Object-Oriented Programming concepts, design patterns as Model-View-Controller, knowledge of .NET development framework, or java.
Salesforce themselves offers a lot of certification programs, which enables the programmers to know more about the different Salesforce facets like Sales Cloud, Service, Marketing Cloud, etc. and work with those. It is also not necessary that Salesforce Developers need to have a certification to handle all these, but having these will undoubtedly help to ensure more credibility.
Programming languages used by Salesforce Developers
Apex is the primary language on which Salesforce is built, and Visualforce is the programming language on which the user interfaces of Salesforce are created. HTML language is also used to create user interfaces, which is interspersed with the VisualForce language. You also need to have an understanding of JavaScript to handle Salesforce development, which is used more in the Lightning components of Salesforce, which is deemed to be the future of Salesforce UI development.
Even though Salesforce had recently released their development platform, they developed each of their other platforms with development in mind. This platform is now optimized for all types of conventional developers to port on to quickly and offer a very positive experience to all. The developers now enjoy the flexibility to customize the Salesforce development environment to fit their unique needs with no restrictions.
Using platforms like SF DevOps provided out to be a massive benefit for the users to provide their clients with quick and easy solutions, which can grow with their organization and expand when they like to. Another highly appreciated thing about Salesforce Development is its ability to integrate with other systems, present the data at the right time, and use various platforms and tools provided by the Salesforce and third parties.
Even though this is the case, there are also some criticizing the Salesforce development platform as there is no apt Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Salesforce Developers, which may sometimes make it a bit tedious than the conventional approaches.
What can an ideal Salesforce Developer offer to the customer?
Salesforce Developers, apart from developing enterprise applications on the DevOps platform, can also help the customers with the implementation and customization of various Salesforce modules. At the first point, integration of the existing systems with the Salesforce platform is necessary, which can be executed by a knowledgeable programmer. Next, the developers will work on extending the scope of the platform beyond just point-and-click development.
Extending the scope means including custom reporting options, automation of the complicated aggregations, and automation of the routine business processes, etc. Another service offered by a Salesforce developer is building customer-facing websites, which don’t appear on the Force.com platform but get integrated later. This will provide the customers of Salesforce a very traditional website experience they are used to, but with all the advanced features of Salesforce Sales, Marketing, Customer Service platforms.
Salesforce DevOps
As we had seen, Salesforce development is about management and changes in the metadata configurations to release them. It is different from conventional software development, which includes only very less coding. Due to this diversity in the development approach, Salesforce developers can also benefit primarily from rapid feedback cycles and measures for instant resolution of the problems. SF DevOps development approach will help to instigate a continuous feedback loop, which will further improve the output quality and ensure business agility and IT responsiveness.
Both Agile and Lean development methodologies act as the core of the DevOps paradigm. These enable businesses to develop continuously and deliver quickly. So, the key takeaways of SF DevOps are Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), and Continuous Deployment.
Better collaboration and real-time communication
SF DevOps transforms how development and operations teams in an organization work collaboratively by facilitating a complete cultural shift. It can break down the silos easily among the development and operations teams and stakeholders alike. This will also help enhance a business’s ability to deliver the applications and gain first to market advantages rapidly.
Quicker Feedback Loops
DevOps also ensure the agile best practices of continuous feedback, which focuses on enhancing the operational stability and quality of the outcome based on constant customer feedback. This approach will help the development teams to access this feedback loop to be incorporated in the process.
Automation of Deployment Pipeline
Automating deployments on Salesforce DevOps will help the teams to promote metadata code and configure the changes seamlessly to different Salesforce environments with only a few clicks. The solutions which automate the deployments also help improve the development productivity, and the operations team also gets the advantage with better application quality.
More frequent releases
Salesforce DevOps allows the development teams to release a custom set of features at a time and then further enhancements based on the customer feedback loop. This is so critical in the process of customer feedback and then using those further to streamline the application for more perfection and user-friendliness. The end-to-end release management tools on SF DevOps will also offer top-notch support to the enterprise development team to improve the release frequency and quality.
This article is meant for beginner developers to understand just the basics of the Salesforce Development approach. If you want to seriously explore technological learning, the best option is to subscribe to the Salesforce Trailheads, which will give you a gamified way of learning Salesforce essentials.
