Over the past few months, I've heard a lot of Salesforce partners, customers, and others make statements such as "DX is the future" indicating developers and admins need to deeply understand version control concepts and use an IDE (VS Code) to make changes and build things on the Platform. I personally do not agree with that statement-- for two main reasons:
- It is contrary to the "clicks, not code" mindset-- one of Salesforce's top selling features
- It is exclusionary to large cohorts of users (eg, business analysts, admins, people re-entering the workforce) who may not have traditional software engineering backgrounds
My question for you is:
Can Salesforce provide messaging/guidance regarding how both tools like the CLI (which is an absolutely valuable tool and required for proper developer experience) and DevOps Center (an amazing win for declarative developers) will co-exist peacefully within Salesforce Ohana? #Salesforce Developer
Hi all - sincere apologies for not weighing in on this thread sooner.
Yes, yes, absolutely a key premise of DevOps Center is its compatibility with the CLI and existing SFDX practices. One of our key goals with this product is to allow declarative/admin users to work alongside programmatic/CLI-based users working on the same project, source control repository, pipeline, etc. We are referring to these team structures as "hybrid" or "fusion", where you have different types of developers (low-code/pro-code) and various roles of team members working together on a single project, but using tools of their choice and comfort level. In relation to this, here's our DevOps Center roadmap we've been executing against at a high level:
- Pilot (last year): An end-to-end declarative experience for change and release management, leveraging work items, source tracking, Github integration, and click-based deployments through a configurable deployment pipeline. No support for "hybrid" teams yet.
- Closed Beta (now): Phase 1 of our "hybrid" team support. Users can work directly in GitHub with mergeability rules and direct merges, and DevOps Center will recognize and reflect those actions.
[SAFE HARBOR disclaimer for items below]
- Open Beta (summer): Phase 2 of our "hybrid team support". Users can commit changes and create pull requests directly to GitHub and DevOps Center will recognize and reflect those actions.
- GA (fall): Phase 3 of our "hybrid team support" including a new (likely Beta) CLI plugin. Users can deploy changes from outside DevOps Center (from CLI or via CLI commands in a CI/CD system), and DevOps Center will reflect those actions.
This gets us to a state where "hybrid" teams can work collaboratively on projects, leveraging change tracking and management, source control, deployment pipelines, and CI/CD if you have it set up through an existing system.
Future plans beyond GA do include support for packaging-based flows, built-in CI/CD, additional source control provider support, work tracking tool (ie JIRA, Agile Accelerator) integration, testing tool integration, and a bunch more!
We're hoping to publish a public roadmap to this site as well, but hopefully the info above helps at this time. Please feel free to provide any feedback or further questions as you have them.
