Level Up Your Salesforce Quality & Testing Maturity

Improving the maturity of the Salesforce DevOps process is essential for increasing work productivity and delivering value to an organization in a timely manner. A key aspect of enhancing DevOps involves prioritizing testing and shifting it to the early stages of development. It is crucial to choose the right functional testing tool, comprehend quality, and optimize release quality in Salesforce implementation projects. In this podcast episode, we have Samuel, a product manager and architect at Provar, a leading Salesforce testing tool, who shares his expertise on various quality and testing topics in the Salesforce ecosystem. He also explains how to integrate quality into all aspects of a Salesforce project.

Samuel is a respected figure in the Salesforce community, serving as a product manager and architect at Provar. He is known for his proficiency in developing apps on the Salesforce platform and his emphasis on quality. Provar is an automation testing tool that is integrated and code-free, tailored particularly for Salesforce. Samuel is also the founder of Yplicity, a Salesforce ISV partner, and has extensive experience in transforming intricate concepts into user-friendly apps for the Salesforce ecosystem. In this podcast, Samuel shares his perspective on what defines quality. The conversation then delves into the challenges of balancing automated testing with small development changes in Salesforce. Samuel also discusses the trend of embedding testing and quality frameworks within DevOps processes to maintain quality in the industry. Additionally, we explore how to handle failed deployments or implementations in production. We also touch on the importance of achieving comprehensive coverage across all systems through end-to-end testing expansion. Samuel offers recommended resources for those interested in unit testing, automated testing, and quality assurance. Lastly, Samuel shares his own experience in the Salesforce ecosystem. This podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in quality and testing in Salesforce implementation projects.

Resources:

Connect with Samuel:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/samuelarroyo/

Mentioned in the episode:

Ministry of Testing: ministryoftesting.com/

Test Automation University: testautomationu.applitools.com/

University of PROVAR: provar.me/

Salesforce Trailhead Modules on Testing: trailhead.salesforce.com/modules

Podcast Transcript:

Francis Pindar 0:00
Hello, my name is Francis Pender, and you are watching or listening to the Salesforce posse podcast, where I speak to Salesforce industry influencers. So we can get you a better understanding of how to excel in a career path from a Salesforce admin or developer, to an architect. And in this conversation, I’m going to be talking to Samuel Aurora, who is a product manager and architect at PROVAR, a fantastic testing tool for the Salesforce platform. But I wanted to pick his brains about how you build for quality, and how you stop pushing the needle to improve outcomes in Salesforce implementation projects. So interested in maximising release quality, I’ll want to take a look at how you choose a functional testing tool correctly, or even understand what quality is, then we’re gonna, you’re gonna get a lot of value out of this conversation with Samuel. So without further ado, let’s go. So here we have Samuel Arroyo. Arroyo, is that correct? I was getting those wrong. Brilliant. So how did you get into the Salesforce ecosystem?

Samuel Arroyo 1:26
But it’s a bit of a funny story I was studying at university. And I think it was it was a three year degree. It was a third year, and we had some conferences, and a startup from Madrid came, they did a couple of sessions. One was about Google Cloud. And the other was Salesforce. I didn’t care about Salesforce at all. We will was the name I wanted? Yeah, exactly. So I definitely went, went to the Google Cloud conference. And I will say there was they did like some sort of interview, where I tried to explain Oh, yeah, I did that. And this and that. And, and I will say that they never contacted me for a while then. I was on holidays. And they reached out to me. They got at the startup and they call me and like, Would you be interested in working in this startup working in in Salesforce like the Salesforce ecosystem? I don’t have a clue what Salesforce is. I’m calling your holidays. But I mean, it’s been, you’re a young person, you don’t say no to a job fairly. Recently, this 50% You’ll say no to a job. So that’s it, like okay, as I’ll be starting in a couple of weeks. And you also find like, when I started the team, that the few people that also joined the already one week training, were training, they were just following one of the Salesforce resources. And there was a like a big book of Salesforce where they they had everything, and they were going through that. But I figured out there were workbooks, there was a like a visa force workbook. And then I started using those, which were much more practical. And and in a week, I really caught up on surpass them, because they were so yeah,

Francis Pindar  3:25
brilliant. Yeah, I remember that. So when did you get started with how many years ago

Samuel Arroyo 3:29
in the cell now? Must be like 2012.

Francis Pindar  3:33
Okay, yeah. So yeah, it’s kind of like, all you had was like the workbooks, the online manual. And that was it. And the Salesforce courses, you know, which you could spend hideous amounts of money on? And that was it, and maybe some developer forums. I think that was it. We’re here. Yeah, talking about quality. And so I think kind of it’s it’s really important for the old days and architect and new way, making sure that that what’s being envisioned, what the goals of the organisation are, are being delivered, I suppose through my architectural designs and also being kind of implemented in the organisation. But I think, yep, I think maybe the first question to ask is like, what does quality mean to you? I think,

Samuel Arroyo
yeah, that’s a good question. Isn’t gnarling to me, I think quality means different things to different people. When I think about quality, I can think of the whole lifecycle and how different people will think that what they do, there’s an aspect of quality. So I think it’s easier when when we look at something that is not software, sometimes and when you have a watch, and you think this watch is quality, like it has good quality, but do you look in it, is it because it’s robust? You can go on the water? Or is it because it didn’t last very long. So I think For me quality, it is that something is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. By when it comes to software. For some people quality means it never breaks. But for other people that are more interested in the experience of the user, for them good quality means a good user experience sometimes. So as a business is important to define, what do we mean by quality? All the different angles by which you can look at quality with, which I think in the end is, well, why what, what is what does good look like? Then set the benchmark? And then once you know what good looks like, it’s like, okay, that is quality that we’re striving for. And, and then anything below that is room for improvement.

Francis Pindar 5:55
Yeah, I think it’s, I always found, yeah, when done done always is the same kind of thing. I remember working in a film post production company. And it’s like, when, and it’s very design thing, right? Creating CG graphics and stuff for films, and it’s very creative. And it was like, when is it got to that kind of quality bar, that you’re happy with it? And these designers that are constantly tweaking and twisting and making it even more perfect? And it’s like, for them the bar was when they ran out of money and ran out of time? That was it. That was the, that’s when you kind of hit that that quality level, right? Because you had to ship it. And I remember where one film, it was literally, it was releasing in two weeks, and they were still, you know, twiddling with it. But so, obviously, like, world, you know, everybody’s kind of looking at the kind of key kind of ways of improving my DevOps process quality being kind of core to that. And it Okay, so there’s one thing of kind of understanding from your organisation, what quality looks like for them, so you know what to focus on? But how do you then kind of understand what the maturity is, and what the kind of the process is to maintaining that and, and setting that, especially if you’ve come from like, a very manual testing, kind of organisation?

Samuel Arroyo 7:31
Yeah, that does a good a whole area in itself, there are different works that try to help people understand the level of maturity? I think it depends on in, how many parts? Are you looking at quality? How are you measuring it? Sometimes it’s not when measured, sometimes is not tested, so you know what quality looks like. But then once you ship a particular feature, and you tick the box, then that say that you never looked back to see if that’s still the case that there are many changes. You may have to do with automation as well. So without automation, it is very difficult to scale. And I’ve seen, I used to work in a consultancy, and quality was always a difficult topic because they pay you by the hour. And that means Well, the thing is, well, you will spend time making sure that everything looks perfect. That is time and money. So you need to sacrifice something, and sometimes you optimise for speed or for the budget that you have, and you have to sacrifice quality. And then the cases come later when they open a case this is not working as expected. And then you look back to the user story. And he was nowhere there. It wasn’t on the acceptance criteria. And then he’s like, Well, we never said that. This was what quality good quality man so even as a product manager, I find that sometimes that I may not spend too much time on a user story or the acceptance criteria. And then when the team comes back with most of it already done, I realise is not as good as I thought. But it’s not the team’s problem. It’s just I didn’t specify in detail what could look like what

Francis Pindar 9:37
is actually a picture isn’t it is that of that house and you’re kind of building a house and different people’s view the house looks different, you know, product, five storey massive mansion kind of thing. Where’s the developers just looking at as a cottage?

Samuel Arroyo 9:53
Yeah. Yeah. And that happens as well like probably In your case, like if you’re managing people, or you’re training junior developers or junior Salesforce admins, and they do something, and you look at the quality of what they’ve done, it’s not good enough for me. But I cannot just tell you all the time to come to my standards of quality, because that will mean that you are senior, and not Junior, like, you don’t have that much to learn. And also, I don’t want to micromanage you. So you have to sacrifice quality because the other person has to learn.

Francis Pindar 10:35
Yeah, interesting. So yeah, so it’s kind of a levels of quality based on the levels of experience developing in Salesforce, or implementing in Salesforce. So how do you manage that in React? So okay, so obviously, you said like, one of the things for scaling, tech quality and testing is going the kind of automated testing route. So what are the kind of the argument that we see got, because the scalable argument for automated testing, but what are the others because always find that, it’s almost like not dancing with the devil, but you can go down a road where everything is so automated testing. And there’s so much kind of engineering there in the automated testing, that when it comes to making small dev changes, which are small on the development side of Salesforce, the impact on the automation, automated testing is huge. And you kind of you almost ended up doing more work supporting the automated testing than you are actually doing the change. So I suppose it’s what’s the balance? How would you kind of achieve that you’re not kind of gone? So far, the automated testing? And what are the arguments for automated testing in that in those regards?

Samuel Arroyo 11:53
Yeah, I think that, that that may be some sort of implicit assumption, especially from I think, the software industry, where, because it’s so easy to build things, we are not used to having these processes in place where quality is very important. Like you look at the manufacturing of cars, yeah, then quality is much more important than it is for us, even though, because obviously, in that case, you’re risking lives. But some of the software, the more implications it has for human beings, or the economic system, whatever the more quality goes into it and cannot be escaped,

Francis Pindar  12:38
which I always find funny, because in the IT world, because it’s like, yes, you’ve got this risk of a life when manufacturing a car, but with it being so unregulated, essentially. But with AI, and many things kind of coming in that actually, the things you’re doing could impact the lives of people. And actually, yeah, having more focus on quality and testing is something that maybe is a safer way of working, then suddenly being liable for something that you had no idea that your development change, there’s my hate in the real world.

Samuel Arroyo 13:17
Yeah. And obviously, I think that there’s that famous debate where real real engineers say subway engineers are not engineers, that you don’t put into your software, the same amount of effort that somebody building a bridge, or our building is going through the risks, you need to calculate everything, you have to go through several levels of quality, everything’s tested. Whereas we software, we just do it and hope for the best. And

Francis Pindar 13:48
we use common of the

Samuel Arroyo 13:55
that I think that that is to say that maybe it’s because we undertake quality, as serious as other engineering specialties. So I think historically, we’re just not thinking about it. We think about speed, train the edge technologies, something that is new, we like to tinker with things. And when it comes to quality, even in the Salesforce world, I wonder how many people even do like test driven development, which I think is an effort on the part of engineers to start with testing and having already done from the beginning, instead of writing the unit test at the end, where it’s really a white box, like you implemented it, your destiny, you know, all the workarounds and all the backdoors and everything and you know how to make it pass like what’s what’s even the point? Some people say, Well, don’t do your own unit tests, have somebody else do them, which means there’s also some knowledge transfer and you cannot see it As you might bring up a box of doughnuts, and then the other person who does, like we tried to do, we tried to get around, improve quality. And I think the automation just makes you stay on top of your game. Because if you know you’re constantly being monitored, and whatever you produce is going to be tested. Like it’s not, it’s not, it’s not going to go into production ignored. If if the automated testing is realised in, for example, because of your changes, the code coverage is going down. What do you do? Or because of your changes, these are the code, these are the flowers, this this thing is breaking. It’s only you’re accountable. So the thing is, if you do that manually, again, you are at the risk of just missing testing a specific user journey, or? Yeah, I think automation allows you to scale, which I think is the main issue.

Francis Pindar 16:08
Do you are you seeing in the industry more because I’m seeing it from my side where, you know, augers are just getting more complex, more troublesome? And actually, people are thinking a lot more around actually, how do we maintain the quality but still kind of keep this feed through the orc and just kind of interesting, you see it like your side, actually more people wanting to kind of embed testing and quality frameworks within their kind of DevOps processes or within the way they’re working? Is that changing?

Samuel Arroyo 16:40
You know? Yeah, I think that there’s still picking up I think that’s why, for example, the likes of Kobato bought some testing software. And we see more Salesforce ISVs focused on on testing. But last month is DevOps is not as big as that, but I think it’s definitely something that people that have been burned with implementations are realising well, what’s the point on just wasting millions on implementing Salesforce? And not getting something in the end that we thought we were gonna get? He’s like, Oh, well, maybe the problem is not Salesforce. Maybe you then the fire what good looks like and how do you test the quality and

Francis Pindar 17:29
where the source of truth is, have been built? Yeah. Yeah.

Samuel Arroyo 17:33
And even the, the main didn’t maintainability of all of that. I think many businesses just use consultancies to implement Salesforce or changes to their Salesforce org. But when they’re gone, where’s that documentation? Where are the tests? How do I know if I can make a change? Will it break what the other company built for me? Am I going to lose all that investment? Because I like how do you now. So unless you have tests that allow you to feel safe to make improvements to your Salesforce org, you’re just in the unknown, you don’t feel confident to make any change?

Francis Pindar 18:16
is one of those problems isn’t the way the ecosystem has grown? Yeah, it’s it’s kind of very consultant driven implementations. And I think again, this is I think this is where again, where people have got to where the maturity the old you had, like, all kinds of different consultancies and people working in the same thing, and you’ve kind of got away with it. Yeah, it’s kind of Oh, issue small issues. Okay, resolve them, they are happening. But now it’s the well, actually, it’s a bit of a quagmire, you know, we change this things are hidden limits over here. And we didn’t realise, and you’re kind of, I’m not, it’s almost not quite the end of that kind of code thrashing. scenario, where literally, it’s just quicker to start, again, is to actually try and fix everything. So how, what would your approach be, then if you are in a scenario where you aren’t doing manual testing, or you your quality, you know, is suffering, you’re getting a lot of failed deployments or failed implementations going into production that just bugs appearing a lot more. And you know, your testing is kind of manual at the moment. What, what are your first steps you said, like you’re defining what quality is, and what good looks like, but then what’s the next step after that?

Samuel Arroyo 19:40
So Well, if you’ve had problems already, with your implementation, you can probably track back what the issue was. I’ve seen this many people working around the established process where it’s like, well, you want to make a change in production. You have to go through the different sandboxes somebody has to prove it. We need to run tests and then you we can deploy that, do you then just do changes in production? Yeah. So somebody may have done that without you knowing to make a validation rule. And then suddenly you want to deploy and you cannot do it anymore. So if you can prevent people from working around your process, that’s one thing. Then I think one of the barriers is something that you mentioned, which is not getting, it’s not bored, it’s just getting angry about how much time is consuming to just keep the quality up. And and the more changes that you do, the more you have to keep track of. So okay, how are you going to define what your business should be doing, like what the system should be doing? You’re going to rely on your you already know what user stories is. So I’m actually updating those once you finish with to reflect what the actual is in the system, because from the original idea until implementation, things may have changed. Some people might say, Well, why don’t you use the test cases? To tell you what the business is doing? It makes sense. Because, okay, let’s not think about test cases as something I need to do to do to, to make sure things I work in is like, these are the source of truth, the same way that you may argue, well, I don’t know what the code should be doing. But I, if I look at my unit tests, they should be telling me this is what they should be doing. If you don’t update your tests, suddenly you the now, but what the business should be doing what the system should be doing. So if you’re starting with manual testing, because it’s better than nothing, to be honest. And then it gets to the point where things break because Julian test them. And you may be the only person who cares about it, or the only person in the team that can do quality. And that’s something I’ve seen more recently, with all these layoffs, unfortunately, the people working in quality are laid off, because it’s one of those things that they sacrifice, like, Well, yeah, we need them. So we just lay them off, or

Francis Pindar 22:27
whoever wants to go, Yeah, you’re squeezed on time, what goes quality testing? It’s

Samuel Arroyo 22:34
and and then you see the result? companies try to release software after laying off. And then for some reason, there’s more quality issues than before. You never know.

Francis Pindar 22:48
You’re not implying something here that happened recently.

Samuel Arroyo 22:54
But I wonder, obviously, I’m thinking about it almost every day. And yeah, I wonder, well, who got laid off? And how do you fill the gap? If if the person was doing manual testing, and you lay that person off? That’s it, no one is doing quality. If at least you have some automated testing, while you can keep running those tests up to the point where you will need to update them eventually with with all the changes coming. So the thing with Salesforce developers are they have to do unit testing is inevitable for them. They can cheat the system because the only thing that is known as

Francis Pindar 23:33
just code. Yeah, get your code coverage. And away we go. Yeah.

Samuel Arroyo 23:37
Yeah. And it goes garbage is? Doesn’t really Yeah. Yeah, ideally, would be. And if it goes down, it’s telling you something is happening. But then you realise, well, that’s a problem for developers to figure out to make sure that they’re following their own best practices. But the thing is, I think in the Salesforce ecosystem, there is less and less push to code and more teachers built with flows and declarative tools. And I think the issue is, how do you test that because as a developer, you have unit tests, and the admins don’t have those tools. And it’s only been recently that Salesforce added a bit of testing or declarative testing on flogs. And from what I’ve heard, I haven’t used it myself. And what I’ve heard is, it’s not great. And

Francis Pindar 24:35
shall we say, yeah, yeah.

Samuel Arroyo 24:37
But it opens the conversation is like, Well, what about all these declarative processes that we’re building? How do we test them? While it’s flowers, you can still use unit tests, but then you need to rely on a developer.

Francis Pindar 24:52
And I think it’s also it’s like the the actual if you’re kind of thinking of the end to end testing, you could be including other systems. in that as well, so actually, it’s wider than Salesforce. Because you’re wanting to test that entire process through to an invoicing system or whatever it may be. And yeah, it’s more than just one piece of the puzzle, I suppose. And how would you kind of get that coverage across?

Samuel Arroyo 25:21
Yeah. And that’s where tools that allow you to automate through the UI. So from the perspective of a user that is interacting with the application, those are the ones that can help you to test your screen flows, your different user journeys. And obviously, there’s a number of tools in the market that allows you to test it there, you have tools that are more generic, even open source, anything like Selenium. They’re open source, but the definitely free. And those are generically you can test every website. The whole idea is, you locate something on the page. And then you just say how you want to interact, you want to click it the owner, put a text on the input, read the text, what do you want to do? And then you have different technologies as well, like, you have like the robot framework, which is a different way of writing your test scripts. And then you go, Okay, do I need to know development? Like, do I need to be a developer to try to automate my test cases? In some cases? Yes, like, if you’re using selenium, or you’re using the robot framework, is you may not look like COVID code. But still, you need to write

Francis Pindar  26:42
that code like way, yeah.

Samuel Arroyo 26:45
And you’re writing a file, it doesn’t feel intuitive, like just drag and drop, click lick lick. You have different tools in the market. And they have different approaches. As well, you have certain things with Salesforce because you may write your test script or read your test case with one of these tools. And then things may change. Even Salesforce may release a change that for some reason, it breaks your test case. And we’ve seen that as they were moving from aura into lightning web components, they were changing the UI back in they were in the way they were rendering things. And depending on your locators, then they could break or still work. And then okay, who do I need? What do I do every time Salesforce releases? Three times a year? Like, do I need to go through all my test cases and fix them? Or does it do allow me to work around that? Do they take care of that or not? So the effort that takes to maintain your test case is definitely something to consider.

Francis Pindar  27:55
So what else do you look for when you’re kind of looking for a functional testing tool?

Samuel Arroyo 28:02
So I think is how easy it is to build a test case. So what’s the learning curve? Is it easy to is it for developers, Kenyan citizen tester, like somebody with no experience whatsoever of writing any code? Start doing it? Or is it for people like admins who want to just automate their manual testing and get rid of all those hours spent to manual testing and do something else? So how easy is it to create a test case? And then how easy is it to maintain? I think those are the two main points. Forget about exporting your task is like, I think once you’re locked in with one tool, the pain of moving to another one is like, I might as well not do it. Yeah, I think that’s why it’s important to choose the right one at the beginning. Sometimes you don’t realise those two things, how easy it is to build and maintain until you’ve started using it. And sometimes there’s just not enough time during the trial period to figure out, is it something I can pick up? Is the name of months? Gonna take me? How do I test fictitious changes that may break? And so what I see with companies, they they tried to do a bit of due diligence. They compare different tools to see at a financial level. Yeah, and yeah, try to test them break them away. But yeah, also thinking of their arm people, like, well, if we need to rely on developers, then good luck trying to go like hiring them, and keeping them and then otherwise, we may have many more non technical people who could who could pick these up and make automated tests much more easily.

Francis Pindar 29:59
All right, cool. That’s fine. I think we get anything else you want to talk about quality? What are your best resources for finding out? How if if you want to learn more about unit testing automated testing quality?

Samuel Arroyo 30:18
Well, obviously there’s a lot out there. I did a course on Coursera. About software testing, I wouldn’t recommend it because it’s just too lengthy for people. But there’s many groups of people the same way we have our like Salesforce Developer Groups and user groups. They’re much more about testing because it’s everywhere. So you go to like Ministry of testing. There are testing conferences all the time going on. There’s test automation University. We have University of PROVAR. So there is a lot of courses information out there. Okay. Salesforce, I think that they have a few Trailhead modules for it. I know that the folks are probably if done two modules. Okay. Maybe going for a third? Yeah.

Francis Pindar 31:21
Okay. I’ll put those in the show notes if I can think about. Cool. Okay, so it’s probably a question I asked everybody at the end, or if I remember, at the end of the podcast, if you could wind back the clock to a point in time in the past and give yourself some advice would it be and when would that time be?

Samuel Arroyo 31:46
The I would probably go the five years ago. So yeah, since the beginning, I always wanted to work on products will product. done that since I started my career in, in Salesforce. But for some reason I was wanted to do that within the company I was at. And he actually never happened. Like, I didn’t get the support or things like that. So few years ago, I just thought, well, I could have just as bill as well build these apps myself. So I set up my own company. I created some epic things apps. And I use my free time to do that. And actually, that’s that’s how I sort of got the job. As a product manager, I switched from more technical tech, CTO to senior product manager, yeah, moved to product management, things to focus in on my free time to do products and just shifting. So I think it’s don’t expect other people or your company to fulfil your dreams. And just try and use even that. Yeah, whatever time you have free time after work hours to pursue those things. And you may be able to switch careers or to get something out of it.

Francis Pindar 33:16
Yeah, definitely. Great advice. Yeah. And to be. Yeah, it’s been the same and similar kind of journey, I suppose. And, and also, just that kind of realising that actually, I could ask my boss and the company to actually work four days a week rather than five. And they were actually up for it. And for me, that was quite a way of actually going well, I want to try something new. But I don’t want to risk everything. I’m just going to reduce my days down. And actually, I can start working on something else on the side. But yeah, fab. So these apps still on AppExchange?

Samuel Arroyo 33:50
Yeah, a couple of them. Going for us. They’re still going through security review, however. But yeah, sort of like a hobby of mine to just build interesting things in there.

Francis Pindar 34:04
So you know, are you the product owner of prover, or one of the products within prover?

Samuel Arroyo 34:11
So when I joined Pro was the company name, and the only product they had was PROVAR. Yeah, that was that was it. But then, a few months after I started working on a new AppExchange product so that the main product that does the test automation, is not on the epic scenes is a desktop app, where you build like a studio like an IDE. And you can run it on your laptop. You can write on the cloud wherever you want. I started working on an epic since product that Richard Clarke had worked previously. So yeah, yeah. And it was about test management. And my background is not quite yet. Oh, like I know what quality but I’m a tester. So I had to dive into what do testers Do what is the quality lifecycle? How does this even work? And, yeah, I’ve, I’ve been the product manager for what used to be test manager, and then they renamed it that to product manager. We launched it back in August last year. Okay. 2022. And it’s grown massively in terms of the scope of what he does. Because well, first is our first application on the App Exchange. But there there isn’t that much about quality on the App Exchange. And there’s even a handful of applications that focus on that. So we wanted to cover all the bases, we allow people to manage their testing lifecycle. So during the test products with test plans, many people don’t do planning at all, like they don’t think and write things down. Before they implement, they just go to straight to implementation. So we tried to train people and raise awareness like, first you plan your design, then you implement

Francis Pindar 36:04
agile, we just push it live.

Samuel Arroyo 36:12
The cool thing is that we wanted to make it sort of a hub to connect to all the different tools that do quality or have to do with quality. So I started, the thing is, obviously, with my developer background, is like, well, I’m going to build this thing, I’m not just going to manage it, I’m going to build the whole thing. And in a way, because it was so like a side project within the company, the main product was the automation baits. They left me like free rein, like do you want. So that’s what I did. I started growing and plugins, so like think extension packages to the main core baggage, and integrate. So you cannot do quality on its own. Like, you cannot just have test cases on its own, that you relate them to user stories, where two people have user stories, DERA Okay, I need to connect the JIRA, I need to bring those into the tool. And then as your DevOps people, at least our customers use that. So those two plugins, then quality is also part of DevOps. So the easiest thing is to integrate it with the native there was players. And the cool thing is good timing, because Salesforce even was getting into the game. So yeah, we have a plugin for Caballo plugin for for awesome, and a plugin for self was ever present. And we were working with, with Salesforce from the beginning, since they were on a pilot to see okay, what are you guys doing? And how can we plug into there, it’s not easy because of using how it is they have a separate interface, but we just worked around it. Like when I created our own app. It’s a nine and experience and just work that way. But that’s how we connect it to DevOps. And it brings something interesting to the table. Because sometimes when you are deploying a number of metadata changes, you’ll know what to test. Like, well, if you know, the test classes that I’ve been deployed, why do I need to tell you what you need test to run? Well, you know, you should know because the first time you don’t know but you should know. So, bro money are automatically tells you, okay, these are the test classes you should be running, or these are the test cases you should be writing because we know the coverage of the metadata, we know what metadata you’re changing, so we bring it out to the table. And then finally, something that personally I feel like is ignored sometimes or if it hasn’t picked up a smart is called quality. And there’s maybe a handful of players that that do that. So we integrated with Clayton we integrated with quality clouds with you, we want to be the central hub where people go to understand the quality of their Salesforce orgs. And of their efforts. technical depth Go code quality is part of the picture. So we should be bringing some of that data from those platforms into the hub. So we have a core package that allows you to do a lot but then we have a lot of integrations that allow you to plug in all that information and to integrate your testing ways your DevOps, bring in information from different places. And then even recently with you know, all the fuss about AI and and I was I was I mean I thought of just quitting LinkedIn for a while and Twitter because it’s just these are the 10 different ways that you should do your prompts. And this is like it’s just annoying up to a point and but then I started thinking well, what’s the point? I know for these AI views and actually putting in inaction. So I started thinking, well, I want AI to take away the most boring things. Especially if I think about citizen testers or admins wanting testing. What are the barriers to start doing it? Sometimes is, well, I’m looking at a user story. Give me suggestions on how to test this. So I quickly integrated with open AI. And he’s no good. He’s just story. Can you give me five test cases?

Francis Pindar 40:36
Is it good? Is it coming up with results?

Samuel Arroyo 40:39
Well, it is. It is good. Sometimes you like you get the results. But sometimes, the answers are more clever than others. Right? Like, let’s try again. It okay, I prefer this ones because obviously, there’s not it’s not perfect. But yeah, it generates five test cases. And then somebody who may not be very used to testing say, well, at least is some inspiration.

Francis Pindar 41:06
Yeah. Lisa, where to start or understand some approach. It’s just I think it’s a challenge of like, it’s still cloud sourced content. Right. So it’s still Yeah, the maturity of what it’s found. Turn out it serves it up. But yeah, it’s interesting, though, is the other shit as I’m assuming. I’m just thinking maybe that actually the test cases that kind of, were actually more accurate or not more accurate, but give you more ideas for juniors than some some other kinds of types of I want this code written like this. And it just comes out with it workable, but just doesn’t scale. type code. But yeah, okay, interesting.

Samuel Arroyo 41:48
So yeah, that’s why I do, I’m only working on that, seeing how we can expand. And I think the main vision is to raise awareness about quality, to have a tool that anyone in the Salesforce ecosystem can say, if I get that tool, it will help me to get more serious about quality, provide a sort of framework that I can follow, it will allow me to connect to the tools I already have in my tech stack. And to make sure that I’m embedding quality into the other things I do however there

Francis Pindar 42:21
Yeah. And in like Provo has always been like that kind of gold standard of testing within the Salesforce ecosystem anyway, but yeah, I love it’s yeah, it’s a good approach. Good, good app, I think, to really kind of glue everything together. And yeah, kind of go a kind of quality first approach to everything. Cool. Well, thank you so much for being on the toss, the pot itself sort of quasi podcast talking about quality and testing. Hope you enjoyed it. It was good, fun. Cool. I look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you. Thanks for watching, or listening to the Salesforce posse podcast. Now please, please, please, if you like, or what you see or hear then please rate this podcast in your podcast player, as it tells me that there are people out there that actually are listening to this and that it’s useful to them. Also, it helps the podcast algorithms to kind of elevate the podcast in the different podcast directories which will be really helpful for me, as well. And finally, if you do have a question that you want to ask on the podcast, then head to Salesforce posse.com/message. And maybe you will appear in the next podcast, but apart from that, thanks for listening, and until next time,

 

Uncover the Secrets of Mastering Tableau with Zach & Sarah

Whether you are an experienced Tableau user or are just starting your data visualization journey, this episode will provide valuable insights and inspiration. So sit back, relax, and join us for an exciting conversation where we will discuss everything about Tableau with Sarah Bartlett and Zach Bowders. In this episode, we will dive into the Tableau ecosystem, explore the vibrant community surrounding the tool, and discover how to learn more about Tableau.

Sarah Bartlett is a Tableau Visionary with over 12 years of experience partnering with clients to deliver analytical solutions to solve complex data challenges. She is passionate about data community building, user enablement, data strategy, and helping organizations embrace a modern data culture. Sarah is a Tableau Public Ambassador, a Tableau Desktop Certified Professional, and has experience working with other BI tools. She is the founder of the famous #IronQuest community project and co-leads the London Tableau User Group. In 2020, she was recognized as a Tableau Visionary and served her fourth annual term.

Zach Bowders is a Business Intelligence Specialist at Jones Lang LaSalle, passionate about data visualization and storytelling. He has a background in data analysis and holds an MBA degree. He is particularly interested in understanding businesses and using data to drive change and improve processes. Zach is skilled in various data tools and technologies, including Tableau, SQL, and Excel, and is always looking for new ways to innovate with data.

Throughout today’s episode, Sarah and Zach converse about various topics related to Tableau and data analysis. They outline what Tableau is and share how they got into the Tableau world. They also emphasize the importance of Tableau Public, where users can download the tool and access the Viz Gallery, including the “VIZ of the Day” selection that highlights exciting and cool visualizations made by the community. Moreover, they suggest downloading Tableau Public is a great way to start learning and that sharing work on social media, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, can be valuable. Also, Sarah and Zach encourage users not to be afraid to share their work publicly, as the community is generally favourable. However, they mention that different social networks attract other people and reactions. Sharing work publicly and asking for feedback is crucial for growth and improvement.

Furthermore, we explore the importance of storytelling in creating visualizations, and they predict the future of Tableau and data science for the next few years. They recommend using Tableau Student Guide, Tableau Public, and Viz Gallery as starting points for learning Tableau and emphasize how working with Tableau can help in developing effective communication skills with data. Finally, Sarah and Zach reflect on their life lessons and share the one piece of advice they would give their younger selves if they could turn back time.

 

00:00 Introduction

03:50 What is Tableau?

10:51 What is Tableau Public?

14:14 Free Learning resources

18:24 Why is Storytelling in Data Important

21:50 The Future of Tableau and Data Science

29:31 How to start learning Tableau

30:35 Why you should Share Your Work

35:17 Tableau Communication Mastery

39:02 Turning Back Time – Reflecting on life lessons

Resources:

Connect with Zach & Sarah:

Zach Bowders: ⁠linkedin.com/in/zachbowders/⁠

Sarah Bartlet: ⁠linkedin.com/in/sarah-bartlett-5a42b830/⁠

Mentioned in the episode:

Website: ⁠tableau.com/community/iron-viz⁠

Sara Loves Data: ⁠sarahlovesdata.co.uk/category/iron-quest/⁠

Data + Love : ⁠podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/data-love/id1489547501⁠

Tableau Tim: ⁠youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw⁠

Iron Viz: ⁠tableau.com/community/iron-viz⁠

Viz Gallery: ⁠tableau.com/viz-gallery⁠

Tableau Student Guide : ⁠thetableaustudentguide.com/⁠

Makeover Monday: ⁠makeovermonday.co.uk/⁠

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History : ⁠podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-carlins-hardcore-history/id173001861⁠

The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses: ⁠goodreads.com/en/book/show/49947205⁠

Uncovering the Secrets to Exceptional Omnichannel Customer Experiences with Noz Urbina

In this podcast, Noz Urbina will discuss the importance of exceptional omnichannel customer experiences. Noz will share techniques to help your business achieve a great omnichannel customer experience.

Noz Urbina has years of experience in omnichannel architecture and design, and he’ll be discussing how his experiences have helped him design exceptional customer experiences. If you want to improve your omnichannel customer experience, this is the video for you!

Salesforce Posse Podcast often features interviews with thought leaders or significant Salesforce ecosystem members. Yet, in this episode, we interview someone less involved in the Salesforce ecosystem. Noz Urbina, the founder of Urbina Consulting and OmnichannelX, joins today’s conversation to share his knowledge and expertise on omnichannel customer experiences. We begin with understanding what omnichannel is. Noz elaborates on the application of personalization and customer-centricity to omnichannel. He explains that omnichannel personalization is a method for pre-digesting content and making it easier for the user to ingest. In addition, we explore the omnichannel customer experience, detailing how this experience is tailored based on the customer’s location and segmentation. Besides that, Noz outlines the questions an architect should ask to determine if a company is truly implementing omnichannel or merely installing multichannel under the guise of omnichannel.

Noz Urbina is a globally recognised leader in the field of content strategy and customer experience. He’s well known as a pioneer in customer journey mapping and adaptive content modelling for delivering personalised, contextually relevant content experiences in an omnichannel environment. Noz is co-founder and Programme Director of OmnichannelX. He is also co-author of the book “Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits” and lecturer in the Masters Programme in content strategy at the University of Applied Sciences, Graz.

Noz’s company, Urbina Consulting, works with the world’s largest organisations and most complex content challenges. He has assisted dozens of multinational organisations with developing or improving their content strategies, managing tool selections, pilot projects, delivering training, and guiding implementations. Clients include Johnson Pharmaceuticals & Johnson, Microsoft, Sanofi Vaccines, Mastercard, Barclays Bank, Abbott Laboratories, and many more.

[09:37] Omnichannel – What is omnichannel, and how does it work?
[16:12] Personalization – Noz adds that omnichannel personalization involves breaking down content into the right pieces and delivering them to the customer at the most relevant time.
[22:58] Customer Centricity – Difference between multichannel and omnichannel.
[24:43] OmnichannelX.digital – OmnichannelX has changed its approach from holding paid in person events yearly to hosting webinars, podcasts, and other learning materials more frequently.
[28:15] Architect’s Role – How does omnichannel relate to the role of an architect?
[30:43] Customer Experience – We explore what the omnichannel consumer experience entails. Also, we further elaborate on how it is tailored based on the customer’s location and segmentation.
[37:34] Data Integration – Determine how unstructured data is processed or labeled, whether it is offloaded or performed on the platform, and how the process is integrated with system components.
[39:43] Advice to Younger Self – What would Noz tell himself If he could go back in time?

Connect with Noz:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bnozurbina/
Website: urbinaconsulting.com
Website: omnichannelx.digital
Podcast: omnichannelx.digital/podcast/

Sponsored by AdminToArchitect.com Salesforce Architect Training

The Salesforce AppExchange Journey with Luca Benini

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qel50wRPKCA
The Salesforce AppExchange is a marketplace for cloud-based applications that can be used with Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) software. No matter where you are on your Salesforce journey, you’ll have access to tried-and-tested apps, that will help you tackle your particular business challenges and speed up your digital transformation. Luca Benini, COO and co-founder at Nativevideo a Salesforce AppExchange Partner and features in today’s episode of the Salesforce Posse podcast to share his incredible experience at Salesforce.
Luca has been in the Salesforce ecosystem for many years and was MD of Europe for Buddy Media, a social media tool that Salesforce acquired in 2012.
Today, we started the conversation by discussing how Luca got into the Salesforce ecosystem and the world of App Exchange apps. We delve into the many types of Salesforce App Exchange apps, the creation process at a high level, the various ways you may monetize your app, and the best practices for making a successful app. Furthermore, Luca elaborates on why he enjoys participating in Demo Jams. Also, we discuss our favourite audiobooks, and Luca shares some words of wisdom he would give his younger self if he could travel back in time.

Resources

Connect with Luca: linkedin.com/in/lucabenini/
Audiobooks we talk about:
Sponsored by AdminToArchitect.com Salesforce Training

The Salesforce Architect Soft Skills to Learn with Kier Bowden

When thinking of a Salesforce Architect, people usually jump to the need for a deep technical knowledge of Salesforce. But that’s only part of the picture, and there are so many other skills that are important to become a highly successful Salesforce Architect. Keir Bowden, Chief Technical Officer at BrightGen, features in today’s episode of the Salesforce Posse podcast to share his incredible experience at Salesforce.

Today, we talk to Keir Bowden about the value of people skills, how to handle difficult situations, and the significance of effective communication across organizational levels. We discuss the need to make things as easy to use as possible and the design principles behind this philosophy.  Also, Keir explains critical things you need to know and where to begin your training to become an architect. At last, we reach a point in the conversation where we talk about learning to say no.

Keir has worked in the information technology sector for the past three decades and is currently the Chief Technology Officer at BrightGen, a Salesforce Platinum Partner in the United Kingdom. He is responsible for the current and future technical strategy, certification and product development there. Since 2008, Keir has been developing solutions and applications on Salesforce, and Keir currently possesses a number of qualifications, including the highly sought-after Technical Architect (CTA) certification. In addition to being a Salesforce MVP, he is the author of the Visualforce Development Cookbook, a frequent blogger on topics related to Apex and Visualforce solutions, and a speaker at events such as the Salesforce World Tour, Dreamforce and London’s Calling. He maintains a blog in his leisure time, writing on Apex, Lightning Components, and the Salesforce Command Line Interface.

[02:08] Background – Who is Mr. Big Bob Buzzard?

[04:00] Soft Skills – We are all savvy with PCs, but dealing with actual humans is a different story.

[09:27] Keir’s Role – Keir shares his role and objectives in the room.

[11:46] Be Simple – We discuss the importance of simplicity in design and how to achieve it.

[15:04] Difficult Conversations – Disagreement is typical at times of transition. Keir shares his ideas on how to cope with crises like these.

[20:56] Communication – The importance of communicating at different company levels.

[24:08] Key Learnings – Keir outlines the essential skills you need to become an architect and where to start learning.

[33:54] No – The art of saying “No.”

Resources:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/keirbowden/

Hosted by AdminToArchitect.com

Aligning Salesforce Architecture to Organizational Vision with Gemma Blezard

A clear vision leads to understanding what an organization wants to achieve as a business. Gemma Blezard joined us today to discuss aligning salesforce architecture to organizational vision.

Gemma Blezard is the founder of The Architect Club & Ladies Be Architects. She is also a Salesforce MVP, entrepreneur, and an influencer of Salesforce architects around the world. She has talked at Salesforce and community-led conferences, including user groups, Dreamforce, Salesforce World Tour London, the Salesforce Partner Forum, French Touch Dreamin’, and many more. She has won several awards, including Salesforce’s Golden Hoodie (May 2018), WeAreTheCity’s TechWoman100 award (2018), Salesforce MVP, BIMA100 Digital Champion for Change & Computing’s ENT Role Model of the Year. In 2020, she delivered a free online salesforce training course for the unemployed and won the Digital Revolution award for Outstanding Contribution to the Salesforce ecosystem. Gemma lives in Bedford, England, United Kingdom.

During today’s conversation, Francis and Gemma discussed governance in a salesforce project, following into what empathy can do for others. Gemma shares information about building a vision for her community, The architect club. Further into the conversation, they talk about the relationships between the client and the organization, how they manage risks, and the difference between a developer and architecture. Gemma shares what it is to be a part of a community with her and her journey through years with Salesforce. Wrapping up today’s conversation, Gemma shares what advice she wants to give to her 20 years old self and why.

[02.47] Governance – Starting the conversation, Gemma explains what governance means in a salesforce project.

[07.05] Empathy –  Gemma shares the importance of having empathy towards other people because it helps them to perform better.

[09.03] The architect club – A clear vision is a must in any organization. Gemma dives into how they take considerable time to build their vision first and then go to the others.

[13.39] Relationships – Gemma dives into customer relationships’ role in an organization’s well-being.

[19.51] Readiness – Gemma addresses ‘readiness’ as one of the most significant issues in salesforce projects.

[24.52] Open-ended questions – Gemma shares what questions are better when conversing with your clients.

[32.18] Managing risks – Managing risks is vital. Gemma shares how they manage risks and the part architecture has to play in that situation.

[39.53] Developer vs. architecture – Francis and Gemma shares opinions about the difference between an admin or a developer and architecture.

[45.00] Working with Salesforce – Gemma shares how she joined Salesforce and her journey through the years.

[49.09] Salesforce community – A community gives a sense of belonging to anyone. Gemma talks about what it is like to be a part of the salesforce community.

[55.06] Words of wisdom – Gemma shares a piece of advice for her 20 years old self.

Resources

Connect with Gemma
LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/gemmablezard/
Twitter – twitter.com/ArchitechClub
Website (Personal) – gemmablezard.com/
http://www.ladies-be-architects.com/

Sponsored by Admin To Architect Salesforce Training

The Salesforce DevOps Ecosystem

As the Salesforce ecosystem expands and integrates with global business technologies, the salesforce DevOps has significantly matured and grown since it started. In today’s episode of the Salesforce Posse Podcast, we are joined by Vernon Keenan to talk about the Salesforce DevOps Ecosystem and the importance of Value Stream Management.

Vernon Keenan is a Senior Industry Analyst at SalesforceDevops.net. He is an industry analyst and technologist entrepreneur who has founded businesses that use cutting-edge technology to serve customers. He is an internationally renowned Internet commerce sector analyst and thought leader. He was a pioneer in the study of how e-commerce affected the US economy. With original content and thought leadership intended to advance Salesforce app development at all levels, Vernon Keenan fills the gap between targeted market research and inspirational content. He aims to increase prospects and exposure for each participant in the Salesforce DevOps market.

During today’s conversation, we dive into the current state of DevOps in the salesforce ecosystem and what value stream mapping is. Furthermore, we discuss application lifecycle management and wrapping up the conversation, Vernon shares some sites to learn more about Salesforce DevOps.

[00.57] State of DevOps – Starting the conversation, Vernon dives into the current state of DevOps in the salesforce ecosystem along with the key difference between developing systems based on salesforce and other SAS systems.

[07.23] Value Stream Mapping – Vernon defines value stream mapping and what it is trying to do.

[13.31] The platform – Vernon talks about where DevOps stand in the ecosystem, saying it’s not a tool but a platform.

[18.55] Application lifecycle management – Application lifecycle management (ALM) is an integrated system of people, tools, and processes that manages software applications development, testing, maintenance, decommissioning, and retirement.

[22.06] Learning more – Vernon mentions some sites to discover more about Salesforce DevOps as well as a free learning resource for learning more.

Resources

Connect with Vernon

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/vernonkeenan/
Website – https://salesforcedevops.net/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/vkeenan

Sponsored by AdminToArchitect.com Salesforce Training

 

London Salesforce Architect Community Group IS A GO!

The Salesforce Architect Group in London is a local resource that enables Salesforce architects, administrators, and developers to learn about Salesforce features and partners and network with one another. Francis Pindar, Tom Bassett and Sam Wadhwan have kicked off the new community group in London and we talk about why we started it all off and what we want the community to get out of it.

Tom currently works for Trigg Digital as a Solution Architect. He has over five years of experience working with the Salesforce platform and is also a Salesforce application/solution architect. Tom’s goal is for customers to get the most out of the CRM, maximise their return on investment, and benefit from working with him. Also, he helps to disseminate the Ohana culture by giving the broader Salesforce Community support in the form of new feature ideas and responses to questions that have been posted. On the other hand, Sam is a Salesforce-certified technical architect and the Chief Technical Architect at PwC.

During our discussion today, Sam and Tom shared their professional backgrounds and the path that led them to become a part of the Salesforce ecosystem for the first time. In addition, we discuss the widespread misperceptions surrounding architects and their work and the numerous campaigns and initiatives undertaken in recent years to dispel these misconceptions. Also, we talk about how the work of an architect needs a great degree of imagination and how important it is to explain a complicated notion in a way that is easy to understand as an architect. Moreover, Sam and Tom share what they are looking forward to experiencing in the community group, in which they highlight that it is impossible to be an expert in everything, and we must narrow our focus to our areas of expertise. Furthermore, they state that they are looking forward to the community group since they believe it will aid the architect community in London and those individuals who aspire to become Salesforce Architects.

[02:20] Background – Introducing Sam and Tom.

[05:24] Architect Group, London – Sam and Tom mention the motivations behind their aspiration to become leaders of the London-based architect group.

[06:42] An Architect –  There is a stigma associated with architects and their work. In recent years, there have been numerous efforts and endeavors to refute these falsehoods.

[09:43] Creativity – We discuss how the work of an architect requires a significant amount of creativity.

[16.01] Communication –  The ability to convey a complex idea in an understandable manner is akin to an art form.

[18:18] Community – Sam and Tom express what they are looking forward to experiencing in the community group.

[20:23] Individual Contribution –  It is impossible to be an expert in everything. You must rely on others and narrow your focus to your areas of expertise.

Resources:

Connect with Sam and Tom:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tom-bassett-uk/?originalSubdomain=uk

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/samwadhwani/

Tom Bassett: trailblazer.me/id/tombassett

Sam Wadhwani: trailblazer.me/id/swadhwani

 

Mentioned in the episode:

Architect Group, London, UK

Register for Meetings/Events here: https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/salesforce-architect-group-london-united-kingdom

What is Salesforce DevOps?

As time passes, organisations that are using salesforce have become more and more dependent on it. Salesforce DevOps is focused on ensuring administrators and developers can release updates and go through the software development lifecycle as efficiently as possible, with the least defects and user interruption. Jack McCurdy, Salesforce DevOps Advocate at Gearset, features in today’s episode of the Salesforce Posse podcast to share his experience as a salesforce advocate.

Jack shares knowledge of DevOps throughout the salesforce ecosystem. He has spent the last few years working with businesses to establish DevOps teams and procedures, which are essential for delivering Salesforce installs successfully and fostering both business growth and customer satisfaction. His passion is supporting the creation and maintenance of outstanding cultures that serve as the pillars of DevOps best practices.

During today’s conversation, we explore what DevOps is, what it provides people, and Jack’s experience working at DevOps. Jack dives into what common problems people want DevOps to find solutions to and how they make it simpler and errorless. Furthermore, he discusses the importance of metrics when measuring success and maturity, and wrapping up the conversation, Jack dives into how communication can solve problems and make a better workplace for employees.

At Salesforce Posse, we interview influencers in the Salesforce ecosystem so that we can gain a better understanding of how to excel in a career path from a Salesforce Admin or Developer to an Architect.

[04.44] DevOps – DevOps is a set of practices combined with software development and IT operations. Starting the conversation, Jack dives into what DevOps is and how they help people to identify problems sooner and solve them.

[06.10] Problems – Jack dives into the common problems people come to DevOps for solutions.

[13.14] Backups – Having backups and the mental health benefits of DevOps. Jack dives into how Dora metrics are used in DevOps.

[15.58] Metrics – Jack explains how essential metrics are when measuring success or maturity.

[21.33] The phoenix project – A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim.

[22.42] Mindset shift – Role changes can be difficult in the beginning. But, with the right communication, you can change the environment for employees and build a level of maturity in the organization.

Resources

Sponsored by AdminToArchitect.com

Transcript

Francis Pindar (A2A)  00:00

Hello, my name is Francis Pindar and you are watching or listening to the Salesforce posse podcast. Now, I did catch up with somebody who grabbed me that I was chatting to. And he didn’t realize you could watch this podcast from Spotify. So if you are listening to this on Spotify, bring up your phone or your computer, and you’ll be able to see me in Technicolor. So the Salesforce posse podcast is where I speak with Salesforce industry influencers to gain a better understanding of how to excel in a career path from a Salesforce admin or developer to an architect. And a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to speak at DevOps dreaming, an event dedicated to learning more about Salesforce DevOps, so that we can deliver Salesforce changes more efficiently into production, monitor and learn from those challenges so we can improve the experience of our users and teams implementing on Salesforce. So I did a talk on my Salesforce DevOps journey, but I managed to grab some time with Jack McCurdy, who is performed gearset and is sponsoring this Salesforce streaming event. So if you’re interested in learning more about Salesforce, DevOps, or even have no idea what I’m talking about, when I say DevOps, then I think you’re gonna get a lot of value from this conversation with Jack McCurdy. So without further ado, let’s go. So I am here with Jack. And we’re here at DevOps, dreaming in London learning all about Salesforce DevOps, a maturing model of how you can kind of be more efficient as the way you do stuff in Salesforce. And you are the DevOps guru. That’s why

Jack McCardy  01:49

we had a conversation earlier about yours.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  01:55

Yeah, we did a panel. The panel discussion? I

Jack McCardy  01:58

think it was yeah, it was part of the panel. Yeah, yeah, we

Francis Pindar (A2A)  02:01

did a panel discussion, which was at was really great actually burn out in a tech and it said, yeah, there are no Salesforce gurus. No, it does not exist. The platform is just too big. And you don’t want that pressure. You don’t? Yeah, it’s a really good session. And so how’s it been? So far? Actually?

Jack McCardy  02:20

Yeah, the conference has been amazing. At gearset. Like, we’re really proud and privileged to be members as communities. So it’s great to be able to put this on and do that for them. And, you know, we take great inspiration from things like London’s calling, and all the other community conferences that we get to go to around States and in Europe, and to see that come out here as well and have it be so well attended. And London is really nice to see. And the speakers have all been amazing. So far, we’re only halfway through. But everybody’s had well attended sessions really engaged. And it has prompted some good conversation from what I’ve heard.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  02:54

Yeah. And that’s been quite interesting. Because that even like, you always get kind of stuck in the tech a bit, I think, and just kind of stepping back and kind of going well, I actually, you know, there’s other stuff. There’s the kind of the mental well being piece of DevOps around well, actually, I want to get this stuff into production quicker. From my own well being of seeing I’ve succeeded in stuff and things like that, which I kind of didn’t even really think of, I suppose. Yeah,

Jack McCardy  03:20

for sure. I think that’s one of the big DevOps can play such a big part in, in that you know, mental well being as well as we’ve all been there and late nights because of a change set or failed deployments or and you know, wrestling until 123 Am isn’t an uncommon story that we’ve heard. So finding a way to address that and help people go back to their families or be able to do their hobbies in the evening or what have you plays into that too, as well as that gratification when you see the deployment succeeded. Deployment succeeded button, the fish completes.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  03:53

So okay, so if you are if somebody is coming in this completely new and has no idea what we’re talking about, when we talk about DevOps, what would you say DevOps is? So

Jack McCardy  04:04

DevOps, when you distill it all down to the basics is really to really succinctly it’s the better way of delivering software is ultimately what it comes down to a set of practices and principles that allow for efficient, streamlined delivery. And the word itself is a combination of software development, IT operations, so was taking the best practices from both of those things, and combining it to software delivery team or Salesforce delivery team that’s really firing on all cylinders and can focus on doing the impactful work, the building of features and the user stories or

Francis Pindar (A2A)  04:40

trying to repackage for the 40th time fourth that thing into production.

Jack McCardy  04:46

Absolutely. So it’s all about speeding that process up but doing it in a safe and safe and controlled way. You know, things break. Even in a great DevOps process. Things still break that still happens, but a great DevOps process will help you identify those things sooner and hopefully be easier to resolve if it’s being done. Right. So that’s it in its simplest form, I guess. So okay,

Francis Pindar (A2A)  05:06

so what are the kind of common things that you see people call on problems they’re trying to fix using DevOps.

Jack McCardy  05:12

So a lot of what it comes down to is the pain that people experience when they have a lot of manual steps, there’s, there’s a large percentage of teams that we see have issues when it comes down to things that either have to be, you know, recreated manually in other environments, you know, you you see, to do something in sandbox. And then so many times you hear, let’s recreate it in production manually again, and you know,

Francis Pindar (A2A)  05:37

it’s like a vicious circle that I’ve been at. It’s like the deployment failed. And you know, this is hard, so they will do it manually next time. And so then your manual worksheet and steps grows and gets bigger and bigger, because always scared doing that, you know, anything other than manual.

Jack McCardy  05:53

Exactly. So either manual steps, which are tedious, even if you’re not manually recreating things in production, you’re then creating a change set or creating a package, which then needs to be redeployed to other places, you have folks that are looking to to not have speaking of lists. Actually, if you think about all the message changes that you make when you’re building something, how easy is it to forget one of those things? And by implementing a process tooling, or what have you, it’s about finding ways that you can make that process simpler and easier and less prone to errors that don’t really need to be

Francis Pindar (A2A)  06:24

Yeah, I think I did a talk earlier on. And it’s like, one of those classic problems is that, you know, developers pull out that profile meta data, but not all the fields and then you miss the field field level security in the profile, you push the profiles back, now you’ve overwritten it in your source code control. That’s right. But then you try and deploy it and the deployments fine. Just didn’t include it. Yeah. But it’s actually you know, you’ve got usability issues, because you just can’t access those fields anymore.

Jack McCardy  06:50

For sure. So and then I think if you think about those, those things, and what we’re actually talking about is actually saving people a lot of time and effort is ultimately what it comes down to is the biggest number one reason people people come to us and say, we need to do something about this is because it’s taking the 9, 10, 11, 12 hours a day, you know, for one production deployment. And they might be doing that once a week or two weeks, or if they had a long running project, then we’re talking days worth of deployment time, so literally days worth. So that’s really what it comes down to, there’s

Francis Pindar (A2A)  07:23

actually we were just talking actually, before the podcast, it’s like, do I do edit my own podcast now. And it’s like I used to do and I don’t anymore. And it was a bit of that it’s the same kind of thing where it’s like, well, it’s not what I’m good at, I’m good at the you know, in Salesforce world, doing the configuration, doing the coding, do the building, not packaging, and trying to get it into the next environment, you know, give that to some other tool or practice or a way of working, that makes everything more efficient. And also, it’s more enjoyable, because you’re doing the stuff you love, rather than trying to hack around with change sets, or whatever it is.

Jack McCardy  07:54

That’s it, we’re chatting a little a little bit earlier on about that enjoyment. And that fulfillment, it’s not just a ticket, the green light, it’s just, if I’m not doing that, then I am doing something I’m learning something new, maybe on trailhead, or what have you, I’ve got to build a new feature that I’ve not done before I can actually focus on that not worry about business as usual stuff that gets in the way. And a lot of the time that those things do get in the way, and can either either hunt for enjoyment of your job, or your ability to skill up and excel at something or learn something new.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  08:24

Yeah, I think it’s also we kind of talked about in some of the other sessions was around like constraints in the process. And actually, you can have just one thing, one constraint in that DevOps process, which even if you optimize everything before or everything after, it’s utterly pointless, because everything’s feeding through on the same track, and it’s all everything’s gonna hit by the same constraint, and you’re still going to be limited by this. And it’s a kind of a way of kind of, and that if that’s a person, an individual, just, you know, the pressure on them to get that word, seeing all this work, building up not being able to do it or responsible just for doing that packaging, and knowing it’s a complete pain, you know, is the mindfulness and the whole mental side. Yeah,

Jack McCardy  09:07

I think if you use like a real world example, I think an area that you see that most often like as a bottleneck, it’s something maybe like QA or testing, especially for quality assurance team is separate to the Salesforce team. And this is one of those things that when we talk about best practice, DevOps is not necessarily about the tools and technology, you can have the best tools and technology in the world. But ultimately, it comes down to people and how you manage people and that process of thinking about that, then, you know, your QA team, for example, don’t sit outside to Salesforce, bring those people that responsible into the team into the communications into the channels that they need to be in so that the whole team can be successful. And those bottlenecks don’t happen. The silos aren’t there. And that’s actually the probably the biggest challenge that we’re looking to solve, you know, for anybody that’s listening that’s slightly more well versed in DevOps or even does some of it themselves. You know, there’s tons of documentation or suggestions out there on version control branching strategies, or do you have

Francis Pindar (A2A)  10:03

branching at all? Is it trunk only? Is Bardsey versus Yeah.

Jack McCardy  10:08

Right. So all of that information is out there. So and still we see the required cultural shift being neglected as might be a strong word, but not as well considered or seen as less important. Yeah, showing the value of it. Yeah, exactly.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  10:22

And I think when we talk about backup in one of those zooms, and actually, for me, actually backup is a big cop can be a big cost saver as well. And so I’ve kind of used backups as well as a way of removing full sandboxes. Because I’ve got an environment that can could go into a partial backup, but obviously, limitations with that is only like 10,000 records per object. So it’s a pain in the ass to use. But the backup can restore to the maximum size of the partial sandbox. So actually, I could get rid of one of my full sandboxes, make a saving on that, get a backup, which cost less than that full backup full sandbox, and then see partial sandbox with backup data. So you’re testing the backup by seeding it in the first place by being able to restore to it and saving money on a full back full sandbox as well,

Jack McCardy  11:16

for sure that if we come back to one of the things that we’ve talked about is, you know, people’s mental health, I guess just having backup gives you that, you know, aside from what it’ll do for you, you know, your time to recover is one of the doora metrics, right? So if something does go wrong, how fast can you do that? And that absolutely is and we see it as part of your DevOps process, because that’s the team that’s going to be responsible for fixing it when it hits the fan. And it all looks bad on you ran that team. And they are exactly so we’ve actually started to see a little bit more of a shift or when we’re speaking to Salesforce teams, pulling back up out of IT ops or another team in the business and handing that responsibility back to the Salesforce team, which is great, because that Salesforce team needs to know what’s going on. And they need to know how to fix it. And they can’t just be given a chance give you

Francis Pindar (A2A)  12:05

abilities in other ways. So like one of the projects I’m working on at most got a lot of record based on thick, and actually just creating new sandboxes is just a pain because you’re essentially doing data migrations, to move conflict through. And also just creating a new sandbox is just a bit of a hassle. So actually, the backups great for that. It’s just, I’m just gonna restore those tables, for sure. Well, job done.

Jack McCardy  12:29

You make it sound like a click of a button.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  12:32

Yeah, well, I said, Yeah, it does kind of help you for certain things like that as well, which I found quite useful. So

Jack McCardy  12:38

yeah, for sure. For sure. It’s such an interesting space. And I think I think that shift in that understanding is definitely getting there. I think it’s interesting when we’re talking about backup most people or there’s a lot of people that would be like I use Version Control, I have a backup. And yeah, you do. But it’s a mess. It is a kind of, and you might not even have it all in there, which is also often the case.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  12:59

Go back to that. Profiles. Yeah, exactly. And I think if it is, it’s like, it’s a big topic. It’s a huge deal. And I think it’s also it’s quite hard, I always find it, it’s quite a hard sell initially, unless you’ve got the metrics and stuff to back it up to go, Hey, look, this is taking this amount of time it could be taking this if we just did you know, the so if somebody’s going into the what how do you see is that kind of like that progression? Through DevOps? Yeah. So

Jack McCardy  13:27

just to touch on metrics? Again, I think that’s one of the things that when we’re speaking to Salesforce teams, and, you know, how do you currently measure your success? Either they don’t, or they go, how stressed I am on a Friday, right? You know, there was a kind of the options. And I think that can be a real hindrance to them going to leadership, for example, and saying, hey, I want to buy this tool, or I want to do this, that or the other, and it’s probably going to take x amount of effort, and they go, what’s the return gonna be? And they go, I don’t know. So it’s metrics is something really important to consider, I think we see a lot more teams using the Dora metrics now, which is great. So that so looking at those things is absolutely a way that you can see your maturity rising. So there’s kind of two schools of thought on maturity, you can see that as the amount of the amount of tooling or the amount or the different types of things that you’re doing within your process. How much is automated or not automated, as this case may be, but if you look at a process, you can still have a manual process and maybe using a tool like gearset or, you know, one of the other DevOps platforms out there is we could automate it for you, but you’re still saving time by even still doing it manually, you know, so your maturity is rising, you know, is the level of effort to automate things going to be worth it? If you’re what’s the, there’s a bit of a balance,

Francis Pindar (A2A)  14:49

they kind of always come back to that constraints thing of actually, you could do it but if you’ve got another place that’s got a bigger constraint, then how’s it gonna help you?

Jack McCardy  14:56

That’s right. And I think a lot of the improvements that a lot of folks see when they first start down this road is once they start thinking about their deployments in the first place and getting the deployments but right, that time to value kind of comes down significantly from that one piece. And then it’s just, there’s just about the, I think they then find out, Oh, what if we, it’d be really good if we could do this, or that. And that’s when they will start to head down that path. And I think a lot of one of the pitfalls and common pitfalls that teams or managers can get sucked into is looking at utopia, looking at fully automated processes, and go, I want that, and have that as like the end goal, rather than, you know, appreciating that journey that you’re going on, because it’s like cliche, life is a journey, not a destination kind of thing. And, you know, the same thing can apply in this space.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  15:44

I think that’s the same for even if you look at it, as you know, the Salesforce maturity and stuff like that, you can see this whole utopian goal of chatbots, and all that other stuff. But actually, the end of it is progress, you are going on this journey, and you’ll find value in different things as you’re going through. And your worldview always changes as you’re doing it, you know, as you’re learning more,

Jack McCardy  16:03

for sure. I think DevOps is one of those things that it’s not you do this, and that’s the way you do it, it’s evolves and it changes. We do this right now. But always be looking ahead to say what’s our next thing is the way that we’re doing things now the right way, you know, always having kind of a bit of like a VA mindset, I guess about it, you know, it’s things fit for purposes, this requirement, what we needed to do, you know, always be thinking about, you know, what the next thing is for you and you as a team, and that in your DevOps process might mean, as we talked about version control, switching to a different git branching model, yes, things that you have a DevOps process set up, and it’s good, let’s assess what we need in the future.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  16:41

So even that could involve like, working with a company now that they’re getting a whole new team set up to support service cloud, for example. And if I, that could totally change the branching strategy of what you’re gonna go in. So it could

Jack McCardy  16:53

mentally new teams, I think there’s almost this notion that a couple of people are responsible for DevOps, you know, they look after the deployments or the tooling. And, and that’s kind of it, that’s their job. But introducing a new team and all members of your team, you know, it’s getting everybody bought into that, and understanding the part that they play and putting out actually putting responsibility in their hands to get their changes to the place that it needs to be for either the process to kick off or be responsible for that throughout delivery process will, it’s you know, it’s not just chucking work over the wall.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  17:23

Yeah. And that kind of understanding the, one of the things I presented earlier on was the whole, the mindset shift of what it is and people thinking, Oh, my God, you’re automating everything, oh, I’m out of a job. But it’s really not. It’s changing in the way you work. But then it’s more interesting. You’re not just doing the same thing again, and again, you’re actually working on the process and, and building it out and improving it and streamlining it. And there’s a great book that I love, called the Phoenix Project in its early I did Yeah. And it’s brilliant. It’s basically a storybook, essentially. Have you read it,

Jack McCardy  17:58

I haven’t read it. I am inspired, though. Yeah, it’s a

Francis Pindar (A2A)  18:01

cool, but it is basically a storybook on a company that is literally on its knees, I think I think literally first couple of slides saying their share prices crashed and the CEOs left or where all this kind of stuff going on. And the first 100 pages is just problem. And then it kind of shifts, and they start adopting agile and DevOps practices to really change the business around. And what I love about the book is you can spot the characters, the characters and books that are Yeah, that’s Jeff at work. And you could just see them everywhere. It really probably because it’s a story, but it’s very accessible people. So when I’m starting a new kind of DevOps journey, I start working on your company or not, there’s using using agile in a fragile way or whatever, you know, this is the book I get out and give to people because it is very accessible. And it’s just gives you an idea of the whole picture. I suppose.

Jack McCardy  18:57

The interesting thing about that mindset shift is I mentioned this in my talk earlier was those mindset shifts, and those cultural changes or routes, like role changes are can be a little fractious to begin with. And I think there’s a lot of notion these days that we shouldn’t be like, we want to please like our staff, you know, the we were speaking about it earlier, like speaking about it earlier, you know, the the talent is still scarce, it’s it’s in high demand, and there’s that, oh, we don’t want to change things because you know, they are bad, but it works. So maybe

Francis Pindar (A2A)  19:25

you know, they haven’t left. Yeah,

Jack McCardy  19:29

exactly. Right. And we don’t want to spoil the applecart. And you know, I think that’s again mentioned earlier, when it comes down to communication and say, Look, we understand this might be changes that you weren’t expecting, or might not wholly agree with, but want to buy into this vision that this is about all of us that if this is about giving you your time back, it’s not giving you some some happiness at work. And I think having that as an organization, if you have that level of maturity to look at yourselves like that and make a change and say yeah, we know this could cause this Using the short term, but the long term benefits are worth it. I think that’s a real way that you can set yourself up for success at the start of the process. If an employee leaves

 

right for the new world,

Jack McCardy  20:11

right, perfect.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  20:12

So yeah, that’s fascinate. Yeah, no, thanks so much. It’s been really fascinating. And yeah, I’ve learned a lot. DevOps has been quite good. Because I only really, from an architectural point of view, you’re kind of like, looking at it at this kind of high level. And actually, it’s been quite interesting just knowing how even just I’ve never even thought of the kind of the impact it has on people’s productivity and happiness side of things. I’ve always thought it’s just it’s a two lane problem that so it’s, you know, the both has been quite fascinating for me as

Jack McCardy  20:42

well. I’m glad picked up. Thanks for coming and, and inviting me on really appreciate it. Yeah. Cool. Thanks so much. Thank you.

Francis Pindar (A2A)  20:49

Thanks for watching, or listening to the Salesforce posse podcast now, please, please, please, if you like, or what you see or hear then please rate this podcast in your podcast player, as it tells me that there are people out there that actually are listening to this and that it’s useful to them. Also, it helps the podcast algorithms to kind of elevate the podcast in the different podcast directories which will be really helpful for me, as well. And finally, if you do have a question that you want to ask on the podcast, then head to Salesforce posse.com/message. And maybe you will appear in the next podcast, but apart from that, thanks for listening, and until next time, Ta ta.

What’s your Salesforce Value? with Qurantulain Tariq

In this episode of the Salesforce Posse podcast, we invited Quratulain Tariq; co-founder of PakDreamin’, a Salesforce Certified Sr. App Engineer at Ortoo to today’s episode we share her fascinating journey with the Salesforce community. Quratulain graduated in 2017 as a software engineer in Pakistan and expected to go into another quality assurance, but in the end, became employed by the UK company Ortoo. Then after searching for the term ‘salesforce.’ She then realised that there’s a whole community out there on Salesforce, and by joining London’s Calling DemoJam live streaming picked up the Salesforce bug and got hooked. Then she got into Trailhead and started creating her own Trailhead internal community at work.

Quratulain became a salesforce MVP; an award given by Salesforce to people with expert Salesforce knowledge who share their experiences to help others achieve in Salesforce. In addition, she collaborated in starting the Pakistan Dreamin’ event, where they had 700 – 1000 registrants, which was a great platform for Pakistani people to connect with trailblazers and different companies and countries and really did put the Pakistan Salesforce community on the global map. Pakistan Dreamin’ happened in August this year.

During today’s conversation, we dive into how Quratulain learned about Salesforce and what kind of value people can get from joining a community. Then, Quratulain shares how she became a Salesforce MVP. In addition to that, we explore Pakistan Dreaming, what it is, what opportunities it gives people, how it opens doors to another level of Salesforce for people, and more. At the end of the conversation, Quratulain shares a piece of lifelong advice to people hoping to make a career in Salesforce by saying, be yourself, don’t beat yourself too much over something, and you will get there eventually, whatever your goal is.

At Salesforce Posse, we interview influencers in the Salesforce ecosystem so that we can gain a better understanding of how to excel in a career path from a Salesforce Admin or Developer to an Architect.

[01.45] Learning about Salesforce – Quratulain walks us through how she got into Salesforce and how she found out there’s a whole salesforce community out there.

[04.21] The value of community  – The joy of having a community that has your back in times of need and the acceptance of anyone without concern where they come from as the value of having a community, says Quratulain.

[11.45] Becoming Salesforce MVP – Quratulain shares the moment when she became a salesforce MVP and how she processed becoming an MVP.

[15.35] Dreaming events – Quratulain dives into how dreaming events are organized in the US and around the world and what value those events have for those communities.

[17.48] Pakistan dreaming – First community-led conference within the salesforce ecosystem in Pakistan.

[24.26] Advice for people starting in Salesforce – Stop comparing and bringing value to your community in what way you can as the advice that she gives to her younger self, says Quratulain.

 

Connect with Quratulain

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/salesforcequrat/?originalSubdomain=pk

Twitter – https://mobile.twitter.com/iqurattariq

 

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast

Indeed Jobs: https://www.indeed.com/

PakDreamin: https://pakdreamin.com/

Salesforce Community Conferences: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/community/conferences

Salesforce Community Events: https://trailblazercommunitygroups.com/

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