The DevOps conversation is changing. Business leaders are increasingly asking delivery teams for more outcome metrics to make sure the effort put in matches the value delivered. While increasing velocity remains a key goal for Salesforce DevOps, more and more organizations are realizing that they must either ensure quality throughout the process or risk struggling to deliver the desired outcomes and demonstrate their connection to business value.

How should organizations approach this challenge and implement metrics that matter? We recently convened a few Salesforce experts - Gaurav Kheterpal, Salesforce MVP and founder and CEO of Vanshiv Technologies; Andrew Cook, technical Salesforce instructor at Salesforce Ben; and Veroljub Mihajlovic, senior product marketing leader at Flosum - for a deep dive on this topic in our webinar Achieving High-Performing Salesforce DevOps with Metrics.

Benefits of better metrics

Software delivery intelligence enables business leaders and other stakeholders to get a complete picture into what is working well and where attention is needed. It helps businesses meet several key objectives:

• Map software delivery flow and create a baseline. Software delivery intelligence provides the necessary visibility into the effort required to plan, develop and operationalize software releases on time and with quality. Additionally, they help organizations understand the problems that can bog down the process, including manual work, inefficient processes, errors and bottlenecks.

• Capture software process and delivery metrics. Having clear insights into metrics enables leaders to balance opinions with process data to push through organizational dysfunction and keep the focus on enacting real change. Industry-standard DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics are a good starting point to help organizations measure factors such as deployment frequency, time for change, mean time to recover, and change failure.

• Link application development efforts with business value. Connect development efforts to business outcomes by tracking the flow of value creation through the application delivery pipeline. By managing their journey with software delivery, organizations can understand the business impact and calculate real ROI on their automation efforts.

Six dimensions of software delivery intelligence

Gaurav Kheterpal has been in the Salesforce ecosystem for more than 25 years and witnessed the complete paradigm shift that has occurred during that time. According to Kheterpal, "When DevOps was first introduced, software delivery intelligence was optional, a nice to have. Today these are critical aspects of your development lifecycle."

There are six key areas where software delivery intelligence can impact businesses:

Delivery - Organizations need more than a tool to replace manual processes; they need an efficient delivery process and the ability to plug holes throughout the development lifecycle.

1. Security - Security is paramount, and an organization's DevOps solution must be secure, compliant, mature and fool-proof.

1. Cost - This is the biggest advantage at play when you use a DevOps platform like Flosum. By taking out the inefficiencies from development lifecycles, organizations can optimize and reduce operational costs.

1. Management - Software delivery intelligence provides the necessary insights to streamline development lifecycles and achieve good governance.

1. Autonomy - CD/IC enables organizations to automate the build process and other phases, minimizing dependencies in terms of various other roles and increasing autonomy.

1. Innovation - How do you make the development process more innovative with the latest and greatest changes in technologies? This is the question all organizations must ask themselves to find a competitive advantage.

There are many opportunities for organizations who integrate software development intelligence into their DevOps. One important note is that with Salesforce, there is not an out-of-the-box solution for adding these key metrics. Instead, Salesforce will prompt users towards creating manual processes. Flosum - the complete platform for DevOps, DevSecOps and Data Management - can help organizations improve their processes with the intel they need.

To learn more about Flosum, schedule a free demo.

For more insights from Gaurav Kheterpal, Andrew Cook and Veroljub Mihajlovic, watch the webinar Achieving High-Performing Salesforce DevOps with Metrics.