Build the thing right
Supercharging Salesforce DevOps
Reduce rework, eliminate rollbacks and increase user adoption. Provide your development teams with clearly designed user stories so they can build exactly the right thing, faster.
Until we had Elements, we really didn’t have an end to end DevOps process.
John Eichsteadt III, Salesforce Solution Architect & Platform Owner
Yin and yang
Build the right thing. Build the thing right
The Elements.cloud platform is complementary to DevOps and makes it easy to perform rigorous, upfront business analysis for your Salesforce org.
Pulling your business analysis and metadata risk analysis together into detailed, concise user stories is the perfect handover to your development team. It eliminates miscommunication and enables better scheduling and resourcing of development teams. And it drives better collaboration between the business and development stakeholders.
Handover quality user stories
Remove ambiguity and reduce rework by attaching the business analysis artefacts directly to user stories.
Metadata conflict checking
Take surprises out of your build and deploy process by grouping user stories into releases – you can see any potential conflicts with metadata changes in the analysis and design phases.
Visualize dependencies
Make sure your development teams understand the risk and scope of any change with our visual impact and dependency analysis.
Jira and DevOps tooling sync
There is no duplication needed, user stories in Elements are kept in sync with user stories in Jira and DevOps tools.
Top trends
Top trend in State of DevOps Report 2022
The Copado 2022 DevOps report found that organizations using ‘Agile Planning’ in conjunction with DevOps were 39% more likely to achieve their objectives. Elements, which offers ‘Agile Planning’ for DevOps, can help your organization reach its goals faster.
Streamline Salesforce Releases with DevOps Integration
Our Salesforce DevOps integration is specifically designed to help admins, business analysts, architects and developers collaborate more easily on Salesforce releases, from development to production. With our platform, they can work together seamlessly, ensuring that releases are delivered on time and without errors.
Shift Left
Build the right things. First time.
Elements makes “shift left” a reality. It provides rigorous business analysis and conflict checking earlier in the development cycle when it is cheaper and quicker to resolve.
Elements streamline the development process by providing rigorous business analysis before assigning user stories, reducing rework and building trust with your business users.
Risk assessment releases
Development resource allocation
Empower your development teams to deliver results faster with insights into the risks of any release.
Grouping user stories into a release combining both the impact and dependency analysis enables development teams to understand the risk of any release. As a result, they can allocate the right level of development and testing resources needed to deliver the release on time.
Releases can be managed through the DevOps pipeline that matches the risk level with low-risk releases being fast-tracked to get results faster.
Complementary to DevOps tooling
DevOps integrations
Elements have developed tight integrations with the key DevOps tooling vendors and Salesforce DevOps Center. User stories are kept in sync across all of these DevOps tools and business analysis documentation can be quickly accessed from panels and popups.
Jira
User stories are kept in sync automatically between Elements and Jira. And the development team can view the Elements impact analysis without leaving the Jira interface.
Salesforce DevOps Center
Elements were the launch partner. Our deep integration with DevOps Center provides a Jira integration, impact analysis for conflict checking and the ability to link work items.
Copado
The integration point is the user story synchronized with Elements, Jira and Copado. In addition, Elements surface the business analysis and metadata impact analysis in the right panel popup.
Complementary to DevOps tooling
Jira integration
The Elements user story right panel is shown inside Jira. The integration also keeps title, description, status and Jira custom fields in sync with Elements.
Free replacement for ChangeSets
DevOps Center integration
Salesforce DevOps Center is the new, free DevOps replacement for ChangeSets.
With Elements, you can overcome most of the DevOps Center limitations that will hinder wide-scale adoption. You’ll be able to manage linked work items, which allows for conflict resolution and management of releases. In addition, it offers integration with Jira, allowing you to view metadata across work items for improved collaboration and coordination with your team.
Getting started with DevOps Center
DevOps Center implementation guide
Alongside Salesforce, Elements wrote the DevOps Center Implementation Guide.
This guide explains the core DevOps principles so that organizations can maximize the benefits of migrating to DevOps Center.
It has been written with Elements team’s experience of the pilot, working with customers on the pilot, and building a partner extension alongside the DevOps Center team.
Frequently asked questions
What are the top DevOps tools for Salesforce?
The top 6 paid DevOps tools are Copado, Gearset, Flosum, AutoRabit, Opera, and Prodly and a growing number of new entrants. They all vary in scope and therefore cost. Salesforce DevOps Center is the free replacement for ChangeSets.
Does DevOps need Elements?
The benefits of better user stories and understanding the risk of making changes to metadata are clear. Without Elements, you will risk more rework and rollbacks that burn up time and resources.
If we are not using a DevOps tool, can we benefit from Elements?
Absolutely. Many of our customers still use ChangeSets rather than a paid DevOps tool. They are now looking at DevOps Center as the first step to a more formal DevOps process.
What is Shift Left?
Shift-Left is the practice of moving testing, quality, and performance evaluation early in the development process, often before any code is written. The benefits of Shift-Left testing are even more significant when implemented throughout the entire implementation lifecycle. It is significantly cheaper and easier to fix conflicts identified in the business analysis phase of the project, but this requires better change intelligence.
Can I trial Elements?
Yes. Talk to us.
