Interview: Gearset, DevOps Excellence Awards finalist

'We've helped teams move from lengthy, manual deployments with Salesforce native tools to mature, efficient CI/CD release pipelines, using Gearset at every step.'

Beyond bringing dev and ops teams together, DevOps is also now about delivering value to customers, recognising the human aspect of collaboration and communication, and realising how it can enhance areas of the business beyond traditional tech teams.

Computing's DevOps Excellence Awards showcase outstanding achievements from organisations, personalities and solutions that have successfully applied DevOps methodologies.

This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Tuesday, 14th March in London.

One of those finalists is Gearset, which has reached the shortlist for two categories: Best Continuous Delivery Product and DevOps Tool / Product of the Year.

We talked to Oli Lane, engineering team lead at Gearset, to find out what makes their company different from other technology firms.

Oli Lane has over seven years of experience in Salesforce DevOps. Since graduating with a bachelor in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, he has helped lead the creation of Gearset's CI/CD solution, Pipelines.

Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers.

Oli Lane: Gearset is an end-to-end DevOps platform for Salesforce, trusted by thousands of companies, including IBM, Accenture and McKesson. We didn't just bring the DevOps philosophy to the Salesforce ecosystem — we've brought the solutions for a DevOps process that handles the nuances of Salesforce development. We've helped teams move from lengthy, manual deployments with Salesforce-native tools to mature, efficient CI/CD release pipelines using Gearset at every step.

What makes you different from other technology companies?

We're a group of DevOps engineers who realised that our Salesforce releases could be far more efficient and reliable. As a result, we created our unique line-by-line diff viewer, which set us apart from other styles of Salesforce release management from the beginning. This comparison engine allows our users to understand their deployments, minimising errors and giving Gearset an industry-leading deployment success rate of 93%, compared to 50% when using native Salesforce tools.

Our development work is driven by customer feedback and we work with our users to help them mature with our tool. Each customer works closely with a Customer Success Manager, who is there to support them with their long term development whilst using Gearset. We're just as proud of our 98% customer satisfaction rating as we are of the merits of our DevOps engine.

DevOps is primarily a collaborative approach to software development, which we embody in our own culture. We've consistently been selected by the Best Companies Awards as one of the UK's Top 5 technology companies to work for, due to our supportive and collaborative culture.

What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?

I'm most proud of just how quickly users can configure complex and reliable automation workflows with our new Pipelines tooling. On average, Salesforce teams report it takes 90 hours to create a CI/CD workflow, but I'm pleased that Gearset's Pipelines can be configured to higher standards in just 30 minutes. These time-savings continue in a team's regular development work — it's possible to merge pull requests, build CI jobs and releases, and back-promote changes all from within the Pipelines interface.

Though teams can set up complex automation flows using Pipelines, users retain granular control over their workflow. Individual changes can be moved through the pipeline independently, so one snag doesn't stall an entire release. Similarly, users can back-promote branches in just a few clicks, so upstream environments reflect downstream hotfixes.

What are you working on this year?

Gearset is continuing to grow, which is reflected in busy plans for 2023. Led by user feedback, we're working to build intuitive solutions to complex technical aspects of Salesforce development.

In 2022, we released our solution for Salesforce's Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) sales tool. CPQ is hugely popular but notoriously difficult to deploy, so we've built a CPQ solution that bypasses the need for complex scripts and simplifies the deployment process. In 2023, we're excited to continue expanding our CPQ solution, through supporting parent-child relationships, complex CPQ metadata deployments and data comparisons. Our hope is to achieve a DevOps solution for Salesforce's CPQ that is as comprehensive as our support for other Salesforce services.

Similarly, many users have reported difficulties deploying changes to Salesforce flows, a tool allowing users to automate their business processes. We're working to visualise the impact of flows on Salesforce data and expanding our capability to automatically flag errors in flow deployments.

Why are events like the DevOps Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?

This industry is a broad church and it'd be impossible to stay abreast of the variety of creative and successful ways that teams are implementing DevOps. The DevOps Excellence Awards allow us to celebrate success from across the industry and, by highlighting the best tools and teams, gives us a fantastic opportunity to learn from one another.

DevOps Excellence Awards will take place on 14th March in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.