The New Copado Value Stream Management Capabilities a Timely Boost for Salesforce Developers

Today’s digital imperative means software delivery performance is the leading indicator of an organization’s capacity to deliver business results. Yet, according to a recent Harvard Business Review report, only 10% of CIOs say they are capable of rapid software deployment. Copado, which provides a DevOps platform for building applications that extend Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications from Salesforce, recently announced that it’s adding Copado value stream management capabilities to help customers accelerate time-to-value. According to the Copado team, the new capabilities can help users demonstrate business value in as little as 100 days.

Announcing the new development, Andrew Leigh, Chief Marketing Officer at Copado, says providing a platform that accelerates application development and deployment is no longer enough. Through the ’21 Winter Release of the Copado DevOps 36o platform, the company wants to provide developers with the opportunity to prioritize DevOps projects, he says.

Copado Value Stream Management: A Timely Boost

Leigh adds that, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, more organizations than ever rely on SaaS applications accessible by employees working from home. Entrepreneurs in the IT sector are also turning to platforms such as Salesforce to accelerate digital transformation initiatives.

Salesforce allows developers to employ low-code tools from various platforms such as CRMs to shorten time-to-value, a departure from traditional app development methods that required developers to write entire applications from scratch.

Given the current state of the economy, interest in DevOps platforms has shot through the roof among organizations building Salesforce applications to maximize return on investment. The organizations investing tons of money (some up to six-figure budgets) in building these applications would benefit immensely from the Copado value stream management tools that help them make sure these projects are delivered on time.

“Customers are laser-focused on accelerating their digital-first projects because of the potential impact on actual business results,” says Sanjay Gidwani, COO at Copado. “The introduction of value stream management allows developers and even organizations under pressure to meet expectations on the speed, quality, and visibility of their investment.”

“The new capabilities align the developer or organization’s corporate strategy with CIO and IT metrics, thus enabling a prioritized, faster, and a continuous stream of value,” he continues.

Which are the New Copado Value Stream Management Capabilities?

The Copado Winter 21 Release introduces new features captured in the Copado Value Stream Management, across all the five stages of development and operations (DevOps).

The features include several new metrics and interaction functions. For instance, there’s a new standard metric called Cycle Time that tracks the time spent on completing a work item for a process block. The tracked time excludes idle time. Also introduced is the possibility for custom metrics to be easily edited or deleted. You can also rearrange your custom metrics using a new drop-down menu.

Still on metrics and interactions, you’ll love the enhancements in the display of numeric fields for standard metrics. The metrics are now adjusted based on months, days, and hours. You can also create metrics based on currency fields.

Finally, new stages and process blocks will show you what records are lagging. You can click on any stage or process block for a drill-down data table with the work item’s corresponding record. This data table displays the work item hyperlink that you can click to record in Salesforce.

Aside from new metrics and interactions, there are also a few changes to filters and chatter. For instance, filters now support custom metrics in addition to standard metrics. Also, value stream filters now support the contains filter logic, lookup, and picklist fields.

Meanwhile, Chatter has been adjusted such that you can use the value stream map to collaborate with team members on a work item. You’ll also notice that native Chatter functionality at the bottom utility bar makes it possible to post, tag, and directly collaborate with users.

Impact at Every Phase of DevOps

With the introduction of the new Copado Value Stream Management features, the following is a summary of the impact on each stage of the development process;

1. Analyze: Integration with Chatter and Slack and a detailed drive-down into VSM data and multi-currency planning make collaboration and interaction more straightforward.
2. Plan: The new Copado release supports application and feature-based planning and gives developers the ability to prioritize projects or features using any objectives.
3. Build: The Winter 21 release comes with a new suite of declarative pipeline builders that allow even non-technical Salesforce teams to define and manage value pipelines.
4. Test: The latest release adds deeper integrations to leading AI testing tools and updates to help developers deliver the highest quality applications ever.
5. Deliver: The new cross-platform tracking functionality means that teams can visualize workstreams across all products and even automate deployment while enforcing quality.

Summary

Copado is redefining how to achieve success on the Salesforce platform. If your organization yearns for a data-driven approach to delivering faster, higher-quality releases and improving customer trust, you should consider trying out the new Copado Value Stream Management capabilities.