Copado this week extended the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities it makes available for its DevOps platform for building and deploying Salesforce applications to include an ability to now discover the relationship between the objects used to create code.
The Org Intelligence module added to the Copado AI Platform leverages the metadata exposed on the Salesforce platform to extrapolate those relationships in a way that promises to reduce by 80% the amount of time previously required to discover them.
Gloria Ramchandani, senior vice president of product at Copado, said that capability, in addition to accelerating the ability of a DevOps team to respond to any incident, will also help organizations reuse objects rather than inadvertently recreating them simply because developers didn’t have a way to easily discover what code had been previously developed.
In addition, organizations will be able to use the Org Intelligence module to analyze the impact of any change they might make to their applications, she added. Understanding how applications are configured and connected will also reduce the overall stress level many DevOps teams experience when updating existing applications, noted Ramchandani.
Overall, Copado claims the Org Intelligence module could reduce by 40% the amount of time required to create code in a way that conforms with established best practices.
Copado, for the past several years, has been steadily extending a set of AI capabilities that make it simpler for both professional and so-called citizen developers to build and deploy custom applications for the Salesforce platform. While there is no shortage of tools for building these applications, the Salesforce platform is based on a proprietary object architecture, and Copado has developed a DevOps platform to streamline and optimize application development workflows.
With the rise of AI technologies, the pace at which Salesforce applications are being built and deployed has been steadily accelerating, which creates an even more acute need for ensuring best practices are being applied in ways that don’t slow down the pace at which those applications are built. That’s especially critical in Salesforce environments where many applications are being built by administrators who often lack formal software engineering training and expertise, noted Ramchandani.
In fact, rather than simply focusing on the amount of code being written, more organizations would be well-advised to focus more on how their applications are designed to ensure usability, she added.
It’s not clear what percentage of the organizations that build and deploy applications on the Salesforce platform have adopted best DevOps practices. The need for those best practices, however, will become more acute as various classes of developers leverage AI to build software. Otherwise, most organizations will simply wind up deploying more poor-quality applications than ever.
In the meantime, organizations might want to assess how many applications they are building and deploying today on software-as-a-service (SaaS) application platforms such as Salesforce, with any toward ensuring as many as possible of them are reliably built and deployed using a set of best practices that ensures they can not only scale but are also just as importantly secure.
