Supercharging Salesforce Development & Testing for Unite Health Share Ministries

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The Challenge

Replacing Risky Deployments with a Centralized DevOps Process

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UHSM provides members with a wide range of healthcare coverage through partnerships with PHCS® PPO Network (the largest provider network in the U.S.), CVS Caremark, MultiPlan, Noom and Fitbod. To support those in need, the nonprofit offers additional assistance thanks to voluntary contributions by other members.

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To keep up with an avalanche of growth across partners, tools and integrations, UHSM partnered with Arcsona to implement Salesforce. From qualifying members to helping patients pay bills through a patient portal, Arcsona’s successful Salesforce implementation enables UHSM to protect sensitive data and support scalable pipelines. But without a Salesforce-native DevOps or automated testing solution, the nonprofit faced a future of overwritten code, merge conflicts and buggy software.

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The Solution

Fixing the Process With Rigorous Testing & Back Promotions

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UHSM explored the commercial DevOps marketplace to see which solution could solve their pipeline challenges and improve their digital infrastructure. They evaluated solutions such as Gearset and Workbench. However, their implementation partner, Arcsona, suggested that Copado would be the best fit due to their familiarity with the platform and previous success using the solution. “We had interacted with Copado on a couple of larger scale implementations and it was just a great breath of fresh air,” mentioned Vaughn Paladin, Co-Founder and CEO at Arcsona.

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Before Copado, UHSM didn’t have an in-house tech team to handle IT, manage engineering processes or set up a robust pipeline structure. UHSM’s dev pipelines deployed small releases directly from a development environment (UAT) to production without any QA testing in between.

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 “We onboarded Copado to lay the foundation before we implemented Salesforce and released it to the broader team,” says Molly Ransone, Director of Technology, UHSM.

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UAT helps UHSM ensure changes are operational and meet business requirements before they are launched to end users. UHSM pushes a production release once they have the right approval in place. Once a release is ready, the UHSM team pushes it immediately and moves on to the next request without any downtime.

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UHSM performed a refresh of Copado to streamline its release process and make sure no environments were out of sync or backed up in the pipeline. As part of the refresh process, they automated the back promotions to help the developers follow DevOps best practices.

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The Outcome

Speeding Up Release Frequency Without Risking Development Overrides

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With Copado, UHSM developers build Salesforce apps in a lower environment and push changes upstream to higher environments after testing. The in-house development team rigorously tests releases and checks with end users to ensure consistency and approve functionality.

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Today, UHSM’s Salesforce development process is a well-oiled machine. Every day, the team releases around three deployments to production and promotes 20+ changes — with a fail rate of just 2%. Developers can build new features in sandboxes without overriding each other and leverage Copado’s Salesforce-native interface to deploy code with ease. Thanks to Copado, the nonprofit organization is able to create great Salesforce applications and deliver business value frequently with a low lead time.

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The Future

Tactical DevOps Management and a Strategic Salesforce Roadmap

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UHSM’s early success has led to plans for more developers, more licenses and more integrations. The company’s immediate plans with Copado include tactical maintenance and strategic Salesforce development to drive steady growth and enrollment. Further into the future, UHSM plans to leverage Copado to gain DevOps maturity and achieve true CI/CD.

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