How Copado Unifies Remote Teams

April 8, 2020

Team Copado

Authored by Gloria Ramchandani, Product Manager | Copado

Given the current circumstances with COVID-19, companies around the world are scrambling to find ways to work together in a remote environment. The challenges many people are facing for the first time have been a part of my life for the past 8 years. I began my remote work journey in 2012, and despite the difficulties we all face during the initial transition, I haven’t looked back. Working remotely can be challenging, but with the right tools and a cohesive team, it doesn’t have to be.

Many companies lack the tools to effectively support their remote workers, especially in unprecedented times such as these. While most companies already have at least a few individuals who are fully remote, in times when social distancing is a priority over in-office work, companies must learn how to adapt to a 100% virtual workplace. For teams to collaborate as they would in a typical office, leaders need to ensure that tools that foster collaboration are available and utilized, especially when teams are spread across time zones and the opportunities for even occasional face-to-face interaction have been eliminated.

Salesforce DevOps teams often face the challenges of remote work, even in times when working together in person is a possibility. As the #1 native DevOps platform for Salesforce, Copado is uniquely positioned to unify remote teams. As a Product Manager at Copado, I myself use the product to manage the features I’m building. The team that I collaborate with the most is located in Madrid, Spain, while I am located on the East Coast of the United States. We have very little overlap in our days and are always crunched for time when we meet. However, the silver lining is that we are able to collaborate on work without having to physically be in the same office, location, or time zone. Sounds crazy, right? Here’s how the process works:

Natively Built On Salesforce

Copado is built on Salesforce, so if you’re familiar with Salesforce you’re already familiar with the Copado UI. Just like Salesforce provides a single source of truth for sales, service, and other departments, Copado allows you to have a single source of truth for all of your development activities. It’s like a Development Cloud!

Simple Collaboration in Real Time

I write tons of user stories all day and every day. Those user stories are records in Salesforce, so other people on the team have access to that information in real time, even from their phones. I continue to refine my requirements, collaborate with engineers and end users all on that same record. Every change to the requirements is tracked, and Chatter lets us have discussions on any aspect of the work.

Automated Processes

When stories are ready to be estimated and reviewed by our engineering team, I submit my User Stories for approval with an approval process that we have built on the User Story object. The Engineering lead will then review and estimate my Story before scheduling it for a Sprint.

Complete Visibility

We do a prioritization exercise over Google Hangouts before placing our work into Sprints. And the rest is history! As a user of Copado, you have a 360 degree view into the development lifecycle. You can see when the work in that User Story was deployed to other environments, all the way up until it is finally released!

So what are the key takeaways? How exactly does Copado unify Remote Teams?

Copado is built natively on the Salesforce platform! The beauty of this is that you never have to leave the platform to check on something related to your DevOps process.

With Chatter, you can collaborate on any piece of work by tagging others and chatter groups. Chatter enables you to have a conversation related to a specific record in Copado.
Standard Salesforce Reports and Dashboards include the Copado objects. You can easily create your own reports and dashboards to see data related to your DevOps process.
Copado offers a WEALTH of information! You can find things like:
What stories were included in a particular production release
How long it took to do particular deployments
When work was merged with that of other developers
How much work is completed in each sprint

It literally can tell you anything and everything about the development work that is taking place, without you having to reach out to someone to ask. It’s like a built-in audit trail of your DevOps process!

Because Copado is a managed package, you can build on top of it according to your own business use case. Maybe you need another object related to the User Story object to track things like components. Or maybe you need something related to Themes or Promotions. The possibilities are endless. With Copado you can BUILD ON!