Driving Salesforce Delivery for Nevada DMV with Agile DevOps and Automated Testing

The Challenge

Manual Processes Cause Digital Transformation Traffic Jam

When Nevada DMV began its Salesforce implementation to create an online experience for vehicle registration and renewals, the organization faced significant DevOps and quality assurance challenges. The digital transformation project was ambitious, bringing together 130+ team members across Slalom, the DMV, and external contractors, to build a comprehensive Salesforce-based experience for vehicle registration, titling, identification renewal, and appointment scheduling.

Additionally, DevOps and testing processes were obstructing this transformation. The full waterfall processes impeded the QA team, who could only proceed with testing after the deployment was ready. At the start of the transformation, Nevada DMV could only manage yearly releases. 

"We were in a waterfall model where testing happened at the end, and it was all manual. We needed to shift left, get testing into the sprint, and automate as much as possible to keep pace with development," explains Stephen Hill, Senior Principal Quality Engineer at Slalom.

The problems cascaded through every phase of the development lifecycle: deployments, testing, environment management, release frequency, and morale. The team relied on a custom-built pipeline without any DevOps tools, requiring them to manually manage deployments. This created massive bottlenecks, with deployment cycles taking 6+ days to move changes from UAT to production. Back-promotions were particularly problematic, often blocking and delaying multiple releases.

If a developer picked up a user story in one sprint, it wouldn't reach the QA environment until up to five sprints later. The team bundled all changes together at the end of a sprint, deployed them, and then redeployed if issues arose. This meant QA was constantly testing 3-5 sprints behind development. The use of their waterfall QA process, rather than in-sprint testing, caused the QA team to wait until everything was ready for deployment, then conduct 5 weeks of testing, resulting in extended outages when issues were discovered.

“Everyone was so overwhelmed and burnt out from how difficult deployments were, how tough testing was, how things continued to be missed,” recalls Shreshthi Jain, DevOps Technical Architect at Slalom. “There was a lot of hesitation in accepting a tool that might help.”

Multiple parallel workstreams - fees and payments, customer registration and titling, and work management, quickly strained the environment strategy. Teams overwrote changes, created merge conflicts, and blocked releases. OmniStudio’s tightly coupled data packs further increased deployment and merge complexity.

‍

The Solution

Cruising Towards a Trusting DevOps Platform

Slalom's approach to implementing a DevOps process at Nevada DMV was methodical and change-management focused. The team faced significant resistance—after years of struggling with manual processes, the internal teams were skeptical that any tool could improve their situation.

"The confidence, the trust, the transparency was low,” says Jain.  “For a team who is fairly technical in nature, they were so burnt out by all the development hurdles that they weren't ready to believe that there was better tooling and processes out there.”

After assessing multiple solutions, Slalom and the Nevada DMV selected Copado for several key factors. One of the most critical factors was Copado's availability on Salesforce Government Cloud. Jain noted, "Copado is already being used by other state organizations. The provisioning at DMV is on the Government Cloud. This was the biggest differentiator between Copado and other solutions."

Ease of adoption and direct OmniStudio integration were also key factors influencing Nevada DMV’s decision making. As a Salesforce-native solution, the learning curve was low when onboarding to Copado. "Copado sits on top of the Salesforce platform so we don't have to go and train our administrators and developers, it just comes naturally," Jain explains.

Additional platform features like visibility, scalability, and quality gates were also features that stood out to Nevada DMV. Copado’s ability to integrate quality gates at any stage of the pipeline gives the team flexibility to customize the process for different workstreams. And by supporting parallel work streams and back-to-back changes, with many overlapping components, Copado helps the team to scale. 

From Continuous Development to Automated Testing

Slalom and Nevada DMV’s implementation followed a strategic sequence: establish CI/CD first, then layer in test automation. The team needed stable, frequent deployments before they could shift QA from waterfall to agile. The DevOps implementation transformed the deployment process, but the cultural transformation was just as important as the technical implementation. The Slalom team had to slowly introduce process changes to a team that had lost confidence in improvement. 

Once basic practices such as peer reviews, quality gates, status tracking in Jira, and DevOps 101 were in place, the Slalom team introduced Robotic Testing. Specific milestones were set so that Nevada DMV’s QA team could mature their skills to begin automation. The goals were clear:

• Build a 30-minute smoke test to verify system functionality
• Reduce the 5-week regression cycle to 1-2 weeks, then to 2 days
• Achieve 90% automated regression coverage (targeting completion by end of year)
• Enable the QA team to work in-sprint rather than in waterfall model

‍

The Outcome

Transforming DevOps Into a Speed and Quality Engine

Implementing Copado DevOps and Robotic Testing has fundamentally transformed how Nevada DMV delivers Salesforce solutions and works as a team. Development cycles have shortened from months to weeks. The team is able to push deployments more frequently to production, enabling the team to deliver services to Nevada citizens faster. With smaller, more manageable releases, they are able to reduce their risk significantly.

Before Copado, it took the team more than six days to deploy from UAT to production. Today the team performs multiple deployments a week, with some teams deploying every hour. Whereas changes were previously bundled into massive deployment packages, using back promotions to back up multiple releases, now Nevada DMV’s development team has clear visibility into their deployments and have automated their deployment pipelines.

Beyond technical wins and improved deployment health, Copado has broken down team silos, created trust, and improved coordination across the 130 person team.  "We can go home on time and be with friends and family. We don't have to sit on a call for hours. We have confidence that we'll be able to finish everything on time," says Hill.  

By setting up DevOps best practices, Slalom helped Nevada DMV transform their automated testing. The team went from manual testing and no automation in place to 40+ tests running regularly and from a 5-week waterfall testing cycle to in-sprint testing. Regression testing has been reduced by 75%. What previously took weeks can be completed in days, with automated tests running continuously, providing rapid feedback. The QA team now has the free time to focus on exploratory testing and complex scenarios.

Nevada DMV’s team has achieved 25% automated regression test coverage. "Instead of five weeks, we can reduce it down to just a couple weeks because now most of it has already been tested and it's been tested continuously," comments Hill. This is significant in the first phase of their testing strategy and foundation, which will allow them to expand their test automation across additional testing scenarios.

By shifting left in their testing, Slalom helped enable agile development at Nevada DMV. Testing moved into sprints, enabling in-sprint quality validation. Faster feedback loops improved developer productivity and defects caught earlier in the development cycle significantly reduced rework.

With Copado’s CICD and Robotic Testing capabilities, the Nevada DMV team increased their yearly releases, to monthly, with the goal to move to quarterly releases and set goals for 90% test automation.  Goals the team couldn’t fathom before Copado.

‍

The Future

Self-Driving, End-to-End DevOps Machine

Together Nevada DMV and Slalom continue to optimize their use of Copado and explore new capabilities. Looking ahead they plan to continue their automation expansion, increasing automated regression coverage beyond 25% and expanding the use of Copado Explorer for citizen developer testing.  “We will continue to develop more tests and get a higher percentage of the regression suites automated," mentions Hill. 

The Slalom team looks to help the DMV enhance its performance testing while integrating SAST and DAST tools into the Copado pipeline. By expanding their static code analysis and quality gates, they look to achieve enterprise-level security testing integrated into their CI/CD. 

Slalom and Nevada DMV look to explore how they can further advance their test generation. They seek to increase the QA’s team productivity by exploring Copado auto-healing capabilities to reduce test maintenance while optimizing their testing.

And of course as the team continues to build trust with the business and demonstrate consistent delivery, they intend to expand their scope and business value.