Automating Salesforce Deployment at a Major Government Agency

A strategic public sector customer engaged Bluewave to modernise their Salesforce release and DevOps processes. As part of a multi-year digital transformation programme, this agency has set a bold ambition: to become the most digitally advanced foreign direct investment organisation in the world. Find out about how our experts successfully delivered this project by reading the case study below.

About the Customer

Our customer is an autonomous statutory agency that is responsible for the attraction and retention of inward foreign direct investment into the country it is based in. The global environment that our client competes for foreign investment in is constantly changing. Despite this, our customer has historically won a far higher share of investment from abroad than you’d expect, given the country’s population size and economy. This success reflects the organisation’s ability to capitalise on the numerous opportunities that arose as new growth areas emerged.

Salesforce is a cornerstone of their operations, and Bluewave has been engaged as a strategic delivery partner to lead elements of their enterprise-wide transformation. This work spans CRM, grant management, and claims management – all supported by an external Salesforce development team.

The Challenge

The customer has over 400 Salesforce users and a delivery team of 10+ external developers, and it relies on the platform to support grant management, stakeholder engagement, investment operations, and regulatory oversight. As part of establishing a Salesforce Centre of Excellence, Bluewave has addressed growing challenges in deployment reliability, code quality, and release efficiency.

This includes technical challenges, such as manual Salesforce deployments previously taking 3-5 hours to complete, developers needing to actively monitor each deployment to troubleshoot any connection issues, as well as security compliance checks being inconsistently applied to Apex code, and Metadata conflicts frequently causing deployment failures. With these technical issues came additional business impacts, such as unpredictable release cycles impacting delivery commitments, the inability to enforce consistent coding and security standards. On top of this, there was a high dependency on key individuals for deployment knowledge and valuable development hours were being wasted on manual oversight and firefighting.

“It became clear that we needed structure, automation, and visibility. Bluewave’s DevOps leadership has helped us make a measurable leap forward.” – Project Manager at Major Government Agency

Analysis

Our team at Bluewave conducted a comprehensive analysis of the client’s existing Salesforce development practices, identifying several key areas for improvement:

• Manual Deployment Processes – Heavy reliance on manually navigating Salesforce deployment tools
• Inconsistent Code Quality – No standardised approach to Apex code validation before merge
• Poor Metadata Management – Lack of clear processes for managing metadata conflicts

Implementation Strategy

Based on our assessment, our experts designed and implemented a multi-faceted GitHub Actions strategy with the following core components:

• Automated Salesforce CI/CD Pipeline
  • Implemented environment-specific deployment workflows (sandbox, UAT, production)
  • Established secure credential management using GitHub Secrets
  • Added deployment approval gates for QA/Production environments
  • Incorporated Salesforce CLI commands for streamlined deployment
• Pull Request Validation Framework
  • Implemented automated build validation for all Pull Requests
  • Added automated commenting on PRs with test results and analysis findings
  • Introduced required status checks to prevent merging of failing code
• Comprehensive PMD Static Analysis
  • Implemented PMD static code analysis for all Apex code
  • Created custom rulesets aligned with customer’s security requirements
  • Added code quality gates that blocked PRs with severe violations
  • Generated detailed reports within PRs

The Results

Our DevOps transformation delivered significant, measurable benefits to the client. We improved the client’s security compliance, reducing Apex vulnerabilities by over 70%, our work resulted in massive time savings for developers, reclaiming approximately 8-10 hours per developer per week. Additionally, development velocity was increased, with sprint delivery time improved by 25-30%. Developer satisfaction was increased, as teams were freed from deployment friction, unnecessary manual effort, constant monitoring and babysitting deployments. Standardisation resulted in a consistent deployment approach across all Salesforce changes, making things much more streamlined. Clear visibility into deployment status and test results led to increased transparency and there was also a reduced dependency on individual deployment expertise due to the knowledge transfer that our experts established.