Salesforce Continuous Deployment Workflow – The Complete Guide

It is well-known Salesforce allows organizations to innovate continuously at scale, enabling them to cater to their fast-evolving business requirements and excellent growth. The needs of a rapidly-growing company are dynamic, and this makes the ability to add new capabilities to its Salesforce org quickly to meet the needs with little disruption to its business operations very important.

Many companies are implementing DevOps, a novel paradigm that facilitates seamless coordination between development, IT operations, quality engineering and data security teams to enhance their Salesforce system with minimal interruption to their operations. DevOps harnesses automation to reduce the duration of development lifecycles significantly, allowing firms to fulfill their rapidly changing requirements in an effective manner.

A Salesforce DevOps initiative (or for that matter, any DevOps project) leverages various proven methods to ensure hassle-free software improvements. One of the most important and widely used methods is Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment/Delivery (CD). Today, we will examine a typical Salesforce CI/CD workflow, in detail. Let’s begin by trying to understand what CI is.

Continuous Integration (CI)

CI is a fully-automated DevOps process that facilitates continuous deployment (CD); it allows organizations to integrate code from multiple Salesforce development teams automatically to enable a complete software release. Each code commit is thoroughly verified by an automated mechanism, and this helps identify issues very early in the development lifecycle.

Most agile methodologies use CI – a development team works on new features and commits its modifications to a version control system. After integrating the modifications, a build is executed along with the work of other development teams. This helps businesses understand how the code generated by all development teams works, allowing the organizations to suggest changes without delay.

A typical Salesforce CI is made up of the following steps.

Step 1: Members of the development team import the revised code into their systems.

Step 2: After developing the new capabilities of the Salesforce system, they commit the changes to a shared repository.

Step 3: The CI server keeps a close watch on the repository and ensures recompiling when a new code is committed.

Step 4: Comprehensive unit and integration checks are carried out on the recompiled code.

Step 5: Once the checks are completed, the teams are informed of the results; they can pinpoint and provide resolutions to bugs rapidly.

From this point, the Salesforce DevOps project moves to continuous delivery or continuous deployment. The two processes share many features in common but differ in a key aspect. But before we look at the difference, let’s see what continuous delivery is all about.

Continuous Delivery