CI/CD Best Practices for Salesforce DX

With digital transformation and the move to online operations, companies are increasingly relying on Salesforce to manage many of their operations. In this context, teams are turning to Salesforce CI/CD to automate manual workflows, which help them handle these growing workloads and quickly deliver quality work to their end-users. This article gives you a short overview of how to implement CI/CD in Salesforce DX.

A development process that uses version control as the source for new development activity is used to build Salesforce CI/CD. The way you manage and coordinate concurrent work streams and multiple environments are then determined by the Git branching strategy you choose.

Automation is used in this process to validate deployment packages, run tests, and move work items along the pipeline. Individual CI jobs can be set up using a Salesforce DevOps solution such as AutoRABIT, Gearset or a standard automation tool such as Jenkins. The continuous integration in DevOps processes runs on a regular basis or is triggered when branches in Git merge, and they can conduct tests before deployments across version control and Salesforce environments.

Implementation of the Salesforce CI/CD pipeline is separated into four stages:

Before proceeding to the next stage, each succeeding stage must be accomplished. All steps are constantly checked for faults or anomalies, and feedback is sent to the delivery team.

Each development, whether a bug patch or a feature enhancement, is routed via the CI/CD pipeline in DevOps before being deployed to production.

It is the first stage of Salesforce CI/CD workflow. Here the CI/CD pipeline in DevOps will be activated by any change in the program or a predefined flag in the code repository. This level is all about source control, including version control and change tracking.

When the automated process detects a change in the central repository (commit, new version), it will start tasks like code compilation and unit testing.

This stage of the pipeline converts the source code and all of its dependencies into an executable/runnable instance of the development. This stage addresses software builds as well as other types of buildable objects such as Docker containers.

Failure in this build could suggest a fundamental problem with the underlying code.

A centralized artifact repository such as yarn, JFrog, or a cloud-based solution such as Azure Artifacts can be used to centralize the storage process of building artifacts. If there are any issues with the current build, we will be able to roll back to the previous build.

The test stage includes all automated testing to validate the software's behavior. This stage's purpose is to keep software defects from reaching end users. This stage might include a variety of methods of testing, ranging from integration testing to functional testing. This stage will also reveal any flaws in the product.

This is the Salesforce CI/CD pipeline's final stage. The package is now ready to be deployed after passing all of the preceding phases. At this point, the package is deployed to appropriate environments, first to a staging environment for additional quality assurance (QA) and then to a production environment. Infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and containerization utilizing technologies such as Terraform, Puppet, Docker, and Kubernetes can all be part of the deployment stage.

New business needs and opportunities constantly increase the workload of Salesforce teams. So, teams are turning to Salesforce CI/CD to automate manual workflows, which help them handle these growing workloads and quickly deliver quality work to their end-users