An Overview of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment Under Salesforce
The Salesforce platform is ideal for the continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI) methodology. It allows organizations to remain agile. Suppose you closely look at modern businesses today. In that case, they face multiple challenges like a very intensely competitive market environment, rapidly changing scenarios, and a necessity to scale up to meet demands.
By KAREN ANTHONY
To combat the limitations of the extended software development processes, organizations in the modern era have adopted theagile software development methodology. It can seamlessly integrate in your work giving you better results.
The agile method of software development
The agile methodology of software development entails short sprints of seamless development processes. The software development team must function successfully and effectively without interrupting or breaking into another’s code. This need is essential, mainly when the software development teams are located in different geographical locations.
In this scenario, continuous integration or CI and continuous delivery or CD can assist software development teams in attaining better efficiency, helping them offer rapid changes to the software while maintaining the security and stability of the system.
Continuous and continuous delivery is a culture that every organization should embrace for improved productivity, timely delivery, troubleshooting, satisfied customers, and more. Irrespective of your company’s size or how complex it might be, it is a good practice that every business must follow.
The CI server
The significant tools and software in the process are the automation testing tool, the source code repository, and the CI server. If the above principles are applied to software development under Salesforce, it implies a deployment that is made either for a production.org or a sandbox. Businesses can push both configurations and changes to customizations to different orgs with continuous integration.
CI and CD in Salesforce
Continuous integration and continuous deployment refer to the software development practice that needs developers to commit the code to a common source each time they have a working code.
Each of the above commits is called a check-in that gets verified by an automated build process. This permits the issues to be detected at an early stage in the software development process. With regular integration, the software team can identify errors faster and resort to instant remedial action. In fact, in the last couple of years, this has encompassed the entire cycle right from the code’s check-in to deployment in the production org.
Critical principles behind CI and CD
Given below are the fundamental principles that are behind continuous integration and continuous development-
- The automation of both the build and the deployment tasks
- Automated testing (this is recommended)
- One source code repository
- Build validation in the integration environment
- Testing in the copy of the production.org
- Visibility and the transparency of the software development process.
Common challenges that could be faced
Given below are some of the common challenges that the software development teams can face-
- The cycle for release management might become too long due to manual deployment across orgs that are different
- This deployment is prone to error when the changes are done manually
- Multiple developers are working on one code, and there may be risks of overwriting
- Code versioning might become an issue if the team wishes to revert to a version they created earlier
Solutions
Specialists from the popular name in the field of Salesforce DevOps, Flosum, recommend in the above cases, businesses should propose and implement a CI/CD solution to help them attain improved coordination among teams to achieve faster coordination among teams with agile methodologies that will allow them to push changes faster into the production.org.
What are the benefits of using CI/CD processes and tools for software development?
The following are the advantages of using CD/CI processes and tools in software development for a business-
- The integrations are quick and simple, with improved visibility boosting better communication.
- Issues are detected early and rectified before they escalate into critical problems
- Time is saved on debugging, and more time can be devoted to the addition of features
- Create a solid foundation of code that is good in quality
- Mitigate the waiting time to check whether the code will work or not.
Both continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are similar terns in some way. However, there is a slight difference between the two. CD refers to the changes that are made to the software, are tested automatically, and uploaded to a repository. The primary goal here is to minimize the efforts used for deploying the code.
CD and its role
Continuous deployment refers to releasing changes to the new code automatically from the repository to the end-user. This is beneficial to avoid manual processes that often make the release slow and sluggish.
How is CI different from CD?
On the other hand, CI is the practice that concentrates on keeping the release always ready. To get CI correct, there is a lot of discipline involved in the process. To enable changes to be successfully made to the application that needs to be pushed, later built, merged, and then frequently tested to a shared repository that everyone shares.
Detect issues early before problems become uncontrollable to manage
If there is a failure in any of the modules, this will be communicated to the concerned team instantly. Experts generally recommend completing the entire process in ten to fifteen minutes.
What is the ideal time for committing codes into the repository?
As an integral part of the continuous integration process, developers need to commit their codes daily or as decided by the whole team into the repository shared by everyone. This helps them identify bugs and other quality issues on the small code over a larger code executed over time.
In conclusion, CI and CD specialists in Salesforce often recommend that the commit frequency of the code be daily or even twice a day to averting conflicts that occur when working on similar codes and merging them before they commit.
