This document discusses challenges in the Salesforce development lifecycle and proposes an opinionated approach. It identifies issues like incomplete metadata capture, lack of a build process, and challenges with continuous integration, deployment and development environments. The proposed solution is to use a version control system to fully track all metadata changes, implement a build process to validate deployments to an empty org, and leverage version control features for incremental deployments. A demonstration tool called force-dev-tool is presented and personal developer sandboxes are recommended for development environments.

1. AN OPINIONATED DEVELOPMENT
LIFECYCLE FOR FORCE.COM
DEVELOPMENT
Salesforce Developer Group Munich
Matthias Rolke, August 17th 2016

2. AGENDA
Challenges / Approach
Demo
Outlook
Questions

3. ABOUT ME
Matthias Rolke
Developer @ PARX in Munich
4+ years Force.com experience
Open Source Enthusiast

4. 13 years of Salesforce experience
Offices: Zurich, Lausanne, Hamburg,
Munich, Berlin
http://parx.com

5. CHALLENGES / APPROACH
1. Metadata
2. Build process
3. CI / CD
4. Deployment
5. Development environments

6. (1/5) METADATA
= our asset of development
= declarative + programmatic

7. (1/5) METADATA
➡ Best effort to capture all metadata!
➡ Use a Version Control System!
➡ Document manual, non-metadata
changes

8. (2/5) THE (MISSING) BUILD PROCESS
Metadata can be broken
missing dependencies
deleted fields
missing picklist values
...

9. (2/5) BUILD PROCESS
➡ validate a deployment
with all metadata
to an empty org

10. (3/5) CI / CD
Continuous Integration
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Deployment

11. (3/5) CI / CD
➡ Continuous Integration using a build
process without actual deployment
➡ ⚡Postpone Continuous
Delivery/Deployment because of missing
tooling for all possible changes

12. (4/5) DEPLOYMENT
Incremental by design
Changesets?!
Ant Migration Tool?!
...?!

13. (4/5) ANOTHER DEPLOYMENT TOOL?!
➡ Making use of built-in features
of a Version Control System
for incremental deployments

14. (5/5) DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS
Personal sandboxes vs. shared sandbox
Efforts for merging/integrating

15. (5/5) DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS
➡ Personal sandboxes

16. DEMO
https://github.com/amtrack/universal-containers

17. OUTLOOK
force-dev-toolcan do more
Scheduled Metadata Backups
Comparing orgs using VCS
Deployment link

18. QUESTIONS?

19. LINKS
https://github.com/amtrack/force-dev-tool
https://github.com/amtrack/universal-containers
https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-
us.dev_lifecycle.meta/dev_lifecycle
amtrack
mr_amtrack
matthias.rolke@parx.com

20. CONCEPT / APPROACH
Problem Solution
complete state regard all metadata
tracking changes Version Control
build process dedicated and empty ci org
deployment VCS-supported deployment tool
org management personal sandboxes

21. PREREQUISITES
Infrastructure
personal sandboxes
dedicated CI org
Project (maintenance efforts)
CI org: remove custom metadata, maintain users,
profiles, installed packages
Metadata
no unit tests with SeeAllData=true
no deprecated metadata (SControl)