The software engineers are now entirely focused on reaping high-quality output in the SF DevOps development processes. The enterprises are on the lookout to work smarter by minimizing efforts and maximizing production as they scale.
Successful administration of the same is crucial in any DevOps process as we have various Salesforce applications in place for global customers. Many new features get add now and then.
Here we are putting forth a humble effort to diverge deeper into Salesforce DX and to explore its functionality in full and determine how we may leverage its features to streamline the development of the applications.
This effort to examine is also to identify better ways to build, test, QA, and deploy the applications. The objectives are for continuous development, quick testing, and thorough QA, as well as a faster turnaround in case of bug fixes, and also leverage the first to market advantages.
Why Salesforce DX?
Salesforce Developer Experience or SFDX is a custom set of the tool for the enterprise developer. To enjoy the best developer experience, testing environment, and quicker release of the packages. It also lets various processes to run in a streamlined way alongside offering better control and a higher degree of flexibility.
At the start of Salesforce DX, you can find scratch orgs, which are fully configurable, source-driven, and disposable development and testing environments. Scratch orgs will help in the rapid development of enterprise applications and testing automation.
While these tools are useful by their won, the real power of scratch orgs get unlease with GitLab’s pipelines. By building different jobs running on the GitLab’s virtual machines, we can create, test, validate, and deploy the codes automatically through the repositories.
With tests running on each step of the process as when the code push to the repository, the merge requests create, built, or approve, and daily as per the pre-set schedule. We can easily detect the potential regression or the bugs as early more possible than ever before.
This also means that we can catch them at the first point when those are the easiest to kick off and thereby limiting the chances of them finding their ways into crucial customer environments.
As all these ideally run through different automate processes and protect GitLab branches, the developers and operations executives can focus more on their responsibilities through the DevOps process to gain better control over who and how the updates are initiated and accomplish to the apps.
Those days are far gone where the unintentional and destructive changes, like removing the codes or package fields getting accidentally deleted, etc.
Benefits to the customers for SF DevOps
Since the enterprises started improving their R & D processes, they also started seeing significant improvement in the development process and releasing lifecycles of their applications. Many customers have successfully integrated this into their business and are seeing great results.
There are many AppExchange apps, too, as Case Merge Premium, Simple Survey, and Email to Case Premium, etc. Which the functional integrations part easier for the developers. Do some research before starting and the process will become easy.
Salesforce DevOps challenges handled with Salesforce DX and SF DevOps
Those working on Salesforce development or SF DevOps may have identified various challenges. With the need for continuous integration, testing automation, scaffolding the entire salesforce organization, tracking the dependencies, etc.
The developer community around Salesforce is now one of the most vibrant technology communities. Finds solutions for all such problems through community-contributed projects.
Some of such projects are the open-source IDEs like Welkins Suite, MavesMate, Force Code, ANT scripts for automated deployments, package.xml generator, etc.
All these will allow the SF DevOps developers to work on their unique instances without interrupting others’ codes. So, it is the entire source control driven, and one can easy way to use the Github features to review the test code and merge the same.
Source driven approach for SF DevOps
This is a big leap in the conventional development approach. Salesforce DX possesses the ability to take out the source code from the version control system. Then deploy it automatically to a salesforce instance.
It also requires some manual steps to be accomplished, like creating new salesforce org, maintaining the scripts that may create package.xml, maintaining the ANT script for code deployment, etc. Many enterprises have automated these too; however, with various steps enabling the chatter, person accounts, service cloud, and so on.
As of late, SFDX, SF DevOps supports automated enablement of many of these features and the org preferences. All you need to do is maintain the file ‘project-scratch-def.json’ in the project’s source control.
SFDX Developer workflow benefits of SF DevOps
CI or continuous Integration is a brand-new development practice that will let the developers integrate. Their code into a shared repository many times a day.
Automated builds verify each of these check-ins by allowing the teams to detect problems. If any, at an early stage itself. Doing this has been a bigger challenge basically because you need highly skilled engineers who are well versed.
The migration tools of force.com as well as the APIs to build it and also maintain it. With the metadata changing every once in a while, it has become more challenging to even the skilled developers.
Salesforce DX remains CLI-based, so it may not be challenging to get it set with Jenkins, Circle, Travis of whatever development environment each is familiar with.
There is also a well-defined trailhead module that will help you with it assist you with this. The Continuous Integration process can help improve developer efficiency and avoid any regression in an agile development environment.
Conclusion
Automating the unit tests may also help in the overall quality assurance. Can ensure a much smoother packaging of application and deployment. It is also possible for the developers to configure your continuous integration to automatically run all the apex unit tests.
Even the lightning components’ tests. The testing framework for the Lightning components is still in the pilot stage. You can explore more out of it in the future.
