How to Build a CI/CD Pipeline for Salesforce

The change in online operations and digital transformation in organizations are becoming progressively dependent on Salesforce to oversee a significant number of their operations. Teams are turning to Continuous Development/Delivery (CD) and Continuous Integration (CI), to automate manual workflows, which helps to manage growing workloads and get high-quality work rapidly to their end-users.

It is important to define what is CI/CD, before discussing how to build a CI/CD pipeline. Let’s go with the following definition:

Continuous Integration

CI automatically moves work items along a release pipeline, through environments for merging and testing packages, before promoting them to production. Merging early often confirms that your work is successfully integrated to the rest of your code.

In this manner, automated testing and authentication reduce the time it takes to review new work, and make sure that work items can be deployed effectively to a new environment at any stage in the process.

Continuous Development

CD is a practice of software development where code changes are automatically arranged for a release to production. It is all about releasing more value and new functionality to end-users after the completion of the development and customization work.

This reduction time not only makes organizations more flexible and agile in delivering work quickly, but also encounters changing priorities and fostering an iterative way of working.

Continuous Delivery

CD pipeline is a series of automated procedures for delivering new software. It delivers quality products as per business needs, predictably from test to production in an automated manner. It also creates a process with which a developer’s changes to an application can be pushed to a container registry through automation. Four common phases in continuous delivery:

• Component Phase
• Subsystem Phase
• System Phase
• Production Phase

Benefits of CI/CD

CI/CD removes time-consuming, error-prone, and repetitive processes, which helps in managing huge amounts of developer time for managing the process.

Time saving is a valuable way for reducing costs, and introducing automation into the process, to ensure continuous delivery of high-quality work to end-users. Some of the significant benefits of CI/CD are-

• Better quality releases with fewer errors and risks.
• Shorter review time.
• Smart integration of testing, tools, and project tracking.
• Well-honed and robust release processes which are trusted.
• Safe options for analyzing mistakes.
• Smoother path to production.
• Collaboration and communication.

CI/CD Pipeline Stages and Phases

The CI/CD pipeline combines continuous integration, delivery, as well as development into 4 major parts i.e. source, build, test, and deploy.

Source

The source stage is referred to as the version control stage, which forms the bedrock of the CI/CD pipeline. Code is created by the developers on their local machines, and after that pushed to a version control system like Git or Subversion. This phase ensures that every modification which is made to the code can be retrieved and tracked, providing a safety net for developers.

A crucial feature of the source stage is the use of branching strategies like trunk based development or GitFlow. It facilitates effective development, experimental research, and bug fixing without disruption of the main code base.

Source: salesforce developer training

Thus, the source phase is also where the pipeline run gets triggered, on a new commit or a pull request. This might include initial quality checks, like syntax checks or linting, which ensures that the committed code follows predefined standards as well as styles.

Build

The build stage is a crucial phase of CI/CD pipeline where source code is collected in the source stage, and converted into a tangible product which can be executed in an environment. During this stage, the system handles tasks such as bundling assets, transpiling languages, and resolving dependencies.

The outcome of this stage is multiple artifacts which can be deployed in the next stages. If these tests process itself fails, then the pipeline execution breaks, and developers are notified. This early detection and rectification of issues embody the principle of fail fast that saves resources and time in the software development lifecycle.

Test

The test stage is where the application is visible to far reaching computerized testing to guarantee it meets generally practical and non-functional necessities. In this stage, the quality of the build is totally reviewed before it reaches the end-users.

Tests accompanied during this stage can include-

• Integration Tests
• Functional Tests
• Performance Tests
• Security Tests

Deploy

The deploy stage is the last stage of the CI/CD pipeline, where the application is released into the production setting, making it available to end-users. This procedure involves moving the build and tested software to a cloud platform or server where it will run.

The deploy stage requires no manual steps, it is fully automated. The post deployment tests are frequently run to ensure the application functions as projected in the production environment. Thus, this stage marks the end of the CI/CD pipeline, after which an updated or new application is live and ready for users.

Conclusion

Successfully adopting CI/CD is integral to unlocking the benefits for agile working, so it is essential to find a solution which is right for your team. When building a new CI/CD pipeline, it is important to start from small. But before that you need to ensure that the team is confident working with version control first.

The more successful you are at keeping your environments in sync, and making small deployments, it will be easy to add automation which won’t break your pipeline.

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