How Version Control Maximizes Productivity in Salesforce DevOps
Version control is a critical aspect of a complete DevOps strategy that maximizes your teams’ efforts and enables them to quickly produce reliable updates and applications.
Why It Matters: Every organization wants to get the greatest returns on their DevOps efforts. Multi-developer teams can produce updates more quickly but often run into issues such as code overwrites or conflicting code.
- Multiple developers working on a single project will inevitably run into problems if their efforts aren’t properly aligned.
- Intentional DevOps tools provide the infrastructure needed to reduce the chances of costly errors that lead to bugs and inevitable reworking of previously completed tasks.
We’ll explore these six ways Salesforce version control increases your DevOps team’s productivity:
- Prevents Code Overwrites
- Facilitates Branching and Merging
- Keeps a Detailed History for Simplified Rollbacks
- Manages Dependencies
- Provides an Audit Trail for Compliance
- Integrates with CI/CD Tools
1. Prevents Code Overwrites
Picture a group of people building a house. They’ll be able to lay the brick much more quickly if multiple people are helping compared to just one. This is also true for development teams.
Salesforce version control gives your team members the tools they need to avoid damaging code overwrites so their efforts are consistently aligned to produce the best products possible.
Bricklayers aren’t going to slap a brick in the place of an existing brick and weaken the stability of the wall. Developers, however, might do just that.
2. Facilitates Branching and Merging
It might seem like a good idea to keep all of your developer’s efforts in a single repository. That way, they’ll know where to find everything, right? This is actually against Salesforce DevOps best practices and will lead to a confusing working environment.
Version control systems support branching and merging, allowing developers to work on new features or bug fixes in isolated branches.
Changes to the code repository can be seamlessly merged into the main code base once they are tested and approved. This helps maintain code integrity and project stability.
3. Keeps a Detailed History for Simplified Rollbacks
Misfires and errors are sometimes found later in the DevOps pipeline, necessitating a reversion to a previous state. This is a common aspect of DevOps, but becomes much more time consuming when your team has to dig through the code to find the changes to revert.
Version control maintains a detailed history of all changes made to the codebase, including who made the changes and when, so developers can track the evolution of the project.
This enables your team to easily revert to previous versions so they can fix the bugs and continue moving the project through the pipeline.
4. Manages Dependencies
Working across various environments for a singular project is occasionally necessary to access external libraries, packages, or modules. And while this improves the eventual product, it can create a confusing workflow for team members and slow down their productivity.
Version control helps teams manage these dependencies to keep these various environments consistent while preventing compatibility issues.
An application with properly managed dependencies is much more reliable and scalable. Tracking these dependencies takes the guesswork out of developer tasks.
5. Provides an Audit Trail for Compliance
Properly handling system data is a critical consideration for every organization, but particularly for those in regulated industries. And when an audit occurs, you need to be able to produce proof of your ability to manage system data in accordance with applicable regulations.
An audit trail of all code changes is stored within version control, supporting compliance requirements and regulatory standards.
This streamlines the traceability and accountability your team needs to prove compliance.
6. Integrates with CI/CD Tools
No DevOps strategy occurs in a bubble. There is a constant dialogue between various teams and tools that need to work together toward a unified goal. Failing to achieve this harmony results in wasted time and poor products.
Version control integrates perfectly into a CI/CD pipeline to support automated testing and deployment tools.
Maintaining high levels of productivity in your Salesforce DevOps pipeline depends on two things: your team and your tools. Your team needs the tools to succeed and your tools need to be properly utilized to provide the expected results. Utilizing a version control system is a critical part of achieving this harmony and enabling your team to reach its full potential.
Next Step…
Increasing productivity in your Salesforce DevOps pipeline makes your team more flexible. Updates can get to market much faster. However, if these updates aren’t secure, you could be doing more harm than good.
Check out our ebook, Bulletproofing Your Salesforce DevOps: Advanced Security Strategies, to learn how to ensure your updates and applications remain secure in the face of mounting data security challenges.
FAQs
How does Salesforce version control work in a CI/CD pipeline?
Version control is an integral part of streamlined DevOps collaboration that fits seamlessly into a CI/CD pipeline. Developers commit changes to a version control system, which triggers automated processes such as builds, tests, and deployments. Continuous Integration (CI) tools monitor the version control repository for new commits, automatically triggering builds and running tests to ensure code quality. Once changes are validated, Continuous Deployment (CD) tools deploy the code to various environments, such as development, testing, and production.
Is version control standard in Salesforce development?
Salesforce itself doesn’t provide a version control tool, but utilizing one is standard and essential practice in Salesforce development. Git is the most popular version control system for Salesforce DevOps teams to manage their codebase, track changes, collaborate effectively, and ensure the reliability and stability of their applications.
How does version control handle conflicts between different developers working on the same codebase?
When a version control system identifies a conflict, it pauses the merge process and highlights the coding discrepancies within the affected files. Developers then need to manually reconcile these differences by reviewing the conflicting changes and selecting which to keep, modify, or discard. Once conflicts are fixed, developers mark them as resolved and carry on with the merge. Effective communication and collaboration are crucial for swiftly resolving conflicts and maintaining the integrity of the codebase, ensuring that each developer’s contributions are worked into the repository without creating issues.
