Many Salesforce developers and admins often ask themselves the question, what are the best practices for managing a strategy that involves a Salesforce version control system? This is a common question that members of the Salesforce community ask themselves frequently. However, the unfortunate news is most developers and admins of the Salesforce community are unable to find the appropriate answer as to why their Salesforce teams need such a system.
Experts say that the answer to the above question is straightforward. Salesforce should have a vision control system if they want to effectively manage their code and configuration. Even large organizations use a good salesforce version control system for maintaining their configurations and codes. Small companies believe they do not need a version control system primarily because they think they do not need one. The major issue lies in the way Salesforce has been created along with its functionalities.
Why do small companies not use the version control system for Salesforce?
Teams of small companies believe they can handle the process of coding and configuration on their own; however, most of the time, they fail. Again, new developers might not have the knowledge of how Salesforce sandboxes work, and this is where some of the problems lie as they are not aware of its functionality. In Salesforce, the configuration drives the functionality. In order to address this problem, Salesforce has launched the Salesforce DX version control; however, not much is known about it as specialists have not explored it. It does give results; however, as per the research and survey of analysts, they say that it is still not implemented in many software development processes because there exists a lack of automation tools that center around the promotion of the code.
The absence of automation
Due to the absence of this automation tooling, developers that work with Sandbox often move the artifacts and codes to different environments in Sandbox. There is another question that arises here is how are developers resolving the issue and introducing the hygiene of engineering to the ecosystem of Salesforce? The answer to this question focusses on a scientific approach that explains why developers and admins should incorporate a version control system for Salesforce. This approach is customized to meet the needs for any developer team sizes, and it gives them guidelines on how to successfully incorporate it for getting the automation tools that need for deployment as well as the tools needed for the analysis of the status codes.
Get better governance and transparency
With the help of a version control system, you are able to get the benefits of a source code that effectively introduces transparency and governance to the whole engineering process by allowing all the members of the development team to view the change history. The system gets the ability to give alerts to developers when a conflict in the code arises. The system helps in the accomplishment of a consistent environment that issues repeatable and dynamic deployments to each environment. It helps to enforce classes for tests to be allowed to run in the Salesforce sandboxes so that problems in these test classes can be identified at the early stages.
The salesforce version control system permits the developer to get daily if possible, as well as continuous delivery and integration. The software release management teams are able to manage deployments better. The incorporation of the version control system for Salesforce is a completely scientific process that can be incorporated in a step by step way. To begin with, the source code for the baseline, as well as the source version, should be defined clearly. This version is retrieved from the production metadata. This step is crucial as most of the time, the developers on the team are used to keeping their present versions at different places, and it makes sense to start from the correct baseline in the production org.
Which one is the best version control system for Salesforce?
Several companies debate on what is the best version control system for Salesforce. There are several systems, and many comparisons have been made on them by experts. The company should choose the right version control system based on key factors like the type of the source code, the number of developers using the system, the tools that are used for version control, and more.
Strategies about merging and branching
You should be sure about the merging and the branching strategies that you will use. Again, this choice is based on the number of development streams or parallel tracks that are running along with the release cycles along with parallel phases that the development teams are executing at that specific time.
In both the merging and the branching patterns, you will find that every development stream will have its individual branch that gets merged at the end of the development phases to the release branch. This is the place where quality assurance and testing for user acceptance takes place. Both the hotfixes and the production builds are promoted from this release branch, and they differ from separate types of the sub-projects that are a part of the strategy.
In conclusion, it can be said that in order to enable effective version control systems, the project team members should always follow specific disciplines and the regulations where the source files, as well as the configurations, are treated as the sources of truth. They are later checked into the system for version control. The codes that are not checked do not find a place in the system. The version control tools ensure that software development is a success. It has the ability to encourage the management of codes that are free from errors and helps boost the efficiency of the engineering process too.
Therefore, when it comes to choosing the best version control system for your Salesforce teams, consider the above points. In this way, you are able to improve the quality of coding and configuration and ensure that all developers enjoy the benefits of successful code management.
