CI and CD in Salesforce

Release Early and Often

Who we are.

Patrick Connelly

• Salesforce Developer

Amber Neill

• Certified Salesforce Administrator

What is CI?

CI stands for Continuous Integration

Principles

• Maintain a version control system
• Automate the build
• Make the build self-testing
• Test in a clone of prod

What is CD?

CD stands for Continuous Delivery

Principles

• Low-risk releases are incremental
• Decouple deployment and release
• Focus on reducing batch size
• Optimize for resilience

source: informIT

Sandbox Structure

Deployments happen from bottom to top

1. Developer pushes from Git to sandbox
2. Developer pulls from sandbox to Git
3. Features are pushed to Git
4. Git commits are automatically pushed to CI
5. "Manual" push to QA
6. "Manual" push to STAGE
7. "Manual" push to PROD

Tools

Solenopsis

• Command-line tool for deployments
• Can be used for unattended code pushes

Jenkins

• Used for unattended pushes
• Can be triggered by events (git update)
• Can be triggered by time
  • Useful for test builds

Ideal Release Cadence

Using SCRUM methodolgy we have a new releasable artifact every two weeks

QA test for a week following the sprint

During the sprint a developer is the release shepherd to assist QA with any needs they have

Releasing to prod with limited audience

What

• Release with no UI front end
• Release with special flag to show data
• Release to full userbase

How

• Add "secret" URL parameter
• Alter VisualForce to only render when parameter is set
• Profit!

Ponies - Hidden features in action

Regular action bar

Action bar after appending "&ponies=true" to url

Ponies!

Questions?