Why Version Control is a Pillar of Salesforce DevOps

Welcome to the next installment in a series about bringing DevOps to Salesforce. Written by Roarke Lynch and Yoni Barkan

Innovation is driven by constant development and iteration. Business-critical applications must be stable and trustworthy, so how do you accelerate innovation without jeopardizing user trust? The key is to enable a mature and robust DevOps process.

DevOps is a series of practices that are widely adopted across all forms of software development. Focusing on the flow of change from ideation, through development and into production.

DevOps has been around for more than 10 years, is well respected, and has a rich ecosystem. However, it’s only now gaining traction with Salesforce. In the past, organizations leveraging Salesforce had a hard time adopting DevOps because they couldn’t turn their orgs into code and then create copies from that code. Code couldn’t be the single source of truth.

Salesforce recognized this several years ago and has been adjusting its infrastructure ever since. Salesforce released SFDX, which provided new APIs, a new metadata format, and an official command-line tool. These features enable us to make code the center of our process, to leverage a code repo, and have version control. That is the key to a successful DevOps process — we must be able to make code the single source of truth.

Salesforce brings a lot of new features, but there’s still a significant amount we must do to truly embrace DevOps when developing on the Salesforce platform.

Our DevOps product, Appirio DX, builds on top of Salesforce DX to enable teams to fully utilize industry-standard version-control techniques. It provides developers with the tools and methods they need for development, testing, and deployment, so they can reap the benefits of DevOps within Salesforce.