CI-CD MEANING
Organizations striving to reduce time to market and increase IT personnel efficiency demand rapid application development, better code quality, and easier deployment of software. To satisfy this need, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery/deployment (CD) have become widely popular in different organizations. Applied to salesforce, CI-CD tools help automate long and manual steps during the release process, which includes data backup, software release management, and security. At its most basic level, CI/CD includes development and operations teams working collaboratively to provide a continuous flow of software releases to a production environment. To put it in a salesforce context, CI/CD tools support development and operations teams with the automation of activities like managing source code, package management, and deployment of changes in Salesforce. By using a CI/CD platform, enterprises can benefit from automated salesforce release management, data backup and recovery, and security solutions. With such platforms, issue resolution times are drastically improved, in addition to reducing the risk of errors due to manual intervention. This, in turn, leads to a quicker delivery of projects through different enterprise departments. The benefits of using CI/CD in the salesforce realm are both palpable and considerable. Firstly, Continuous Integration allows developers to easily detect, resolve and prevent conflicts between changes made by different developers and merge them into a shared master branch. This helps accelerate application iteration cycles, as teams don’t have to spend time trying to understand what changes were made and configure the environment manually. Applying changes to the salesforce environment automatically and in a safe manner is made easy. Then, Continuous Delivery enables developers to automate the entire build process of their application, and deploy it to production servers with a single mouse click. This reduces the time spent on manual steps, and allows developers to focus on developing features and bug fixes, rather than managing manual operations. It also provides an additional safety mechanism by testing the changes in a non-production environment, before deployed into a production environment. With a CI/CD tool, organizations easily control and standardize the source code version and instantly rollback to a past version. Finally, CI/CD offers the advantage of achieving process automation and data backup and recovery. Organizations can have a reliable source of backed up data, minimize manual processes, and test automation across environments. This all leads to a quick and traceable upgrade path of different processes, which is beneficial in terms of cost and time. In summary, the implementation of CI/CD tools in the Salesforce realm is an effective way to ease the long and complex steps across release management, data backup, and security solutions. Automating the testing process and ensuring reliable deployment helps organizations spend less time on manual activities and more on the value-adding aspects of the software delivery process.
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