AZURE DEVOPS BRANCHING STRATEGY
Organizations that leverage both Salesforce and Microsoft Azure need an efficient and reliable system in order to keep all their production environments up to date. Microsoft Azure DevOps serves as an ideal platform for orchestration, as it helps enterprises deploy, test, and monitor applications and services across all their production environments. In particular, one of the most important aspects of using Azure DevOps for organizations working with Salesforce is establishing a robust branching strategy. Having such a strategy in place helps organizations quickly roll out updates and new features, while ensuring all changes are appropriately integrated and managed. Organizations use version control systems such as Git to manage their source code. This type of version control system is designed to manage changes within code versions, tracking who did what and when. However, Git also allows organizations to leverage what’s known as a branching strategy, which enables them to view differences between revisions, so that code can be appropriately merged back into the core repository. When establishing a mechanism for version control and branching, teams should look for solutions which enable collaboration - such as Azure DevOps pipelines and repositories, which allow teams to better manage their development workflows. Branching strategies help track progress and isolate changes from the mainline of the development process for further review and testing. In this way, developers can keep their copies of code in a separate work space and coordinate a staging or release process with minimal disruption in the development cycle. Azure DevOps provides users with a simple visual design process in order to better manage their branching strategies. With Azure DevOps, branches are organized hierarchically, with the main branch, known as the “master” branch, at the top. This master branch is the basis of other distinct branches, which users can use to focus their development efforts, isolate changes from the main development process, and form feature-based release branches. Some organizations might create multiple configurations of their product, one for each needed environment (development, staging, production, etc.). Each of these deployments would have its own branch that reflects the version of the code required in that environment. Its highly recommended to use automated tools like Azure DevOps to deploy continuously to multiple environments. This allows organizations to facilitate and coordinate urgent changes to their production deployments while maintaining relative ease and control. Azure DevOps branching strategy also ensures that code changes are properly verified and tested before they go into production. The branches can be used to deploy various issues and pull requests, which are reviewed by a team of experts and accepted or rejected based upon quality standards. The process is iterative and allows stakeholders to evaluate each change before officially deploying it. This is especially beneficial for larger organizations that need to maintain quality control and move quickly. Finally, a comprehensive branching strategy enables teams to better collaborate with each other, securely access their source code, and sustain excellent control over all their production environments. By leveraging Azure DevOps and its branching strategy, organizations can deliver Salesforce deployments without disruption, back up data and implement security solutions with ease. In implementing a branching strategy, organizations can ultimately employ a more comprehensive release management strategy to meet their customer's needs.
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