INTRODUCTION:
At Dreamforce ’14 I presented a session on some of the tools and techniques we use at The TAS Group to improve our Salesforce development cycle. During the session I discussed these tools and techniques without delving into the technical details so I will use this series of blog posts to elaborate on the content of the session.
The recording of the session “Techniques and Tools to Improve the Salesforce Development Cycle” is available here:
The video discusses many of the tools and techniques we use. In this series of blog posts I will provide a lot more detail and provide code snippnets and examples so that readers can replicate the setup we use. In the upcoming posts I intend to cover the following:
- Part1: An introduction to the Salesforce Migration Tools
- Part 2: Preparing and cleaning new Developer Orgs
- Part 3: Advanced use of the Force.com Migration tool
- Part 4: Using version control with Salesforce source code
- Part 5: Automated Testing
- Part 6: Isolated Feature Development
- Part 7: Continuous Integration
It is worth noting that The TAS Group is a Salesforce ISV and we develop code that is released in managed packages, however, the techniques discussed are focussed on source code (Salesforce metadata files) and should also work for unmanaged Salesforce development.
CONCLUSION:
I hope this series of posts will help other developers to implement a reliable and flexible environment and workbench for developing with Salesforce. Please feel free to post any comments or questions regarding the content.