Mistakes can happen quickly in Salesforce development, often with significant consequences. In this blog post, we’ll explore a real-world scenario where a deployment disaster occurred and discuss how a source-driven development approach could have prevented it.

The Scenario

Picture this…

A team of Salesforce professionals have been hard at work building out a new workflow for a critical business process. The project involves integrations, Apex code, flows, new objects, fields, and pages—all meticulously crafted in a development org. The plan was to push these changes to another development org for testing, but there was a crucial misstep: the wrong org was refreshed, erasing all the work done.

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The consequences were immediate and severe. Hours of development work were lost, integrations were disrupted, and the testing timeline was thrown into disarray. The team faced delays, frustration, and pressure to quickly recover from the setback.

How Source-Driven Development Could Have Saved The Day

Enter the hero of our story, source-driven development—a modern approach to Salesforce development that could have prevented this deployment disaster. Unlike traditional methods that rely on manual packaging and deployment, source-driven development manages changes directly through source code. Some of the benefits, include:

  1. Version Control: With source-driven development, all changes are tracked in a version control system like Git. Each change is documented, providing a clear history of modifications and enabling developers to revert to previous versions if needed. And, a robust branching strategy or the use of scratch orgs could have compartmentalized the work. In our scenario, using version control could have prevented the irreversible loss of work caused by the mistaken refresh.

  2. Code Integrity: Beyond version control, source-driven development places a paramount emphasis on code integrity—a holistic approach to ensuring the consistency, reliability, and trustworthiness of the codebase. This encompasses not only the meticulous tracking of changes but also rigorous code review processes, collaborative workflows, deploy documentation, and stringent adherence to coding standards.

  3. Automated Deployment: Source-driven development facilitates automated deployment processes, reducing the risk of human error during deployments. By automating the deployment of changes from one environment to another, the team could have avoided the manual steps that led to the mistaken refresh.

Some additional benefits of source-driven development include: greater efficiency and agility in the development process and improved collaboration and coordination among teams. Check out my original blog post on Delivering Value Through Source-Driven Development for a comprehensive overview.

The deployment disaster described in the above scenario underscores the importance of adopting modern development practices like source-driven development in Salesforce projects.

By managing changes directly through source code, organizations can mitigate the risk of deployment disasters, maintain code integrity, and streamline development processes.

As Salesforce developers, embracing source-driven development is not just about staying ahead of the curve—it’s about safeguarding against costly mistakes and ensuring success in every project.

Looking for more insights on how you can get started with source-driven development? Contact our team for a consultation.