Advantage of continuous integration to Salesforce

Undoubtedly, Salesforce is the world’s number 1 CRM solution today. Salesforce is accessible and open to all. Over the past, some years, Salesforce Continuous Integration (CI) has become a vital part of software development.

It not only helps the Salesforce development teams to detect errors early but also helps to establish a robust quality assurance process. So, if you are about to start any new java or c# project, integrating CI is important as each line of code is validated by an automated build to ensure its accuracy using it.

Today, we are going to look over to the Advantages of continuous integration to Salesforce in Faster Application Delivery.

1). When and When Not to Use Continuous Integration:

Well, it’s not a hard task to decide which projects would benefit from CI but how to draw the line? Let me give you some idea of the concept. The projects that will never evolve does not need CI to get indulge into it. Remember, version control or CI is not useful/ needed for the project’s declarative with no APEX classes, Visualforce or Lightning components.

To get foremost benefit from the CI, first, you should consider the evolving projects. It could prove even more fruitful if you work on starting the CI plan as part of Salesforce as a whole, as opposed to just for an individual project.

2).Top 6 Benefits of Salesforce Continuous Integration:

On every new submit, CI executes its automated tests. It is one of the efficient and simple, productive ways to improve the code quality in the Salesforce application releases. Below are the top six benefits of Salesforce continuous integration. Note it down away:

Commit only the verified code: With Salesforce Continuous Integration, only the valid and flaw-less code is being used in the version control. It basically checks the code quality and consistency.
Enables Continuous Deployment: Many organizations are connected to Continuous deployment, which is an SDLC best practice that even makes sure that the code gets rapidly deployed to the Production after passing through the required tests. Integrating Continuous integration together with Continuous deployment not only allows the development teams to reduce errors but also detects build problems early on. This step enables seamless and quick deployment of the code to Production
Better Communication: If your CI process works seamlessly as a Continuous Delivery workflow, it makes easy for you to share the codes with other team members regularly. This feature enables visibility and collaboration between team members. As a result, it leads to better communication speed and efficiency within your company as every member is on the same side of the table.
Early location of mistakes in the advancement procedure: Well, we are a part of the IT industry and so we know that integrating code, in the end, increases the risk of code failures and makes it costlier to fix them. Continuous Integration understands it well and thus fizzles the off-base code quick that is very early in the development lifecycle.
Faster feedback on business decisions: CI Process is good for all, for both software developers and managers. You can analyze the code even better to check if the product is heading in the right direction by pushing it more often. The timelines of metrics such as dependency, unit tests, complexity, and code smell along with the continuous data flow can also help even on the progress of the project. In addition to this, it helps in faster technological and business decisions.
Faster iterations: The gap between the application in production and the one the developer is working on it will get reduced if you release the code frequently. Even small changes will be checked by CI automatically and thus the whole team will get to know about the changes. This helps you to develop features quickly and easy deploying as faster for your users. Thus you get the valuable feedback also faster.

3). Other Benefits of Salesforce Continuous Integration:

Below are some of the additional benefits of CI of which certainly we are not aware of:

There is an additional advantage of CI to catch syntax and other compiler errors automatically.
Team member collaboration is possible to share the recent code.
A quick feedback mechanism on every change is possible
It reduces overall manual testing effort
It offers the feature of Automate build deployment
You can make your build self-testing using it.
It keeps the builds very fast
It saves time on the debugging side so you can work more on adding features
It is integrated regularly. Thus, it prevents divergence in different branches
It significantly reduces overhead across the development and deployment process
The reduce regression testing is possible with continuous integration. Advance CI can reduce it by running automated regression tests. For example, APIs and UI testing.

Time to sum up:

So, guys, these were some of the outstanding Advantages of Salesforce continuous integration discussed. It is being used rapidly with the Salesforce community to get the most out of it.