How to Implement CI/CD for Salesforce using Gearset

Written by

Slade Solobay, Developer Team Lead

Written by

Jeremy Horan, Reuse Architect

Despite projects becoming larger and timelines becoming tighter, clients still expect features delivered rapidly and efficiently. Implementing a CI/CD project can help streamline the release cycle by delivering development more quickly and with less risk when compared to traditional Salesforce deployment methods.

Defining CI/CD and its Benefits

Before diving into how to set up an effective CI/CD process, it’s important to briefly define what CI/CD is. Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of continuously validating and running unit tests against development that is pushed to a specific pipeline. Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) is the process of deploying or migrating the development items pushed to the pipeline from one environment to another.

So, what does CI/CD actually solve within the confines of Salesforce deployment and release management?

If you’re using change sets or a deployment tool, chances are you have some sort of shared document or process to track changes. This can lead to headaches when items are missed or incorrectly documented.You may also struggle with development cycles that don’t allow sufficient time for code review cycles or running tests between testing environments prior to a production release.

With a CI/CD process in place, you will:

Save time running comparisons and manually selecting elements
Make source control the source of truth similar to more traditional development
- Richer metadata history
- Easier collaboration
Have increased visibility of all changes across the team
Increase issue tracking automation

Using Gearset for a Simple Solution

Although there are countless CI/CD tools and products available, Gearset provides a simple, point and click configurable solution that makes setup and maintenance easy. It avoids integrating other tools that require complicated scripts or other software to maintain. Minimal experience with CI/CD is needed to get started, which is especially useful in the Salesforce ecosystem, where admins are taking on more development tasks using clicks over code.

Additional benefits of Gearset include:

Direct JIRA/BitBucket integration
Easy rollbacks
Simple and effective diff viewing

Setting Your Team Up For Success

If you’re new to CI/CD and are looking for a starting point, or you have an admin heavy team but want to get the most out of DevOps, Gearset is a great place to start. In addition to the many benefits of a solid CI/CD process, Gearset has a very approachable learning curve, specialized for Salesforce and is set up using clicks, not code.