There are a lot of reviews out there about the latest package of Salesforce DX, focusing on its advantages and disadvantages. Majority of the discussions center around the source-drive approach of Salesforce DX and the concept of Scratch orgs.
As we know by now, Scratch orgs contains codes or metadata that can be built, changed, or destroyed easily to speed up the development and deployment process through continuous integration.
Let’s also start with some of the major advantages of Salesforce DX.
Source-driven Approach
You can expect the best out of Salesforce DX by collaborating the latest technologies as version control of all the development assets, including the source code, metadata, and org configurations.
To get these enabled, you can also export metadata additionally and also define the files for data import. The developers can also easily specify the features they need, different editions, and custom configuration options based on your specific needs.
Faster Development and Automated Testing
As we have seen, with Scratch Orgs, Salesforce DX offers a fresh and user-friendly development environment. The source-driven code from Salesforce is disposable to drive easy development, inline testing, and CI (continuous integration).
The developers can spin up a scratch org dedicatedly for your project to develop and test code. Once after validating the code changes, they can instantly access the integration tools for code deployment.
It is possible to merge different branches and build custom packages s soon as the code test is cleared. All such advantages now make Salesforce DX the top developer-friendly platform.
Salesforce DX development for Small Businesses CRM
No doubt that Salesforce is a reliable cloud SaaS platform, which helps to enhance the developer efficiency in building business CRM to improve results.
In the highly competitive market environment, ongoing development and continuous integration are the challenging needs, which Salesforce DX meets at best.
Salesforce DX puts forth a collaborative set of tools, which can, in turn, ensure optimal governance, compliance, and foolproof security.
Salesforce DX as a scalable platform lets all size of businesses to come on to it and equip their internal teams with the mightiest tools for development and administration.
It is known that people are willing to pay more for a better experience. For this same reason, business is investing more on better user experience, and here comes the importance of platforms like Salesforce as an integrated CRM application and development environment.
You can read many reviews about Salesforce DX online, which are focusing on its benefits and the advancements it makes through Scratch orgs and CLI.
As pointed out by Flosum.com experts, the Scratch orgs may consist of metadata or Salesforce code, which can be deployed real-time to speed up the entire process workflow.
Salesforce Governance for Small Businesses
While using Salesforce applications, small businesses need to know some essential aspects to manage it well. One of the major hurdles in terms of Salesforce implementation is its proper governance.
Most of the businesses, irrespective of their sizes, may have their specific roles on handling various tasks. However, what small businesses tend to lack is an appropriate system with proper work allocation and standardized procedures.
While there are different actions which are not properly defined and allocated between the team, then it tampers the governance process. In a typical development environment, the frequent questions raised as a result of such mis-governance are:
- Who is responsible for code deployment?
- Who to make changes?
- How the changes to be made?
- Whether those changed required are tested?
This is the scenario where Salesforce DX comes for the rescue of small business administrators.
The Salesforce DX approach
Salesforce DX comes to market with customized solutions for the existing problems developers face on Salesforce platform. Here are a few benefits of DX which can largely benefit small businesses too:
- Salesforce DX will help deploy a customized platform, which makes developer easier for non-coders too.
- The sandbox environment and automated testing features of Salesforce DX help in the ongoing development and continuous integration.
- On Salesforce DX, developers can also write the codes if there is a need for custom user interface or if they want to incorporate any advanced features.
- DX features many secured components which can connect flawlessly to other enterprise applications too.
- Citizen developers can test the low-code apps in the sandbox.
One major concept in Salesforce DX is its modular package against the monolithic codebase, which applies to the whole org.
Many developers have now shifted to this approach, which helps them to identify the full potential of their modules better. Some of such specific things to note are
- Custom applications – Custom apps on orgs are all about grouping set o codes and objects which are related. This could be an ideal starting point to build a full set of modules.
- AppExchange – With the installation of AppExchange, the developer can have the custom code and related configuration handy. Each of the AppExchange packages may have unique modules related to it.
- Open source packages – There are many open source tool and libraries and frameworks for the developers on Salesforce DX. You can access financial force lib or apex-commons, etc., which can be installed easily to an org to make the development much quicker and easier.
Breaking the Codebase
Unlike the conventional approach of app development, while trying to break the codebase to different packages, you should make sure that the metadata never gets supplicated, which may result in adverse results.
To avoid this issue, you must follow a unique naming convention before moving metadata into the Salesforce DX packages. You may prefix all metadata using the package name which it belongs to. If this is done properly, then it will smoothen the process of moving metadata.
Overall, we can say that Salesforce has made a great move with the release of Salesforce DX by shifting the prime focus to the developer side.
As DX is new and Salesforce is serious about it, we can expect more addition to this suite, and as there is a huge community also to support, Salesforce DX may prove out to be the most developer-friendly platform of the future.
