What is Continuous integration?
Continuous integration allows teams to build and deploy new improvements to Production safely and quickly.
An integral part of DevOps, CI/CD is about automating various workflows within your team's development and release pipeline. The aim is for your team to deliver a continuous stream of high-quality improvements to your org. This is done via an agile process that runs reliably and is accessible to all contributors. CI/CD runs automated tests, validations, and deployments on a periodic basis or directly after you've committed new work to version control.
Small, frequent changes are continually integrated into target environments without the need for repeatable steps to be performed manually. By automating as much of your development and release process as possible, CI/CD reduces manual effort and mistakes. Alongside a whole raft of other benefits, it dramatically increases development velocity and reduces lead times. Valuable work you've already completed isn't left waiting to be released.
How does Gearset support Continuous integration?
Gearset has full support for end-to-end continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery/deployment (CD) out of the box without the need for external software such as Jenkins. Gearset CI can be set up with both Salesforce orgs and version control systems (source control).
When you create a CI deployment job, Gearset will automatically compare your environments, select the metadata and Vlocity data packs you specify (using the metadata filter) and analyze it to find any dependencies through our advanced problem analyzers. It then builds the deployment package, runs your tests, and deploys the changes. A deployment report is saved in your history, along with the package created, and we'll notify you using your configured options.
Features of CI in Gearset:
Deployments are made straightforward and much more successful as we can validate pull requests so you know when it’s ready to deploy.
Once you have set up your CI jobs you can clearly view and manage them in our CI job list.
You can also create a validation-only CI job (sometimes referred to as continuous validation). This would be recommended if the target is a production org.
Deployments done by CI jobs all contain their own easy to find history, allowing you to see all the changes for deployments that have been completed.
You can set apex tests to run on every deployment, shifting those issues left and being able to fix them sooner.
Run Static code analysis on every deployment to keep your code in the best shape possible.
Based on Gearset's powerful CI jobs, Pipelines brings some new functionality to help you manage where changes are in your release process, and helps give your entire team visibility and control over the workflow.