Ideal Salesforce Branching Strategy and Deployment Workflow

In Salesforce projects, establishing a clear, scalable Git branching strategy is more than a DevOps best practice — it's a prerequisite for smooth collaboration, CI/CD automation, and long-term maintainability. The diagram below outlines an ideal branching and deployment workflow, particularly suited to enterprise Salesforce implementations.

It's also the model Navceed more or less follows — especially in how it minimizes unnecessary long-lived branches and leverages GitHub Actions to handle both CI and CD tasks within a unified automation layer.

Why This Workflow Matters

Salesforce development is fundamentally different from traditional software engineering. Changes are often made in metadata-rich sandboxes with inconsistent state across environments. That makes a clean, opinionated branching model essential to avoid chaos in releases.

This strategy balances developer flexibility with organizational control — enabling structured deployments across multiple stages while keeping the number of persistent branches to a minimum.

Summary of the Flow

This model consists of 16 steps, flowing left to right from local development to production deployment, with GitHub (or any VCS) at the center. It encourages:

• •Short-lived feature and release branches
• •Long-lived preprod and main branches
• •Pull Request (PR) gates for review and automation
• •Unified automation through GitHub Actions or equivalent
• •Optional change management integration for enterprise approvals

Here's a quick walk-through:

🧱 Local Development

1. •Develop in a local VSCode + Dev Sandbox.
2. •Commit changes to a remote feature branch (e.g., feature/xyz) on GitHub.

🔁 PreProd Cycle

1. •Raise a PR from feature to preprod branch.
2. •Code is reviewed and merged to preprod.
3. •The CD Tool (e.g., GitHub Actions) detects the merge and triggers the CI build job.
4. •The CI Tool (same GitHub Actions workflow or a separate process) builds, scans, and deploys to PreProd Org.

📦 Release and Promotion

1. •Create a short-lived release branch (e.g., release_sprint_01).
2. •Merge the reviewed feature into the release branch.
3. •Raise a PR from release to main.
4. •Review and merge into main.

🚀 Production Pipeline

1. •CD Tool listens for merges into main and triggers the CI Tool.
2. •CI Tool builds, scans, and validates the metadata against the Production Org.
3. •CI Tool sends back the success/failure status to the CD Tool.

📋 Optional Change Management

1. •On successful validation, an automated Change Record is created in the Change Management Tool.
2. •Validated package is deployed on the planned date using quick deploy.
3. •The change record is closed manually or automatically.

Tooling Notes

• •Unified Automation: Although labeled separately as "CI Tool" and "CD Tool" for clarity, both can be implemented using the same GitHub Actions pipeline — as Navceed does — without the need for separate platforms.
• •Change Management (Steps 14–16): These are optional and depend on enterprise governance policies.
• •PreProd Is Persistent: The preprod branch is long-lived and acts as a staging ground for changes, not a short-lived integration branch.

Short-Lived Branching Discipline

This workflow intentionally limits the lifespan of feature and release branches. By treating them as isolated, short-term contexts, it:

• •Reduces merge complexity
• •Encourages continuous integration
• •Keeps preprod and main free from unreviewed code
• •Prevents long-term drift between environments

preprod and main remain stable, long-lived branches used as promotion gates.

Closing Thoughts

While tools like Navceed bring this strategy to life, the real value lies in the structure: a branching model that maps well to Salesforce's sandbox-driven deployment world, enforces review gates, and enables automated delivery without introducing tool bloat.

The workflow outlined above isn't theoretical — it's been applied and battle-tested. It works across teams, scales well with enterprise controls, and avoids the overhead of unnecessarily complex branching.