Salesforce Development Lifecycle: Stats, Process, Models, And Benefits

Salesforce is a growing tool that is swiftly becoming popular in various industries. That’s because it has all the necessary features that a business needs to accelerate its growth. From lead management, and managing & storing customer data to improving, Salesforce can do it all.

However, building and deploying a Salesforce application is not easy. To make sure the app meets the business needs, you need to do careful planning, collaboration, and testing.

Enters Salesforce development lifecycle!

It’s a comprehensive framework for developing, deploying, and testing Salesforce applications. It includes multiple activities, such as requirement gathering, design, coding, development, testing, and deployment.

In this blog post, we have discussed the Salesforce development lifecycle in detail. In addition, we have highlighted its models, its benefits for your business, and more.

Keep reading!

Salesforce Stats

Did you know that some of the largest Salesforce customers are Walmart Inc. and Amazon Web Services? As of 2023, Walmart Inc. had an annual revenue of $611.3 billion while Amazon Web Services had a revenue of $90.8 billion.

Salesforce Customers by Revenue

Smaller companies with annual revenues between 1-10 million USD are widely using Salesforce CRM tools for their better growth. Followed by bigger businesses with a revenue of 10-50 million USD. And large enterprises with revenue up to billions of dollars occupy the third position in this list.

Salesforce Customers by Industry

Wondering which industries use Salesforce the most?

As of 2024, Salesforce services have been widely used by companies that represent professional services, such as architects, accountants, lawyers, and more. This list is followed by the finance and retail sectors.

What is Salesforce Development?

The Salesforce application development lifecycle is a process of building, integrating, customizing, and extending Salesforce functionalities to develop cloud-based apps as per business requirements.

With Salesforce, companies can use various programming languages and integrated development environments to create powerful apps, user interfaces, business logic, and integrations with third-party apps.

Salesforce has a multi-tenant architecture and user-friendly interface, which allows companies to have flexibility and ease of use in their ongoing business practices. Companies can avail of the best Salesforce application by following the below-mentioned Salesforce development lifecycle.

Salesforce Development Lifecycle

The Salesforce app development lifecycle consists of 6 stages:

Stage 1: Prepare the Development Plan

Before starting the development, the first step is to create an inclusive plan of all your requirements. You can hire a project manager to analyze the process, gather specifications, and identify common obstacles.

After creating the project idea, discuss it with your team and Salesforce product development partner. As your team proceeds with the development and testing environments, they will require various tools.

Stage 2: Move with the Development

After considering the predetermined specifications, you can start with the development part.

If you use Lighting Platform, you get access to a combination of tools like Flow Builder, Custom Object Wizard, and other complementary UI tools. Likewise, you also get to use programmatic tools like Developer Console, Source Code Editor, and Visual Studio Code.

Make sure the overall development is taking place in an environment with a copy of production org metadata with no production data.

Stage 3: Test

Once development is completed, you must perform testing to access the app at every step. This way you can be rest assured that the app is performing well and does not have any bugs. While you should use the same environment for testing that you have used for development, the integration and development environment needs to be different.

Stage 4: Build Release

At this stage, you must carefully consolidate all the pieces that you have created and modified so far to complete the development process. Aggregate a single-release artifact, which consists of customization of logical bundles that you have produced for deployment.

Stage 5: Test Release

Test your app in a secure staging environment to ensure its readiness for deployment. The staging environment needs to replicate production conditions. In addition, connect the test environment to all the external systems to accurately stimulate product integrations.

Through user-acceptance testing, you can complete regression, performance testing, and gather feedback from a selected group of experienced users.

Stage 6: Release

After the testing is done and your team has approved the quality, you can prepare to deploy your app. For a successful deployment, you need to ensure that your team is well-versed with the entire setup and changes.

Remember that if your release will significantly impact users, you need to set up a consolidated training environment with real-time data.

Salesforce Development Models

Salesforce development models refer to various methods used in designing, constructing, testing, and deploying apps on the Salesforce platform.

Below are two Salesforce development models that support the source origin:

1. Org Development Model

With the Org Development model, you can access a range of tools that provide users with better flexibility, unique deployment methods, scalability, new ways to manage track, and deploy changes in the sandbox & later in the production org.

The Org Development model uses a source control repository to store relevant data and files related to the project. The repository helps keep the environment in alignment. After externalizing the changes for every release, your team will notice that the Source Repository shows what they deliver and makes alterations to the environment. This overall process will help your development team to proceed at the right speed in testing and release settings.

Moving forward, the Release artifact consists of metadata changes that are not required during production org. However, your development team can leverage change tracking mechanisms to monitor and compare the changes made in various components through the setup UI in the org.

Lastly, you can use Salesforce Extensions for VS code to reclaim metadata from development environments. Salesforce Extensions can also help you store changes in source control and develop an automated process for smoothly testing and deploying production. It eliminates repetitive creation and deployment errors.

2. Package Development Model

An organization that has large-scale Salesforce development projects with multiple complexities should consider getting this model.

The Package Development Model can handle all the changes happening and rationalize the Salesforce implementation lifecycle from start to end. This model offers:

How Salesforce Development Benefits Your Business

Successful Salesforce development provides you with many benefits, such as:

1. Ease of Managing Orders

Salesforce helps businesses manage orders more efficiently by providing a centralized processing, automation, and tracking platform. Salesforce’s integration capabilities improve efficiency and accuracy while reducing errors.

2. Identify Growth and Decline

From identifying areas of improvement to potential opportunities, Salesforce can successfully take care of every aspect of your business. Your team can also refer to business performance during strategy formulation. Likewise, reports and dashboards can help them predict if a business might face a decline.

3. Analyze Competitors

Businesses can use Salesforce CRM analytic tools to carefully monitor and gain insights into their competitors' sales, marketing, and customer engagement strategies. It will help businesses to benchmark their performance, develop product development & pricing strategies, and identify areas for improvement.

4. Improve Decision-Making

Salesforce gives you the power to visualize yourself as a part of the current market so you can understand where you want to be in the future. It offers you sufficient time to store, manage, and update data so you can stay relevant to the current market trends.

Salesforce development can also help companies unlock better opportunities like speeding up the process, offering better customer experience, improving accuracy, time management, increasing visibility, and more.

How Protonshub Technologies Helps with Salesforce Development Lifecycle

Availing of custom Salesforce development services can greatly benefit the success and growth of your business. That’s why you should hire a trusted company, like Protonshub Technologies for the work.

Our team of professionals can oversee the Salesforce development lifecycle while offering user-friendly and bug-free apps to cater to your business needs. We deliver top-notch Salesforce development services and optimize your existing systems.

Connect with us today to get the most scalable and secure Salesforce development service!

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Ekta Singh

"Senior Content Writer"

Ekta Singh is a rookie food experimentalist and k-drama fan with 4+ years of experience in writing. Bridging gaps between companies and customers through conversion-driven content is her forte. She believes in writing stories for a living and living life for exploring places.