A Systematic Review of CI/CD Pipeline Strategies in Salesforce DevOps: Tools, Practices, and Deployment Outcomes

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@article{1717559,
      author = {Olaniyi Badmus, Adetomiwa A. Dosunmu, David Excel Ozowara},
      title = {A Systematic Review of CI/CD Pipeline Strategies in Salesforce DevOps: Tools, Practices, and Deployment Outcomes},
      journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
      year = {2018},
      volume = {2},
      number = {6},
      pages = {319-333},
      issn = {2456-8880},
      url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1717559.pdf},
      abstract = {The rapid growth of Salesforce as a dominant enterprise cloud platform has created urgent demand for rigorous, scalable approaches to software delivery. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines have emerged as a central mechanism through which Salesforce development teams manage the complexity of multi-sandbox environments, version-controlled metadata, and high-frequency deployment cycles. Despite the widespread adoption of CI/CD tooling in traditional software engineering, there remains a notable absence of systematic review literature examining how these practices translate to the Salesforce platform context specifically. This paper presents a systematic review of CI/CD pipeline strategies as applied to Salesforce DevOps, synthesizing evidence from practitioner literature, peer-reviewed scholarship, and platform-specific technical documentation. The review addresses three primary questions: what pipeline architectures are most prevalent in enterprise Salesforce environments, what tooling configurations have been shown to reduce deployment failure rates, and what organizational and technical impediments constrain CI/CD adoption at scale. Findings indicate that hybrid tooling configurations combining native Salesforce DX capabilities with third-party deployment orchestration tools produce the most resilient delivery pipelines. The review further identifies sandbox management strategy, metadata dependency resolution, and automated test coverage requirements as the principal technical barriers to CI/CD maturity in Salesforce contexts. This paper contributes a structured analytical framework for evaluating CI/CD readiness in Salesforce organizations and offers evidence-based recommendations for practitioners seeking to improve deployment velocity and release reliability.},
      keywords = {CI/CD Pipeline, Salesforce Devops, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Deployment Automation, Sandbox Management, Release Engineering},
      month = {December},
  }