Introducing SFDX

The state of Salesforce change management had largely remained stable for several years. For the majority of Salesforce developers and admins, change sets remained the definitive means of delivering change from sandbox to production.

All this changed again when Salesforce released its SFDX toolchain in 2018. SFDX offered the promise of modern development and deployment practices, seen on other platforms, delivered through a command-line tool. Suddenly, the potential existed for advanced, scriptable deployments, more robust IDE integration, and a new way to manage changes. Most importantly, it represented the move toward a source-driven development model for Salesforce, rather than the traditional organization-based model.

The SFDX command-line interface (CLI) was coupled with the introduction of scratch orgs. These are ephemeral development environments that can be spun up and torn down easily from SFDX, created using different configurations (or org shapes)...