There are several approaches to managing branches in Salesforce development. Broadly, these can be categorized into Org-based branching and other branching strategies.

Org-based branching is relatively uncommon outside the Salesforce ecosystem. While it allows tracking the state of multiple sandboxes in a pipeline, it comes with significant drawbacks. These include the need to create pull requests against multiple branches, challenges in keeping branches synchronized with their respective orgs, and difficulties in maintaining long-term branch consistency.

With Hutte, you have the flexibility to choose any branching strategy, as it supports the creation of feature branches from any branch. However, we strongly recommend trunk-based development for release deployments. Trunk-based development is widely regarded as a best practice in modern development lifecycles, as it promotes continuous integration, reduces merge conflicts, and simplifies release management.

How Hutte Enhances Trunk-Based Development

One challenge of understanding trunk-based development is that a branch isn’t tied to a specific Salesforce org. In this approach, the content of the trunk branch (usually main) is deployed to different orgs (e.g., SIT, UAT, or Production) based on specific events, like a Pull Request merge or a manual action (e.g., running a script to deploy metadata from the branch to Production).

This method simplifies development by requiring only one branch to manage and provides great flexibility in defining how the deployment pipeline operates. However, it introduces complexity in tracking which changes (metadata) are deployed to which org, since the main branch is not linked to a single Salesforce org.

Hutte addresses this challenge by offering clear visibility into which release is installed in each org. This transparency ensures you always know where each feature is in the pipeline, making it easier to track deployments and manage features effectively.

Key Benefits of Hutte Release Module:

1. No need for custom deployment scripts: The Release module in Hutte provides a powerful deployment engine and user-friendly interface for executing deployments and validation deployments, complete with configurable test levels and destination orgs. No custom scripting is required, but you can enhance the Hutte Release module with additional scripts if needed for even greater customization.
2. Streamlined Production (or other Sandboxes) Deployments: Approved bundles of features can be seamlessly moved to production.
3. Feature bundling: Hutte allow to package multiple user stories into a release for deployment, or deploying individual user stories. It includes built-in functionality to extend, shorten, or modify the content of each Release for maximum flexibility while in draft.
4. Early Testing Opportunities: Hutte supports integration testing, manual QA, and acceptance testing during the development cycle (Sprint), ensuring issues are identified and resolved early.
5. Revert Functionality: While Hutte does not offer full "pick and choose" functionality for individual features, it allows you to revert changes during QA, enabling modifications to a release before it is pushed to production.
6. Hotfix Deployment: Hotfixes from feature branches can be deployed quickly and efficiently, and they are automatically included in the next release.

See Release Management (Deployments) for more information.

In-depth comparison between Org-Based branching strategy and Trunk-based Development strategy