Platform Development Lifecycle and Deployment Architect Practice Exam 2025: Latest Questions

A team is starting a new Salesforce implementation with multiple scrum teams and a shared org. They want to prevent developers from overwriting each other’s changes and ensure every change is traceable to a work item. Which approach best supports these goals?

A release manager needs to ensure deployments are repeatable and that the same artifact tested in staging is what gets deployed to production. Which practice best achieves this?

A developer reports that their deployment to a sandbox fails because Apex tests are taking too long and sometimes exceed limits. The team wants fast feedback for feature branches but still needs strong confidence before production. What is the best testing strategy?

A project is using scratch orgs for development. A new developer frequently gets scratch orgs that behave differently from others due to missing settings and inconsistent metadata. What should the architect recommend to standardize scratch org creation?

A program has three Salesforce orgs: Dev, UAT, and Prod. Multiple teams deliver in parallel. The architect must reduce merge conflicts and improve release predictability. Which branching strategy is most appropriate?

During deployment, the team gets an error that a Flow cannot be activated because a referenced field is missing in the target org. In the source org, the field exists and is deployed in the same change. What is the most likely root cause?

A team must introduce a new required field on Opportunity, but existing integrations and users will not populate it immediately. The architect wants to avoid breaking inserts/updates at release time. What is the best rollout approach?

A CI pipeline validates deployments using a sandbox. Occasionally, validation passes, but the subsequent deploy fails with 'component has been modified' or unexpected differences. What is the best recommendation to reduce these inconsistencies?

An enterprise org has hundreds of Apex tests. A new initiative introduces parallel development and frequent releases. The architect must optimize test execution while ensuring adequate coverage for riskier areas. Which approach best fits an expert-level testing strategy?

A company uses unlocked packages for modular delivery. They frequently see deployment failures in downstream environments due to missing package version dependencies and inconsistent installation order. What is the best architectural recommendation?

A release manager wants to reduce risk by ensuring every deployment to UAT and production is reproducible and traceable to a specific source control commit. The team uses scratch orgs for development and a CI server. Which approach best supports this goal?

A team is starting a multi-team Salesforce program and needs a way to prevent unreviewed code from reaching the main branch while still enabling frequent integration. Which practice best meets this requirement?

After a production deployment, users report they cannot see a new custom field on a Lightning record page even though the field exists in the org. The deployment succeeded and metadata shows the field is present. What is the most likely cause?

A company must meet audit requirements demonstrating who approved each production release and exactly what changed. The org uses DevOps automation and Git. Which combination best satisfies these requirements?

Two teams are building Salesforce features in parallel. Team A modifies a global picklist value set used by many objects, while Team B modifies record types and page layouts that reference the same picklist. They frequently experience deployment conflicts and broken dependencies. What is the best architectural/process approach to reduce this risk?

A CI pipeline deploys to a full sandbox successfully but fails when deploying the same commit to production with errors about missing profiles/permissions and field access. The team wants a deployment approach that reduces profile merge conflicts and improves maintainability across environments. What is the recommended strategy?

A managed package includes Apex that references custom metadata types (CMDT). A subscriber org reports that after installing a new package version, behavior did not change as expected because their CMDT records still reflect old values. What should the publisher recommend to ensure subscribers receive intended configuration updates?

A team wants to speed up feedback in their CI pipeline. They currently run all Apex tests for every pull request validation, causing long build times. They still need confidence that changes won't break production. Which approach is most appropriate?

A global enterprise requires near-zero downtime deployments. They use heavy configuration (Flows, validation rules), Apex, and integrations. During releases, they sometimes must deploy metadata that temporarily breaks integrations or data loads. Which deployment architecture best supports near-zero downtime?

A company uses multiple development teams and wants to scale delivery by splitting a large Salesforce org into independently deployable components while maintaining shared standards and minimizing cross-team interference. Which strategy is most appropriate?

A global rollout requires deploying the same Salesforce release to 12 production orgs (one per business unit). Each org has different local configuration, but must share the same managed codebase and deployment process. The enterprise wants a repeatable, scalable way to package and deploy with minimal per-org variance. Which approach best supports this requirement?

A team’s CI pipeline validates pull requests by running Apex tests. Developers report that validations often fail because different tests pass/fail across runs, even when no code changes are made. The failures frequently involve tests that query org data and assume specific record names. What is the best remediation to stabilize the pipeline?

A release includes Flow changes and Apex changes. In a full sandbox, the deployment succeeds, but in production it fails with a "field integrity exception" indicating a referenced field does not exist. The repository clearly contains the field metadata. Which is the most likely cause and best next step?

A program has three Scrum teams delivering features to the same Salesforce org. They frequently overwrite each other’s work during integration because changes are developed directly in a shared integration sandbox. What is the best practice to reduce conflicts while keeping integration continuous?

An org uses a large number of record-triggered flows and Apex triggers. During peak loads, they hit CPU time limits intermittently. Architects want a design change that reduces synchronous processing while preserving transactional integrity where required. Which approach is most appropriate?