50 Platform Development Lifecycle and Deployment Architect Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A Salesforce team is adopting a DevOps process and wants to reduce merge conflicts and enable parallel feature development. Multiple teams currently work in the same shared development sandbox. What is the recommended approach?

A release manager needs to ensure all metadata in a deployment is traceable to approved work items and that auditors can see who changed what and when. Which practice best satisfies this requirement?

A team plans to introduce a managed package from an ISV into their org. They want to validate the package and their customizations without risking Production stability. Which environment strategy is most appropriate?

A deployment failed because a custom field referenced by a validation rule does not exist in the target org. What is the most likely root cause?

A large enterprise has multiple teams delivering Salesforce changes. They want a governance model that reduces risk by validating releases and preventing unauthorized deployments, while still enabling frequent releases. Which approach best fits?

A solution includes Apex triggers, flows, and declarative validation. The architect wants a system design that minimizes unintended automation interactions and makes behavior predictable across environments. Which design practice is most effective?

A team uses scratch orgs and wants to ensure every scratch org has identical settings, features, and dependencies needed for development and CI. Which artifact should be the primary source of truth?

During UAT, testers report that a new feature behaves differently than in the integration sandbox. Investigation shows the UAT sandbox was refreshed recently and contains different configuration and permission assignments. What is the best preventative measure?

A deployment to Production succeeds, but immediately afterward users experience failures in a critical process. The team needs a rollback strategy that is reliable for both metadata and data changes introduced by automation. Which approach is most appropriate?

A CI pipeline validates deployments by running Apex tests. Recently, deployments intermittently fail because tests pass in the integration sandbox but fail in the validation stage due to missing test data. The org uses SeeAllData=false across most tests. What is the best long-term fix?

A team uses source control and a CI pipeline to validate every pull request. They want to ensure only the metadata changed in the pull request is validated, while still catching any dependency issues before merge. What is the best approach?

A release manager needs a go/no-go checklist for a production deployment that minimizes downtime and ensures rollback readiness. Which set of activities is the best practice immediately before production deployment?

A program has multiple teams delivering features in parallel. They frequently overwrite each other’s metadata changes when deploying to a shared integration environment. What is the most effective governance and technical solution?

A company must deploy a package of changes that includes new permission sets and field-level security updates. The security team requires evidence that the principle of least privilege is maintained. What should the deployment architect recommend?

A new integration requires a Named Credential and external credential configuration. The team keeps accidentally committing environment-specific endpoint values into source control. What is the best practice to prevent this?

During system design, an architect wants to minimize future deployment conflicts across teams by reducing the number of overlapping metadata edits. Which design choice most directly supports this goal?

A deployment to production fails because several Apex tests pass in staging but fail in production due to unexpected data-dependent behavior. What is the best corrective action to prevent recurrence?

A team is transitioning from change sets to a source-driven development process. They struggle with metadata that cannot be easily managed as source (certain org settings and manual steps). What is the best strategy to keep deployments reliable and auditable?

A global enterprise runs multiple Salesforce orgs. A new release must be deployed to all orgs, but each org has slight variations in enabled features and data model extensions. The architect wants to minimize duplicated effort while ensuring safe, consistent deployments. What is the best approach?

A production deployment includes destructive changes (deleting fields and removing automation). The business requires a rapid rollback path if key processes break, but the deleted fields must not be restored from scratch. What should the architect recommend?

A team wants to improve traceability from requirements to production changes across multiple Salesforce orgs. They already use Git for version control. Which approach best supports end-to-end traceability with minimal manual effort?

A release manager needs a lightweight way to ensure every deployment includes a consistent set of pre-deployment and post-deployment steps (for example, disable scheduled jobs, run smoke tests, re-enable integrations). Which solution is the BEST fit?

A company uses unlocked packages and second-generation packaging (2GP). Two teams develop separate packages that both extend the same custom object with fields and validation rules. They frequently encounter deployment order and dependency conflicts. What is the most appropriate architectural change?

A team is planning a multi-release program. Leadership requires a clear definition of what must be true before a user story can be marked 'Done' to reduce deployment defects. Which artifact best satisfies this need?

A CI pipeline deploys to a full sandbox for validation. The pipeline intermittently fails during Apex tests with record locking errors that do not reproduce locally. What is the BEST mitigation strategy for improving reliability without weakening test coverage?

A regulated customer requires proof that only approved changes reach production. The company uses Git and automated deployments. Which control best demonstrates separation of duties and change approval?

A large enterprise has multiple Salesforce orgs (regional production orgs) and wants to standardize development and release processes while still allowing region-specific configuration. Which strategy is MOST appropriate?

A deployment to production fails because a permission set references a custom field that was removed in the source branch but still exists in production. What is the BEST practice to prevent this type of failure in future releases?

A team needs to ensure that a new release can be quickly rolled back if a critical issue is found. They are using unlocked packages for deployment. Which approach provides the MOST reliable rollback capability?

During sprint planning, the architect wants to reduce integration risks by identifying dependencies on external systems early and ensuring environments are ready. Which action is the BEST fit for this objective?

A Salesforce program uses a monthly release train with multiple teams. Leadership wants a lightweight, consistent way to decide whether a change should be handled as configuration, low-code automation, or custom code. What is the BEST governance artifact to implement during planning?

A team is moving from manual change sets to source-driven development. They need a way to ensure every deployment to QA and Production is repeatable and can be audited back to a specific set of changes. Which approach BEST satisfies this requirement?

A project has frequent integration failures because multiple teams modify the same components and only discover conflicts late. What is the BEST process improvement to reduce late conflict discovery?

A release manager wants to minimize production risk. For each user story, they require a defined rollback plan that can be executed quickly. Which rollback approach is MOST appropriate for metadata and configuration changes?

A team is using unlocked packages. They need to ensure that new components are intentionally packaged and that stray components created during development do not accidentally reach production. What is the BEST practice to enforce this?

A production deployment fails because an Apex trigger references a new custom field that does not exist in the target org. The team uses source control and a deployment pipeline. What is the MOST likely root cause?

A company has strict separation of duties. Developers cannot have permission to deploy to production. However, they must still be able to prove what will be deployed and that it passed tests. Which process BEST meets this requirement?

A team’s automated tests pass in scratch orgs but intermittently fail in a full-copy sandbox due to unexpected existing data and automation. What is the BEST way to improve test reliability across environments?

A global enterprise has multiple development teams working on separate product areas. They want to reduce coupling between teams, support independent release cycles, and ensure consistent dependency management for shared services (e.g., a logging framework). Which architecture approach BEST supports these goals on Salesforce?

A regulated company must prove that every production deployment was validated against the exact same metadata that was approved, and that no person could alter the deployment contents after approval. Which control BEST satisfies this requirement?

A team wants a lightweight way to track user stories, tasks, and bugs directly in Salesforce and link them to deployments. They do not want to adopt a separate external tool. Which approach best supports this requirement?

A release manager needs to ensure deployments occur only after required approvals are captured, and that a complete audit trail exists for who approved what and when. Which solution best meets this requirement with the least custom development?

A team uses unlocked packages. After installing a new package version in a full sandbox for UAT, testers report that some profiles lost access to new fields. What is the most likely cause and best practice fix?

A program has multiple scrum teams working in parallel on the same Salesforce org. They frequently encounter merge conflicts and accidental overwrites of configuration. Which governance and branching approach most directly reduces these issues?

A CI pipeline validates pull requests by deploying metadata to a test org. Occasionally the validation fails because dependent metadata is missing (e.g., a Flow references a Custom Metadata Type record). What is the best way to design the deployment process to reduce these failures?

A deployment to production succeeds, but users immediately report that a new Flow is causing record save failures due to unhandled exceptions in an invocable Apex action. The business needs an immediate mitigation that does not require rolling back the entire deployment. What should the architect recommend?

A team must support regulated deployments where every change must be traceable from requirement to code/config to test evidence to production deployment. Which combination best establishes end-to-end traceability?

During system design, an architect must choose how to separate concerns between "core" shared functionality and "line-of-business" customizations across multiple business units in one org. Which approach best supports maintainability and independent release cadence?

A CI job runs Apex tests in a scratch org and intermittently fails with "Too many SOQL queries" even though the same tests pass locally. The org has many active automation components (Flows, Process Builder, triggers) that run during test data setup. What is the best remediation strategy to stabilize tests?

A production deployment fails validation because several Apex tests break only in production due to existing customer data patterns. The business requires a fix within hours, but the team also must not compromise long-term quality. What should the architect recommend as the best path forward?