Platform Development Lifecycle and Deployment Architect Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

An enterprise uses a 3-org strategy (Dev, UAT, Prod) with multiple Scrum teams. Teams frequently overwrite each other’s metadata during UAT deployments, and hotfixes sometimes bypass Dev. The architect must design an ALM process that prevents collisions, preserves auditability, and supports parallel feature development with minimal bottlenecks. Which approach best meets these goals?

A company has strict regulatory requirements: every production change must be traceable to an approved work item, include evidence of testing, and be reproducible. They are moving to automated deployments. Which set of controls most directly satisfies traceability and reproducibility while still enabling automation?

A release includes declarative changes and Apex updates. During final validation, automated tests pass in UAT but fail in Prod due to differences in existing data and configuration (e.g., unexpected record types and validation rules). The architect needs a plan to minimize environment drift and reduce last-mile failures without slowing delivery. What is the best strategy?

A global program will deliver 6 major releases per year plus weekly minor enhancements. Several business units share the same Salesforce org, but each has distinct compliance gates and blackout windows. The architect must define a release plan that minimizes coordination overhead while maintaining quality and respecting blackout windows. Which plan is most appropriate?

A program has 12 teams contributing to a shared org. The business demands that critical fixes reach production within hours, but also requires full regression for major releases. The architect must propose a branching and promotion strategy that supports both fast hotfixes and stable long-lived workstreams. Which strategy best balances these requirements?

A multi-team org has frequent failures during deployments caused by unexpected profile differences and permission dependencies. The architect needs to redesign the security deployment approach to reduce merge conflicts and make permissions more modular across apps and teams. What is the best design choice?

A company runs large-scale data loads and has multiple asynchronous processes (Platform Events, Queueables, scheduled jobs). They experienced intermittent post-deployment incidents where new automation caused cascading failures under peak load. The architect must design a deployment-safe architecture that allows controlled activation and fast rollback without redeploying code. What is the best approach?

A CI pipeline validates and deploys metadata. A deployment to UAT fails because Apex tests that previously passed now fail due to a dependency on an updated managed package version in UAT. Production has the older package version and cannot be upgraded until next month. The release must proceed for non-package-related changes with minimal risk. What is the best course of action?

A deployment includes changes to flows, Apex, and permission sets. In production, users report missing access to new fields even though permission sets were deployed. Investigation shows that the deployment order caused intermediate failures and partial metadata application, but the pipeline marked the job as succeeded because the final step completed. How should the architect redesign the deployment process to prevent partial success and ensure atomic, verifiable releases?

A critical release introduces new integration logic and data model changes. The organization has high test coverage but has suffered production defects due to untested data migrations and missing negative-path cases. The architect must define a testing strategy that increases defect detection specifically for deployment-time risks while keeping feedback fast. Which strategy is best?