Topics to study for Development Lifecycle and Deployment Designer exam

As I started the System Architect journey, I found some topics to be more vital in succeeding the exam. Even though there may be a lot on the certification on Trailmix already, but here are some that I would particularly like to mention:

Components of Governance Framework:

Three elements of a responsive and adaptable framework for governance

1 - Center of Excellence:

A few stakeholders from different functional groups work together to ensure that changes support business goals and follow IT best practices and processes. Teams that can be part of COE: 

2- Release Management:

Set up a release schedule and defining criteria for major versus minor releases.

Releases typically fall into one of the following categories: Daily, Minor, Major

Daily: Bug fixes and simple changes that do not require formal release management, including reports, dashboards, list views, email templates, and user administration.

Minor: Changes with limited impact, such as a new workflow rule or trigger impacting a single business process. These releases typically require testing, but limited training and change management, and are delivered within a few weeks.

Major: Changes with significant impact, including configuration and code changes with one or more dependencies

3- Design Standards: 

Its important to have design standards for the following keys areas: Coding, Testing, Integration, Handling Large data Volumes and Documentation.

Some examples of design standards include:

• Standard naming conventions
• Consistently using the Description field
• Bulkified code
• Standard methods for deprecating classes and fields
• Consistent data architecture across all projects

Metadata API:

Here are some key points. You can find all details here

• Use Metadata API to retrieve, deploy, create, update or delete customization information, such as custom object definitions and page layouts, for your organization.
• List of Components which are not supported in Metadata API. Details here 
• You can deploy or retrieve up to 10,000 files at once and the maximum size of the deployed or retrieved .zip file is 39 MB.
• The size and complexity of the metadata components affect the deployment time. 

Sandbox License and Storage by Type:

You can create different sandbox environments for your org, depending on your needs for storage, copy configuration, and frequency of refresh. Details here

Application Lifecycle Management:

Salesforce provides various development tools and processes to meet the needs of customers. This module introduces the application lifecycle management (ALM) process and the three development models. Details here

1. Change set development
2. Org development
3. Package development

Useful links:

Effective Change Management

Change Set  Development Model

Force.com IDE Basic

Governance Basics

I hope this information is useful for getting you through the exam. Feel free to comment below if you require further details. Good luck on the exam! 

Topics to study for Sharing and Visibility Designer exam

I've recently taken Sharing & Visibility exam which happens to be the second and final step towards the completion of my Application Architect journey. Phew!

Although, I took this exam way back in November, but given my laziness (oh wait, I was traveling and that's kinda fair) I'm posting my key-learning from it only now.

So before any further a due, here are the topics which you can study in order to master this certification:

Access Grants:

Salesforce uses access grants to define how much access a user or group has to that object’s records. There are 4 types of access grants:

Implicit Grants:

There are a number of sharing behaviors that are built into Salesforce applications. This kind of sharing is called implicit because it is not configured by administrators; it is defined and maintained by the system to support collaboration among members of sales teams, customer service representatives, and clients or customers. Details here

1. Read-only access to the parent account for a user with access to a child record
2. Access to child records for the owner of the parent account
3. Access to records owned by or shared to portal users for internal users 

Explicit Grants:

Salesforce uses explicit grants when records are shared directly to users or groups. Specifically, Salesforce uses explicit grants when:

1. A user or a queue becomes the owner of a record.
2. A sharing rule shares the record to a personal or public group, a queue, a role, or a territory.
3. An assignment rule shares the record to a user or a queue.
4. A territory assignment rule shares the record to a territory.
5. A user manually shares the record to a user, a personal or public group, a queue, a role, or a territory.
6. A user becomes part of a team for an account, opportunity, or case.
7. A programmatic customization shares the record to a user, a personal or public group, a queue, a role, or a territory

Group Membership Grants:

Grants that occur when a user, personal or public group, queue, role, or territory is a member of a group that has explicit access to
the record.

Inherited Grants:

Grants that occur when a user, personal or public group, queue, role, or territory inherits access through a role or territory hierarchy,
or is a member of a group that inherits access through a group hierarchy.

Object Record Tables

Tables that store the records of a specific object, and indicate which user, group, or queue owns each record.

Object Sharing Tables: 

Store access grants to individuals and groups. Each of rows (called sharing rows) grants a user or group access to a particular record

Group Maintenance Tables:

Store the list of users or groups that belong to each group, indicating group membership. Single group membership or inherited access grant can give several users and groups multiple ways to access a record. Also includes including system-defined group. System-defined groups are groups of users that Salesforce creates and manages internally to support various features and behaviors, such as queues and hierarchies. For every node in role hierarchy, 2 types of system-defined groups is used : Role groups and RoleAndSubordinates groups

Salesforce matching process in sequence: 

Visibility of Custom Settings

Protected:

If the custom setting is contained in a managed package, subscribing organizations can't see the custom setting: it doesn't display as part of the package list. In addition, subscribing organizations can't access the custom setting using either Apex or the API, however, developer organizations can. If the custom setting is contained in an unmanaged package, the custom setting is available through the Enterprise WSDL like any custom object (as if the Visibility was Public.)

Public:

The custom setting is available through the Enterprise WSDL like any custom object. You can package custom settings defined as public. The subscribing organizations can edit the values, as well as access them using Apex and the API, regardless of the type of package (either managed or unmanaged).

Defer Sharing Rule: 

Defer Sharing Calculation lets an administrator suspend and resume sharing calculations.Administrators should plan to suspend/resume sharing calculations during maintenance windows to have minimal impact on users. Details here

Useful links:

Record Locking 

Salesforce permissions applied to Apex

Contact Sharing Rules do not grant Users access to Contacts as expected

Grant High-Volume Community Users Access to Records

Enable Filter-Based Opportunity Territory Assignment

Guidelines for Using Opportunity Teams

Parallel Sharing Rule 

Granular Locking

Overview of differences between Territory Management (1.0) and Enterprise Territory Management (2.0)

Built-in Sharing Behavior

Restrict Where and When Users Can Log In to Salesforce

Error 'Group Membership Locked' when updating group membership

All the best for your exam. Feel free to shout out if there's anything which you want to know more.