What are your SDF pipelines like? I'm implementing SDF for a client and they have nothing in place so wondering what your "best practices" are while I'm designing it.

I currently am creating seperate projects/repos per customization. That's the way that seems best for me (Single Person Dev) where others go Monolith design which I feel gets pretty messy when making deployments.. @erictgrubaugh has a good article on structure as well https://stoic.software/articles/repository-layout-comparison/

For context, that article is a few years old now, and I wrote it before I had done much in the way of CI/CD. Do you have any specific questions or ideas you're trying to explore? I don't know that there are universal "best" practices; there are tons of approaches.

I have two goals at the moment, and maybe SDF isn't the best solution, (or maybe it is?) 1. Back up all SuiteScripts and XML objects. 2. Establish a deployment pipeline because right now they have nothing.

Are you building it for your own use with the customer's environment (e.g. you are deploying changes from lower to higher envs), or does the customer have devs/admins who will deploy changes? If the latter, I'd recommend understanding their skillset first.

They have one admin and I'm their only developer, but I'd like to build them something that future developers can understand and use

The biggest piece of advice I give to teams is to avoid making the branches of your development lifecycle match a specific environment (e.g. just because the

main

branch is your "Production-ready code" does not mean it has to match the Production environment). If you want branches that match specific environments, I advise using separate, long-running branches that are outside your dev cycle for that.

maybe a dumb question, but why do you advise that @erictgrubaugh?

They don’t have any kind of CI/CD at the moment so no version control. I’ll be implementing a main branch repository for them but the rest they’ll have to decide later. I just want a sane environment to work in. 😆

If you're working on a team with multiple developers, and especially in the case where the dev team doesn't "own" the Production account (e.g. third-parties, contractors, Admins are also making changes outside your own dev flow), it is completely disruptive to the dev flow. You're constantly battling and colliding and overwriting or being overwritten. I never see it cause anything but thrashing and stress.

Yeah that's the situation with this client until I got here. Too many NetSuite partners each making their own changes. That's why I'm not looking to come up with a formal process, just a place to put stuff so it can be searched, deployed, and reverted.

interesting points i need to think about, thanks for elaborating

I've seen many different branching schemes work just fine, but I've never seen one work well when the team wanted a branch to simultaneously match an environment and be part of the dev cycle