A development workflow describes the day-to-day activities of a developer in order to obtain the latest build, make changes, and submit them back to a repository that maintains the current overall state of the source code. Having a solid well-defined developer workflow, supporting tools, and infrastructure is critical to the efficiency of any development team.

The first thing a developer will want to know is where the source code is—typically in a common Source Control system such as SVN or Git. The next would be how to get it into a form so that they can start executing it. Salesforce provides a toolkit known as the Migration Toolkit that helps write scripts to deploy to a Salesforce org using the popular developer scripting language known as Ant. We will be building such a script in this chapter. Such scripts are also used by Continuous Integration build servers described later in this chapter.

The Migration Toolkit also provides a means to extract...