Scratch Orgs. The chances are you have never used or even heard of them. In the more traditional Salesforce development processes Sandboxes are used to build new features and change sets are used to transport those changes to other sandboxes or the production org. You don’t do any changes in production? Right?

So what is a scratch org, it is a deposable new salesforce environment. It is created based on a configuration file, not an existing environment. Forget about org shapes for now if you know what they are. For CICD we will have to create a configuration file mimicking our production environment in features, settings and licenses.

The created scratch org will be without your metadata, so the next step is pushing your metadata. This sounds easy but is often a process containing multiple steps due to metadata dependencies.

And last but not least make it easy on yourself, so think about generating data and users in your scratch org, this eases the development and testing done in scratch orgs.