Help on reducing deployment time

Question

We have a unique situation. We have a force.com site implementation where we have around 150 visual force pages and around 250 apex classes. The classes are tightly coupled from an architecture perspective and currently our deployment time from one sandbox to another is 3 hour minimum to a maximum of 5 hours. Our project is still in development now and we have 2 sandboxes for dev and uat. 1. We are using eclipse ide to do deployment and it takes 6 minutes average to do polling and complain about compile errors. So here is what we are looking for a. An ant script which can do a diff between 2 sandboxes and let us know on files which changes from an apex, visual force and meta data level so that we can only add the changed files in our directory and deploy them. b. A sample ant script which can only deploy selected apex classes and visual force pages. Any thoughts on reducing this time would certainly help? What do you use now to find the differences between sandboxes ? Thanks Buyan

Answer 1

You should check out these two articles by my colleague about setting up Jenkins for continuous deployment and dynamically creating a package.xml for selective scripted deploys with ANT:

http://kevinbromer.com/2013/03/force-com-ci-using-aws/

http://kevinbromer.com/2013/03/dynamically-building-package-xml/

Another helpful resource would be this other StackExchange post on reducing deployment times:

How to reduce the test class execution time while deploying?