Lesson 3: The Seven Mismatches

Each of the seven mismatches has a specific technical mechanism and a class of solution: this lesson examines all seven from first principles.

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Each topic below covers a building block of this lesson. We recommend following them in sequence as each builds on the last.

Git tracks XML files, not the org's component graph. A field rename silently breaks 14 other components.

Org state and repo state diverge continuously. No reconciliation mechanism exists, and code clobber is the natural result.

A syntactically valid merge can produce semantically broken metadata: Profiles and Permission Sets are the canonical failure case.

Standard branching strategies assume environments are disposable and identical. Salesforce sandboxes are neither, and get expensive fast.

Salesforce validates dependencies, tests, and constraints before committing atomically or rolling back. Deploying is nothing like a file push.

Salesforce has no rollback. Restoring a broken production org means manually reconstructing prior state while users wait.

Git records authorship; compliance auditors need approval chains, deployment records, and out-of-pipeline changes, none of which Git tracks.