Reducing The Technical Debt in Salesforce

Many organizations have been incredibly productive over the last few years with their Salesforce Instance. However, that also means that these entities have accumulated baggage that was once necessary but is now obsolete, like fields in forms that continue to remain even though they are no longer required, or producing reports that no one reads. Cleaning your Salesforce org is an inevitability, but leaving it unattended for too long will result in massive amounts of baggage—also known as technical debt—that will be difficult to filter.

A Salesforce technical debt clean-up is necessary after a few years, given its tendency to accumulate slowly. The baggage often occurs when making urgent changes without thoroughly assessing or designing them, resulting in extra components that can bog down your company. With too much technical debt, you may risk delivering poor performance, reducing your return on investment, and even giving your end-users a lousy experience.

Identifying Technical Debt in Your Org

To eliminate all the clutter, you’ll first have to identify existing technical debt in your organization. It helps to categorize the debt, such as unnecessary customizations, duplicate data, which can quickly rack up extra elements that can bog down your processes. You can also analyze your database for unused form fields, tables, and data columns, which indicate the details that your users ignore. Doing away with them will reduce your user interface’s visual clutter and help create a more streamlined appearance and navigation.

You’ll also want to watch out for low-quality code, which you added to your organization to enjoy the required customizations. However, it doesn’t follow Salesforce or APEX best practices while contributing to technical debt. Reports tend to take up a bulk of technical debt since many organizations continue to produce files that are no longer useful. Still, employees write them because the organization hasn’t taken steps to stop the process altogether.

Open Source libraries are another source of technical debt. Like JavaScript frameworks, these libraries are frequently uploaded to organizations so developers can benefit from features they think they need to perform their work correctly. However, if developers can use similar features in the platform components, this quickly becomes technical debt. It also applies when developers use their choice frameworks even though they don’t comply with the organization’s Open Source Software guidelines.

Choosing a Strategy to Implement a Salesforce Technical Debt Clean Up

After identifying the main components of your technical debt, you can opt for a full re-implementation of your Salesforce organization or implement a periodic reduction of it. If you pursue the first option, you’ll have to hit the brakes on all new releases and concentrate on implementation. Luckily, Salesforce’s plug-and-play functionality makes this step more comfortable and almost effortless.

However, if you decide to perform a gradual reduction of your technical debt, you must prioritize a percentage of each reduction for remediation work. Most companies decide on going for this method instead of starting from scratch, although they both have their disadvantages. Still, frequently inspecting your code is still an essential part regardless of the strategy you choose.

Technical debt can quickly bog down your organization and cause your performance to suffer. Without cleaning your organization of it, you’ll lose hundreds or thousands of dollars in revenue without even realizing it. By prioritizing a regular clean-up, you can enjoy all the benefits that Salesforce has to offer while increasing your overall efficiency.

Apphienz has solved the technical debt issue for numerous clients. We help our clients maintain their Salesforce Instance debt-free. Apphienz provides new implementation, managed service and support, and business transformational services tailored to your company. Contact us today to find out what else we can do for you!