5 MIN READ
The Guide to Managing Salesforce Tech Debt
Tech debt: those two small words can give even the calmest Salesforce admin or ops pro a massive headache. At its core, cleaning up tech debt involves the time, effort, and implied cost of reworking a solution that was initially rushed or incomplete. The individual decisions that create tech debt don’t seem like a huge deal at the moment—they’re saving your team time, after all—but tech debt builds up slowly without you realizing. The more you take the short route, the more tech debt you’re at risk of accumulating. The short route opens your Salesforce org up to vulnerabilities like duplicated fields and out-of-date or incorrect reporting. Plus, as orgs are passed from one admin to the next, tech debt gets harder and harder to track and manage. All of this can add additional strain and unnecessary work to your ops team and Salesforce admins.
When to start thinking about tech debt
Curious about what tech debt looks like in a Salesforce org and when you should start thinking about it? Here are some examples:- Reports or dashboards that have been abandoned because they no longer return accurate results
- Extremely specific solutions that aren’t scalable or easy for other teams to use
- Users with a paid seat who have been inactive for a long period of time
- Inactive or out-of-date validation rules, process builders, and workflow rules
- Solutions built off of a previous, outdated integration—especially one that already had unresolved tech debt
How to manage your tech debt
Depending on the size and age of your org, your list of tech debt might be intimidatingly long. You’ll need to split tech debt into projects depending on their priority. Think about which items you need to tackle now because of their downstream impact, and which projects you can leave for later, during a quieter month or sprint. From there, you’ll need to create a strategy for tackling those urgent projects. Who’s the owner, how much time and effort will this take, and what does fixing this tech debt improve? Divvy up those items amongst the other work your ops team and admins are implementing. Go through this exercise for the lower priority items, too—just be sure to build in plenty of time for those projects to be completed. Most importantly, remember to document everything. Collaborate with your fellow admins and ops team members to collect all items in one place, track progress, and have conversations around each item as needed. If you’re a team of one, documentation will be your best friend. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your colleagues who use Salesforce every day to see how certain tech debt items affect their workflow and how it improves after you implement a solution.How a Change Intelligence platform helps manage tech debt
Looking for something more sophisticated to keep track of all of your tech debt projects? Look no further than a Change Intelligence platform like Arovy. Arovy helps you:- See dependencies across your systems. Take a look at how fixing tech debt can cause a ripple effect across your tech stack, and get ahead of any potential issues or confusion before you make a change.
- Manage the downstream impacts of change. Automatically document your additions, subtractions, and changes. Every change is documented in a complete timeline history that you can view in Arovy, via email, or in Slack.
- Scope and collaborate with your team on tech debt projects. Organize and assign tech debt tasks, document important context, and keep all communication about changes in one place.