Overcoming Technical Debt

🧹 The Great Org Cleanup – Battling Salesforce Technical Debt Over time, Salesforce orgs tend to accumulate tech debt — unused fields, outdated automations, redundant code, and legacy workflows. It’s not just a developer problem anymore—admins, architects, and consultants all feel the drag as agility and performance suffer. In extreme cases, orgs become so unwieldy that companies consider starting over from scratch, though many experts caution that remediation is usually more prudent . ✅ Here's a practical cleanup roadmap I’ve been exploring: Audit your org – catalog custom fields, automations, code APIs, page layouts. Create a data dictionary for tracking usage and purpose, then flag components (<15% usage) that could be deprecated. Allocate cleanup time – dedicate ~10‑25% of each sprint or release cycle to technical debt reduction. Use cleanup tools like Elements.cloud or Metazoa Snapshot to detect stale assets, show dependencies, and even automate safe deletions. Build governance practices – ensure cleanup is ongoing; establish metadata reviews, documentation, and architecture oversight . 🔄 Your turn: How much technical debt is lurking in your org? Do you regularly incorporate cleanup cycles into your development process? Have you reached a point where rebuilding seemed the best option—or did you cleanup instead? Let’s compare experiences and best practices—share your tech debt nightmares and cleanup wins below!

4 Salesforce technical debt to work on in 2025 (Give your org some TLC) Technical debt creation is inevitable. But like any debt, there comes a time you need to pay it back. If you don't, you'll pay "interest”. It becomes higher as you wait longer. The sooner you catch problems, the cheaper it is to fix them At some point, it becomes critical: → The development team gets slowed down → It causes org crashes →Your ability to use Salesforce features becomes limited. Don't wait until that point. Identify them and work on them now. Here are a few aspects you should stop ignoring: 1. Stop ignoring unused fields and objects. → More fields, more headache when troubleshooting. → You might be hitting the limits. How to eliminate: ✅ Run a field and object usage report using Field Trip (AppExchange). ✅ Identify unused ones and archive or delete them. ✅ Keep only what adds value to reporting and automation. 2. Stop relying on outdated automation. → Workflow Rules and Process Builder are deprecated at the end of the year. → Those old Visualforce pages?... Time to say goodbye → They are inefficient and resource-consuming How to eliminate: ✅ Audit all workflows, process builders VFP, and maybe even triggers (Flows/Apex). ✅ Migrate legacy automation to Flow/Apex for better performance (Split to Before/After Save) ✅ Consolidate redundant processes, remove irrelevant archival logic. 3. Stop neglecting data quality. → Don't say "We’ll clean it up later”... Later is now. → To get the most out of AI, this is a must. How to eliminate: ✅ Implement required fields, visibility filters, and validation rules to prevent bad data. ✅ Schedule regular deduplication and data enrichment. ✅ Monitor with reports crucial data. 4. Stop hoarding old reports and dashboards. → More reports don't mean more insights. → Too much clutter hides the valuable items. How to eliminate: ✅ Identify reports with zero recent views (LastViewedDate, LastRunDate fields). ✅ Consolidate duplicates and outdated dashboards. ✅ Move reports to folders Clean up your Salesforce org now. Future you will thank you. Which of these is the biggest issue in your org right now? --- Found this helpful? Like 👍 | Comment ✍ | Repost ♻️

💳 The 6 Types of Technical Debt—And How to Service Each 🧰 Let’s bust a myth: Technical debt isn’t just old code. It’s everywhere—hidden, visible, intentional, accidental. And it’s costing you. 📊 The numbers: • 69% of tech leaders say technical debt slows innovation (Stripe Developer Report) • 41% of IT budgets are spent servicing it (CIO.com, 2023) So what kinds are you carrying? The 6 Types of Technical Debt: 1. Planned Debt: Rushed features shipped to hit a deadline. Service it: Schedule “debt sprints” post-launch to refactor. 2. Unintentional Debt: Mistakes or gaps from unclear requirements. Service it: Improve specs, add code reviews, document lessons learned. 3.Outdated Library Debt: Dependencies that are old or unpatched. Service it: Regularly audit and update libraries—don’t wait for CVEs. 4. Design Debt: Architecture that no longer fits the product’s needs. Service it: Re-architect in phases; don’t try to “boil the ocean.” 5. Test Debt: Incomplete or missing automated tests. Service it: Make tests part of the Definition of Done; prioritize high-risk areas. 6. Process Debt: Inefficient workflows or missing automation. Service it: Map bottlenecks, automate manual steps, empower teams to fix process pain. The kicker: You can’t pay down what you can’t see. Start by naming your debt—and make servicing it a regular habit, not a last resort. 👥 Your turn: Which type of technical debt is your biggest headache right now? How are you tackling it? Let’s swap strategies below! #TechnicalDebt #Engineering #SoftwareDevelopment #Refactoring #DevOps #ContinuousImprovement

Most Salesforce orgs are drowning in technical debt and they don't even know it. Here's the brutal truth: McKinsey found that 10-20% of tech budgets get diverted to fixing technical debt. In Salesforce terms? That's your innovation and GTM budget going straight to firefighting instead of growth. The paradox is real, the more successful your Salesforce implementation, the more debt you likely accumulate. What does Salesforce technical debt actually look like? It's not just messy code. It's: -Unused fields cluttering your objects -Multiple triggers without frameworks -Legacy Process Builders and Flows you're afraid to touch -Hard-coded IDs breaking when you least expect it -Duplicate records making your reports unreliable The compound effect is brutal. Just like credit card debt, technical debt grows exponentially. Developers spend 23-42% of their time firefighting instead of innovating. Performance suffers. User adoption drops. Costs skyrocket. Here's your way out: The CLEAR Methodology 1. Classify - Categorize debt by type and urgency 2. List - Create a detailed inventory 3. Evaluate - Assess cost vs. business value 4. Act - Implement in prioritized phases 5. Review - Monitor and prevent new accumulation Start with quick wins: Remove unused fields. Consolidate duplicate reports. Clean inactive users. These high-impact, low-effort moves build momentum. 2025 game-changer: AI-powered tech debt management Agentforce needs solid clean data and efficient processes. AI tools can now automate code analysis, predict maintenance needs, and suggest refactoring, turning debt management from reactive to proactive. The shift-left principle applies here: The earlier you identify debt, the cheaper it is to fix. Don't wait until your org becomes unmaintainable. What's your next step? Start to audit your Salesforce org today to assess how bad it is. Technical debt doesn't have to kill your Salesforce ROI. With the right strategy, transform your org from a source of frustration into a competitive advantage. What's your biggest Salesforce technical debt challenge right now? Drop a comment and share: - The debt that's causing you the most pain - A solution that's worked for your team - What's holding you back from tackling it Let's turn this comment section into a technical debt solutions exchange. Your experience could be exactly what someone else needs to hear. #Salesforce #TechnicalDebt #SalesforceAdmin #SalesforceDeveloper #CLEAR

After years as a Team Lead at Google, I can confidently say: 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗗𝗲𝗯𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺. 𝗜𝘁’𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺. The problem isn't the code quality; it's the 𝗹𝗶𝗲 that leadership accepts when prioritizing 100% features and 0% maintenance. If you lead a team, stop thinking about debt as 'bad code' and start thinking about it as a 𝗵𝗶𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝘅 on every feature you ship. Here are the three unexpected costs of "quick wins" that eventually crush teams: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 "𝗖𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗟𝗼𝗮𝗱" 𝗧𝗮𝘅: Every piece of ignored debt adds complexity. New engineers spend 2x longer onboarding. Existing engineers spend 3x longer debugging. Your velocity looks good on the spreadsheet but is silently being suffocated by mental friction. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 "𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻" 𝗧𝗮𝘅: Your best, most detail-oriented engineers leave first. They leave because they came to solve challenging new problems, not fight the same old mess inherited from a rushed deadline two years ago. Debt is a talent retention killer. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 "𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝗢𝗻𝗹𝘆" 𝗧𝗮𝘅: By only tackling debt during an immediate, catastrophic failure (the outage), you guarantee two things: 1) The work is done under maximum stress, increasing risk, and 2) You solidify the negative perception that maintenance work is only necessary when the business is actively losing money. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: As a leader, you must mandate and protect a 20% 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵 𝗕𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘁 every sprint. If the business won't budget 20% for maintenance, they are implicitly budgeting for 100% of future chaos. #TechnicalDebt #SoftwareEngineering #EngineeringLeadership #ProductManagement

Your PM just spent 45 minutes in 2026 planning making the case for critical tech debt. They had everything: Last quarter's three production outages. Customer complaints about reports timing out. That security vulnerability that made the CISO lose sleep. Even showed how fixing this would save 200 engineering hours next year. The CEO listens politely. Then: "This sounds important, but can it wait? We really need that enterprise feature to close the xyz deal." Tech debt loses. Again. When you try to trade infrastructure work against revenue features one by one, infrastructure loses every single time. Revenue is tangible now. Technical risk is abstract future. In our recent Supra 2026 planning session, Rich Mironov shared an effective approach to scope tech debt. He doesn't fight feature by feature. He negotiates the entire portfolio upfront. His breakdown: ↳ ~50% on customer-facing features (stuff they ask for by name) ↳ ~35% on "keeping executives out of jail" tech debt (compliance, security, scalability)   ↳ ~10% on executive escalations (the random fires from sales) ↳ ~5-10% on innovation/discovery That second bucket; Rich literally calls it "keeping you from being arrested" work. When executives push back, he gets specific: - "Remember last month when the site went down during the customer conference and you had to apologize on stage?" - "Remember when the board grilled you for 20 minutes about why our main competitor's app loads 10x faster?" - "Want to explain to investors why we had to pause new customer onboarding because our database is melting?" Now they're listening. What makes this work is that you negotiate this percentage once at the start of the year. Not every sprint. Not every quarter. After that, that 40% is sacred. Someone wants to raid it for their pet feature? "We agreed that not getting sued or having the site explode was worth 40% of our capacity. Let's discuss in our next board meeting to ensure everyone is ok with the change." No more justifying individual infrastructure projects. No more death by a thousand "but can't this wait?" conversations. The portfolio is approved. The percentage is locked. I've watched too many product leaders burn out trying to defend every single piece of infrastructure work. Meanwhile, the technical debt compounds until something catastrophic happens, and suddenly it's "why didn't anyone warn us?" + the product leader is on the hook for the consequences. Rich's model flips the whole thing. Instead of begging for permission to keep the lights on, you're protecting executives from explaining to the board why everything caught fire.

Repaying technical debt will always pay off in unexpected ways. We just landed massive changes in the Flutter repositories this week, officially unifying lints across flutter/flutter and flutter/packages. This has been a long-term goal to reduce cognitive load and improve consistency for all our contributors, but the process of landing it revealed something fascinating. As part of this cleanup, we updated all our API documentation examples to adopt the official flutter_lints package. In doing so, we discovered over 100 API samples were using deprecated code. 🤯 How did this happen? Typically, the framework suppresses deprecation warnings to keep the code in use and ensure we don't cause regressions while in the deprecation window. This is a necessary safeguard for stability. However, an inadvertent side effect was that our API documentation examples were inheriting this suppression, silently holding on to outdated patterns. We are fixing all of these now, but it sparked an interesting conversation: Could LLMs be suggesting deprecated Flutter patterns partly because they’ve been training on our own official documentation? It’s hard to know for sure, but it stands to reason that cleaning up our samples doesn't just help the human developer reading the docs, it likely improves the quality of AI suggestions for the entire ecosystem. This is why repaying technical debt is so critical. It’s not just about "clean code" or "busy work". It’s about improving quality and unearthing the invisible side effects that impact the user experience in ways we might not be aware of. Feels great to have this land, and a cleaner, healthier Flutter for everyone. 💙 Check out the full journey here: https://lnkd.in/esx7pFdX And the official flutter_lints package: https://lnkd.in/eP2DNv-v #Flutter #SoftwareEngineering #TechnicalDebt #OpenSource #DevX

Technical debt is the cost of moving fast. When you cut corners to hit deadlines, you’re taking out a loan against your future productivity. Manage it before it owns you. Start by tracking your debt. Document what it is, why it’s there and what it’ll take to fix. Treat it like an actual loan with interest. Some debt won’t hurt you immediately, but the critical high interest stuff needs fixing fast. Maintenance isn’t optional. Set aside time every sprint to clean up. Think of it like brushing your teeth. Be honest about the trade-offs. If you’re shipping fast, tell the stakeholders what it’ll cost to clean up later. Be transparent about the development choices. Design modular systems that are easy to fix or swap out. Untangling spaghetti code is a waste of everyone’s time. Leave clear comments and TODOs where shortcuts are taken. Your future self (and your team) will thank you. Unchecked debt only grows. Revisit old systems regularly. Don’t chase perfection. Good enough and stable beats over-engineered every time.

𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀/𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗥𝗼𝗮𝗱𝗺𝗮𝗽𝘀 You had many questions about incorporating technical issues into backlogs/workflow/planning. How do you ensure technical issues are addressed as part of the overall business/product strategy? Here are 3 great methods for integrating technical issues and debt remediation into planning: 𝟭/ 𝗘𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗙𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗲𝘀 Regularly include technical assessments in your planning cycles. Evaluate existing technical debt. If you're touching and testing that code, estimate remediation. 𝘼𝙗𝙤𝙫𝙚 𝙖𝙡𝙡, 𝙙𝙤 𝙣𝙤 𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙢. Put an end to hacks and shortcuts to get something out the door. If there isn't time to do it right, there isn't time to do it. Systematically evaluating technical issues in parallel with features, you ensure they remain a visible and integral part of strategic planning. 𝟮/ 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗢𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 Show how to address technical issues in the workstream. They support business goals like improving system performance, enhancing customer experiences, and reducing operational costs. Direct business benefit secures stakeholder buy-in and resources. Stakeholder alignment also helps prioritize technical issues that deliver the most business value. 𝟯/ 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗹𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝘂𝗹𝗮𝗿 𝗥𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 Setting a remediation schedule/budget can be good practice. Where there is significant debt, allocate specific time slots within project timelines or dedicate entire sprints to technical debt reduction. Establishing a regular cadence for remediation activities ensures that technical debt is addressed consistently, preventing it from accumulating to unmanageable levels. This proactive approach maintains system health and allows for continuous improvement without disrupting business operations. By incorporating technical issues in planning cycles, aligning remediation efforts with business objectives, and scheduling regular remediation activities, you can address technical issues and debt remediation into business roadmaps. Technical debt isn't going away. Managing it proactively supports sustainable growth and innovation while maintaining system performance. ________ 👍 Like if you enjoyed this. ♻️ Repost to help your network. Follow Kevin Donovan for more. ________ 🚀 Join the IT Architects' Hub! Unlock more of our 3-𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚-𝙩𝙞𝙥𝙨 with our coming newsletter. We aim to connect you with a community that gets it. Dive into a network of peers who challenge the status quo. Ready to level up?  Improve your skills, meet peers, and elevate your career! Click and Subscribe 👉 https://lnkd.in/dgmQqfu2 -- Photo by Owen Cannon