💃 Patch or Remodel? 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds!

Imagine walking into your dream home only to find the floorboards squeak, the paint peels, and the plumbing drips. 💧 

That’s your Technical Debt in a Salesforce org:

Those invisible cracks and quick fixes that offer short-term relief but long-term headaches. 🤒 

In the Salesforce ecosystem taking shortcuts today means you’ll spend more time patching tomorrow.

Today, the 💃 ChaCha 🕺 will show you how to catalogue, measure and manage those cracks.

So your org becomes more like a well-built home and less like a fragile fixer-upper.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

💃 Patch or Remodel? 🕺

• What's Tech Debt Anyway?

• How Much Debt Are We Talking?

• Categorizing Your Remodel Jobs

• Best Practices for Managing Debt

• Your Org's Future-Ready Foundation

LET’S PULL BACK THE DROP-CLOTH

WHAT’S TECH DEBT ANYWAY?

Technical debt is the cost of choosing a quicker, easier path now and deferring better design or maintenance for later. ⌚️ 

In Salesforce terms: maybe you’ve got 43 validation rules on a single object, spaghetti flows, a monolithic Apex trigger that handles everything, or integrations we built five orgs ago and forgot about.

These are not inherently bad. But when you keep “just one more” workaround, the interest starts to pile up. 🏔️ 

Debt comes in flavors:

• Intentional debt: we said “let’s ship now, revisit later”.

• Unintentional debt: we didn’t realise this pattern would scale or didn’t document it.

Key point: debt isn’t always sloppy.

It’s the friction and maintenance cost, the impact on team velocity, that tell you you have it. 👈️ 

TIME TO CHECK THE WIRING

HOW MUCH DEBT ARE WE TALKING?

Measurement is tricky but vital. ❤️ 

Here are metrics tailored for a Salesforce org:

• Technical Debt Ratio (TDR) = (Estimated cost to fix debt) ÷ (Cost of new feature work) × 100.

  Example: If your team spends 20 hours a sprint on patching and refactoring and 80 hours building features, your TDR = (20/100) × 100 = 20%.

• Code/metadata health hotspots: high change-frequency Apex classes, flows with many versions, objects with war-stories.

• Lead time, change failure rate, defect ratio: e.g., how often do deployments fail because of old triggers or unmanaged dependencies?

• Qualitative signals: onboarding takes too long, devs complain “I can’t touch that code”, velocity stalls.

As you track these, think of your org as “old wiring” in a house. 🏠️ 

Some outlets trip circuits, some parts are brittle.

You may not know the exact dollar value, but you know the humming and sparks need attention. 😯 

WHICH THINGS ARE COSMETIC, WHICH STRUCTURAL?

CATEGORIZING YOUR REMODEL JOBS

In home renovation you’d classify tasks: repainting, rewiring, foundation fix-up …

In Salesforce debt terms you can categorize too: 👇️ 

• Metadata/configuration debt – overly complex page layouts, flows with little governance, deferred upgrades.

• Programmatic debt – legacy Apex triggers, hard-coded IDs, tight integrations with brittle dependencies.

• Data debt – duplicate records, skewed data, uncontrolled sharing rules.

• Architectural debt – monolithic org design, poor modularity, unmanaged legacy integrations.

When you classify, you gain clarity: a cosmetic repaint (metadata tweak) moves fast; rewiring the electrical system (architectural overhaul) takes time and budget. 💰️ 

Use that knowledge when negotiating backlog time.

CREATE THE REMODELING PLAN

BEST PRACTICES FOR MANAGING DEBT

Here are the strategies that separate “forever fix” houses from “we’re living in a renovation zone”. 🚧 

• Make debt visible: Build a backlog of debt items like any other feature. Tag items: “metadata–low”, “architecture–high”.

• Allocate sustainable time: Reserve a percentage (10–20%+) of every sprint for debt cleanup or refactoring.

• Prioritise smartly: Focus on high-impact debt. Areas where defect rate is high, change rate is high, or onboarding takes forever. 💯 

• Embed quality in the pipeline: Use static analysis, quality gates (e.g., complexity thresholds), automated tests.

• Governance + education: Make debt part of sprint reviews, educate developers, admins and architects about sustainable design.

• Pay the interest early: Every new feature should ask: “Am I adding debt or cleaning it up?” Minimizing new debt keeps the house in shape.
  Metaphor check: You wouldn’t paint over rotten floorboards and pretend everything’s fine. Same with your Salesforce org.

FROM FIXER-UPPER TO FEATURE POWERHOUSE

YOUR ORG’S FUTURE-READY FOUNDATION

If you leave your Salesforce org in “fix-later” mode, you’ll find new features slow to roll out, bugs creep in, maintainability plummets. 🐢 

That’s like trying to entertain guests in a house with sagging ceilings and water-stained walls.

By measuring, categorizing and managing technical debt you turn your org into a home with a sound foundation. 👌 

One where you can confidently add wings, remodel kitchens, or host big events (read: deliver major releases) with ease.

Start small … identify the creaks, sketch the backlog, allocate the time … and you’ll build reliability, resilience and maintainability into your architecture. 🔥 

Think less “quick patch job” and more “well-planned remodel”.

Your developers, admins and business stakeholders will thank you (and your org) will be ready for the future. ⏩️ 

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Salesforce Memes