What Is Technical Debt?
Technical debt is the implied cost of choosing a quick, easy solution over a better, more robust approach that would take longer. Think of it like a financial debt: the quick fix is the loan you take out, and the extra effort needed to fix it later is the added interest you have to repay. The slowdown in development you experience because of these issues is the interest you're paying. Unresolved technical debt compounds over time.
This means that new components and new platform functionality often get built on top of older metadata items, problematic code, increasing org complexity, leading to releases requiring additional rework. When team members leave, the knowledge of these initial design decisions is lost, making it even harder to fix these issues in future projects.
The Impact of Technical Debt
Technical debt affects both your engineering team and the wider business.
For your team: It slows down development, making it more time consuming to build new features. This leads to increased
maintenance costs as developers spend more time dealing with existing problems rather than creating value. It can also cause developer frustration and burnout, potentially increasing turnover rates.
For the business: Unresolved technical debt can lead to performance issues, frequent bugs, and system instability. This directly impacts user adoption and the overall return on investment (ROI) of your Salesforce implementation. In severe cases, technical debt can make solutions unmaintainable and error-prone, which is a bad thing.
Measuring Technical Debt with Clayton
Clayton helps you measure and manage technical debt in Salesforce by providing clear metrics.
Technical Debt Ratio (TDR): This is a core metric used to quantify the amount of technical debt in a codebase relative to the effort needed to build the application from scratch. It's calculated by dividing the estimated cost to fix all identified issues (Cfix) by the estimated cost to develop the application from scratch (Cdev). A lower TDR indicates better code quality and easier maintenance. Clayton's goal is to help teams reduce unnecessary complexity and keep this ratio low.
Remediation Effort: This provides an estimate of the time required to address and resolve the issues identified by Clayton's scan. This effort is measured in hours and helps teams prioritize what to fix. You can see the estimated effort for different issues, making it easier to plan for project refactors and tackle tech debt.
Defect Density: This metric shows how common issues are within your application, helping you understand the overall code quality and health of the codebase.
Technical Debt Risk Levels
Clayton categorizes technical debt into five levels:
Low (≤5%) – Healthy and recommended.
Medium (6-10%) – Manageable but should be monitored.
High (11-20%) – Requires attention to prevent escalating costs.
Severe (21-50%) – Slows down development significantly and increases risks.
Extreme (>50%) – Critical intervention needed; the system is at risk of failure.
How to Reduce Technical Debt in Salesforce Using Clayton
Clayton provides a comprehensive approach to help you tackle technical debt and improve your Salesforce org.
Define Your Coding Standards: With Clayton, you can define Policies; sets of rules that enforce coding standards, security measures, and best practices. These rules apply to various Salesforce features like Apex triggers, Flows, custom objects, and page layouts. By implementing and customizing these policies, you can ensure consistent code quality and enforce governance across your projects.
Automate Code Reviews: Clayton can be set up to perform real-time code reviews on every change, automatically identifying issues before they are merged into your main codebase. This helps prevent new technical debt from being introduced and ensures a higher standard for current development work. You can configure quality gates in your version control system (like Gitlab, GitHub, or Bitbucket or Azure ) to require a passing Clayton review before code can be merged.
Prioritize and Manage Remediation: Clayton's scan reports organize findings by policy and severity (Critical, Error, or Warning). The Remediation chart visually summarizes issues based on severity and estimated effort, helping you identify "quick wins" and plan for "long-term initiatives". This allows you to prioritize tasks effectively and systematically repay your debt.
Enforce Well-Architected Best Practices: Clayton's policies align with the Salesforce Well-Architected Framework and OWASP guidelines to ensure your applications are Secure, Reliable, and Resilient. It checks for issues like hardcoded IDs in code or flows, missing null checks, and inefficient logic in loops, all of which contribute to more technical debt.
Educate Your Team: Clayton provides detailed explanations and links to resources like Salesforce documentation, Trailhead, and OWASP for each identified issue. This helps your team understand the problems and learn how to implement a better approach. It fosters a culture of continuous learning and adherence to best practices, reducing the likelihood of making the same mistakes in the future.
Best Practices for Managing Technical Debt
Effective tech debt management requires a continuous and proactive approach.
Keep Your Debt Visible: Track technical debt as part of your product backlog. This makes it a visible and accountable part of your work, rather than something that gets ignored.
Allocate Time for Repayment: Reserve a small portion of every sprint to tackle technical debt reduction. This prevents it from building up into a major problem.
Prioritize Strategically: Look for "quick wins"—issues with high impact but low complexity. Addressing these first gives you the most value for your effort.
Enforce Standards: Use tools like Clayton to automatically enforce coding standards and best practices in your CI/CD pipeline. This prevents new issues from being introduced in the first place.
Avoid Reckless Debt: Make a conscious decision about which technical debt is necessary (for an immediate problem) and which should be avoided. Skipping design and documentation due to time constraints can be especially damaging.
By consistently following these practices, you can maintain a low Technical Debt Ratio and ensure your Salesforce ecosystem remains healthy, agile, and productive for years to come.