Discover and Remove Technical Debt

 

Introduction

Salesforce orgs can become unmanageably complex over time. This complexity may stem from a variety of factors, such as corporate mergers and acquisitions, poor change and release management practices, failed or stalled development projects, and administrative turnover. As organizations grow and evolve, the expanded use of Salesforce can quickly lead to an overburdened environment. Without proper maintenance, these complex environments can become virtually unusable. The accumulation of “technical debt” – a term used to describe the financial and resource-based cost of neglected software problems – is a leading cause of organizational inefficiency. When a company invests in Salesforce, it expects innovation, flexibility, and a robust foundation for day-to-day operations. However, as technical debt mounts, businesses often experience:

• Slower performance and reduced business agility
• Additional staffing requirements to maintain the org
• Lost opportunities or sales due to system outages and delays
• Delayed delivery of essential projects and features
• Excessive spending on sales, marketing, and development efforts
• Increased complexity caused by poor data quality downstream
• Prolonged update cycles and administrative burdens

Consider a simple example where administrators create Profiles, Page Layouts, and Custom Objects at a linear pace. Even in that scenario, the total number of user permissions grows exponentially. When other entangled assets—like Custom Fields, Record Types, Custom Tabs, and Apex Classes—are included, the complexity grows at an even faster rate. To address and reduce technical debt, it is crucial to adopt methods that identify overbuilt or underutilized assets, remove duplicates, and streamline security and configuration. This white paper details how Salesforce Administrators can use Metazoa Snapshot to reduce technical debt and maintain a healthier, more efficient Salesforce environment. We provide a comprehensive look at the causes and consequences of technical debt, strategies for reducing its impact, and a step-by-step methodology for leveraging Metazoa Snapshot’s powerful tools to identify and remove unnecessary complexity.

What Is Technical Debt?

Technical debt refers to the additional work (and cost) that accumulates over time when a quick solution is favored over a better, more scalable solution. In a Salesforce ecosystem, this may manifest as hastily created customizations, unmaintained automation, or poorly documented processes. While short-term speed is sometimes necessary, pushing unresolved problems into the future can lead to compounding issues that become difficult to untangle. Similar to financial debt, some level of technical debt may be unavoidable for quick releases or when addressing urgent requirements. However, failing to address that debt expediently often leads to software entropy, where the Salesforce org becomes congested with outdated configurations, excessive code, and disorganized security settings. The end result is an environment that is slow, unpredictable, and expensive to maintain.

The Effects of Technical Debt on Salesforce Orgs

As an org’s complexity increases, so does the likelihood of operational disruptions. Below are common signs of an overextended Salesforce org:

• Performance Degradation: Regular usage slows down, and batch processes or integrations take longer to complete.
• Administrative Overhead: Routine tasks such as adding new users, migrating metadata, or troubleshooting issues become overly time-consuming.
• Configuration Sprawl: Redundant Profiles, fields, or automation rules cause confusion and increase the likelihood of errors.
• Security Gaps: Inactive or stale configurations, such as unknown Apex Classes or incomplete permission sets, may introduce vulnerabilities.
• Delayed Projects: It becomes challenging to introduce new features or integrate new applications due to an unwieldy environment.
• Bug Propagation: One minor change can break multiple transitions or business processes because of interwoven configurations.

Ultimately, organizations that fail to address technical debt may see a dramatic decrease in productivity, higher support costs, and a creeping sense of uncertainty every time a new requirement is introduced.

Discovering Complexity Through Metazoa Snapshot

The journey to reduce technical debt begins with discovering and documenting existing complexity. Metazoa Snapshot excels at helping administrators:

1. Assess Org Complexity: Generate comprehensive asset counts for each metadata type. Pinpoint the total number of custom objects, workflows, Apex Classes, Profiles, Permission Sets, and more.
2. Create Metadata Snapshots: Capture an entire Salesforce environment’s metadata to form a baseline. Over time, multiple snapshots can be made and compared, providing insights into how an org evolves.
3. Identify Bottlenecks and Redundancies: Metazoa Snapshot’s specialized reports, such as Impact Analysis and Relationship Matrix, help you see how different components connect and where duplication or unnecessary complexity exists.
4. Evaluate Historical Changes: Study the Manage Time Series report to observe how your metadata footprint grows or shrinks over time. This provides clues on which assets spur exponential growth in complexity.
5. Visualize Data Usage: The Data Dictionary and Org Dictionary help you document custom fields and other metadata types to see usage patterns. This can reveal stale fields, underutilized record types, or outdated tags.

These insights help you form a solid understanding of how your Salesforce org has evolved and where the cleanup process should begin.

Key Reports for Anatomy of an Org

• Full Snapshot: Captures all org metadata into a permanent backup.
• Snapshot Limits File: Displays a detailed account of the number of assets by metadata type.
• Manage Time Series: Compares how an org’s metadata has changed at different points in time.
• Data Dictionary: Documents all custom object and field properties, including lengths, types, help text, and more.
• Org Dictionary: Color-codes any of the 250+ metadata types, giving a visual overview of complexity.
• Impact Analysis: Highlights how an asset is related to other assets, which is useful for determining dependencies.
• Similar Assets: Identifies potentially redundant metadata structures that could be merged or eliminated.
• Relationship Matrix: Offers a tabular view of how assets rely on each other.
• Fields vs Page Layouts: Documents which page layouts and record types use specific fields, providing a big-picture view of field usage.
• Record Types vs Picklists: Shows which picklists are in use by each record type.
• Controlling vs Dependent Picklists: Gives clarity on the interplay between controlling and dependent picklist fields.

Unused Assets and Forgotten Metadata

Salesforce’s customizable nature often leads to a buildup of unused or forgotten assets. Common examples include:

• Inactive and Hidden Automation: Old workflows, assignment rules, approval processes, or flows that are disabled but never removed.
• Redundant Groups and Queues: Created for specific projects or initiatives but no longer referenced by any other asset.
• Stale Email Templates: Templates created for short-term campaigns that are never utilized again.
• Profiles and Permission Sets with No Users: Orphaned permissions left over after project reorganizations.
• Reports and Dashboards That Are Never Run: Duplicates or outdated analytics with no current value.
• Custom Fields with Low or Zero Usage: Fields that rarely store relevant data or are never populated.

Removing such unreferenced or rarely-used elements is a cornerstone of reducing complexity. Metazoa Snapshot provides the Forgotten Assets report to detect over 100 different metadata types that might be abandoned. You can then use Smart Deploy to remove them safely from production or sandbox environments.

Field Usage

Fields are fundamental to the Salesforce data model. Yet many organizations discover that they have hundreds—or even thousands—of fields that are empty or rarely used. When investigating field usage, consider:

• Empty Fields: A high ratio of null values could mean the field is unnecessary.
• Default Value Reliance: If most records contain the same default value, the field might serve little purpose.
• No Page Layout References: Fields not visible in any layout can be wasted real estate.
• Distinct Value Checks: Grouping or filtering queries help you see whether the same few values are repeated, which can indicate a field is either underutilized or poorly designed.

Metazoa Snapshot’s Field Usage report combines Data Dictionary analysis with advanced queries to discover patterns of deficiency. Administrators can decide whether fields should be repurposed, made mandatory, or removed entirely.

Picklist Usage

Picklist fields often introduce additional complexity, especially since their values can be multiplied across multiple record types, controlling fields, and dependent fields. Over time, picklist options can grow unwieldy. To address picklist-related technical debt:

• Remap Uncommon Values: If new picklist entries were casually added in the past, determine if they can be consolidated with existing choices.
• Remove Unused Values: Declutter picklists by removing obsolete or redundant items.
• Detect Hidden Picklist Dependencies: Identify controlling vs. dependent picklist pairs to understand how one choice may limit or influence another.

Metazoa Snapshot’s Picklist Usage report helps you see each value’s frequency of use. Combine this with historical metadata information to determine if certain picklists are simply remnants of past projects or expansions.

Profiles, Permission Sets, and Permission Set Groups

In Salesforce, user access and security revolve around Profiles and Permission Sets. Profiles define a base level of permissions for each user, while permission sets allow you to grant additional permissions in a more granular way. As an org grows, the total number of Profiles and Permission Sets can become staggering. Without a strategy for consolidation and standardization, an admin may discover that a small update to a single piece of functionality requires changes across dozens of permission sets.

Analyzing Profiles and Permission Sets

Metazoa Snapshot offers a suite of tools to inventory, document, and refactor these security layers. For instance, the View Profiles capability enables bulk editing of multiple profiles, while View Permission Sets provides insight into how they are assigned. This functionality helps identify overlaps, highlight underused security components, and simplify the management workload.

• Combined Security Report: Aggregates Profiles, Permission Sets, and Permission Set Groups assigned to each user. Understand how each user’s final permissions are composed.
• Merge Similar Profiles: Automated detection of profiles that have almost identical permission architectures, simplifying your environment by consolidating them.
• Create Permission Set Groups: Group together sets of permissions to deploy them collectively. This reduces the overhead of multiple, individual permission assignments.

Incorporating Permission Set Groups

Permission Set Groups are a feature that helps unify permissions by bundling multiple permission sets into one object. They offer a highly effective way to assign, manage, and audit larger clusters of permissions. By harnessing permission set groups:

• Admins can reduce the total number of permission sets assigned to each user.
• The org enjoys a more modular and scalable security model, easing future changes.
• Performance can improve by reducing recalculations triggered by changes to multiple individual permission sets.

Metazoa Snapshot supports the creation and assignment of these groups, as well as the documentation of changes so that compliance and audits run smoothly.

Inactive Users and the User Connection Cleanup

Over time, a Salesforce org often accumulates a large number of inactive users. Although these users are not actively logging in, they can still own records, manage other users, function as the running user for scheduled jobs, or remain on approval teams. These “zombie users” create security vulnerabilities and complexity in the org. The User Connection Cleanup report in Metazoa Snapshot scans for over 50 different ways an inactive or legacy user can remain connected to your Salesforce org. By thoroughly auditing these connections, administrators can:

• Reassign Ownership: Move vital records or automations to an active user.
• Remove or Replace References: Delete old references to inactive users in groups or security settings.
• Optimize the Role Hierarchy: Large role hierarchies create performance overhead during recalculations, so reassigning or removing roles tied to inactive users is a must.

By methodically eliminating inactive users and their “traces” within the org, you reduce risk and pave the way for more efficient updates and deployments.

Managing Unlocked Packages

Many Salesforce customers benefit from transitioning certain customizations or new projects into Unlocked Packages. This packaging model grants modular control over groups of metadata. By isolating custom functionality into a package:

• Bugs and errors become confined to the package’s namespace.
• Administrators can more easily upgrade, replace, or remove components.
• Developer teams can focus on smaller, more controlled sets of code, leading to improved testing and collaboration.

Metazoa Snapshot helps teams prepare for this transition by providing a graphical interface for Salesforce DX workflows. You can create, install, and maintain these packages as your codebase evolves. While packaging is an effective strategy for the future, it’s always advisable to first address the foundational technical debt that may currently burden your org.

Change and Release Management Best Practices

Arguably one of the most critical elements of reducing technical debt is adopting a strong Change and Release Management practice. Metazoa Snapshot makes this process straightforward by delivering tools that help with:

1. Identifying Problematic Customizations: Pinpoint problem assets with specialized reports.
2. Testing in Sandboxes: Examine the outcome of potential deletions or changes before moving them to production.
3. Communicating Changes: Ensure stakeholders are aware of what is being removed or refactored, why it’s necessary, and what impact they can expect.
4. Gradual Deprecation: Restrict asset visibility (via profiles and permission sets) or disable automation before permanent removal.
5. Deployment of Cleaner Features: Use Smart Deploy to finalize the removal or restructuring of problem components in production.

By integrating continuous improvement of your Salesforce org into your regular release cycle, you mitigate the risks associated with growing complexity. This ensures that your org continues to be stable, reliable, and capable of evolving with your business.

Measuring and Managing Technical Debt

Beyond the immediate features in Metazoa Snapshot, organizations may also want to employ additional strategies to measure the scope of their debt:

• Code Coverage Metrics: Evaluate how much of your Apex code is covered by tests. Low coverage could indicate untested pathways that hide future problems.
• Cyclomatic Complexity: In the context of Apex, complex triggers or classes might require extra overhead to maintain. Simplifying logic can reduce future debt.
• Known Defects: Consider how many bugs or errors are consistently reported by users or internal testers.
• Backlog Analysis: Regularly review all open tasks, user stories, or enhancements that have been postponed due to complexity. This backlog often indicates the burden of your technical debt.

While some technical debt is inevitable, remaining vigilant about these metrics helps ensure that any debt accrued is safe, manageable, and short-lived.

Conclusion

Technical debt arises when short-term fixes, hurried processes, or rapidly evolving business requirements outpace careful planning and sustainable development. In Salesforce, this debt can become visible in a cluttered configuration, fragile automation, and labyrinthine security structures that hinder daily operations and stifle innovation. The good news is that technical debt is solvable. With Metazoa Snapshot, Salesforce admins have the power to detect and correct issues by generating comprehensive reports, analyzing usage patterns, and eliminating old or underutilized assets with Smart Deploy. Moreover, by implementing best practices in change and release management—and consistently refactoring the org with each release—administrators can keep complexity in check. Download our in-depth PDF version of this white paper to explore specific step-by-step scenarios and see how each of these features operates in real-world Salesforce environments. A case study is also available, detailing the transformative impact of technical debt removal from one of our enterprise customers. We look forward to helping you clean up your Salesforce org and ensure it remains an agile, high-performance environment.