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6 Salesforce Coding Best Practices

Josh Rank
June 1, 2022

Salesforce is widely known as one of the most popular CRM platforms in the world. It is also increasingly becoming a popular platform for developers due to its point-and-click capabilities as well as its flexibility to cater to more sophisticated coders.

Adhering to Salesforce coding best practices helps streamline and optimize DevOps pipelines to produce better products more quickly.

Best practices are habits and tactics generally regarded to provide the greatest potential results. Salesforce coding best practices align the efforts of your team to work together with the goal of producing more secure products with as little wasted time and effort as possible. This increases the overall ROI of a Salesforce DevOps project while also making a better experience for team members.

A large aspect of optimizing DevOps efforts is to provide your team members with tools that go along with these tactics to optimize their efforts. That’s why these Salesforce coding best practices are aimed both at administrators as well as developers to offer a comprehensive approach to software development.

So how can a DevOps team see the greatest returns from their development pipeline?

Here are 6 Salesforce coding best practices:

Utilize Static Code Analysis
Implement Source Code Management
Don’t Put Speed Before Quality
Automate as Much as Possible
Keep Data Security in Mind
Back Everything Up

1. Utilize Static Code Analysis

The strength of your code is the single greatest factor into the success of your DevOps project. Enabling your team to produce the strongest possible structures is the first Salesforce coding best practice. Even the most skilled developers are liable to make mistakes, resulting in potential data security vulnerabilities and failed deployments.

Static code analysis is an essential tool that provides complete visibility into code health from the moment it’s written through deployment.

This automated tool supports your developers as they pursue the rest of our Salesforce coding best practices. Intentional practices combined with strong tooling will create the best atmosphere for creating reliable code.

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2. Implement Source Code Management

Working on a multi-developer team offers the ability to split responsibilities when building a new application or update, leading to expediting the building stage of the DevOps pipeline. This can be very beneficial, but it can also lead to errors such as code overwrites and incompatible lines of code.

Source code management is the process of tracking all changes to the master repository of code for an update or application.

Version control is a method of source code management and is the cornerstone of a developmental organization. It allows developers to manage software revisions by tracking each update with a time stamp and personal signifier, which allows the team to roll back incongruous updates if a discrepancy is found.

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3. Don’t Put Speed Before Quality

Being the first to market with a new application or functionality is incredibly attractive. It positions you as a leader in your industry. However, prioritizing speed will often come at the expense of other important aspects of a DevOps project such as security and quality.

Utilizing automated release tools and code quality tools will enable speedy delivery of applications while ensuring the proper testing is still taking place.

A failure to properly test projects will lead to what’s known as technical debt—known issues within an update with the understanding they will be resolved later. Unfortunately, many of these issues remain unresolved, creating data security vulnerabilities and bugs in the live environment. Avoid this by insisting on proper testing and get it right the first time.

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4. Automate as Much as Possible

Integrating lines of code into a single repository, testing, and scanning for bugs are examples of DevOps processes that can be highly repetitive when performed manually. People have a tendency to tune out when they are performing tasks such as these which leads to mistakes. Beyond that, manual tasks are incredibly time-consuming and take your team members away from more pressing issues.

Automating these tasks ensures they are properly addressed while also drastically speeding a project to the next stage of the Salesforce DevOps lifecycle.

We’ve discussed how static code analysis automates essential code checks, but other tools like CI/CD and data backup & recovery should also be included in your DevOps strategy.

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5. Keep Data Security in Mind

DevOps has gained traction over the last decade as the go-to mindset for software development. It has revolutionized the approach for many developers and provided amazing results. As we’ve seen with many recent high-profile data breaches, data security has become an essential consideration for every aspect of your company’s platform.

Data security needs to be kept in mind when writing code right alongside functionality. Constant attention will create the most secure result possible.

The first step to protecting your system starts with reliable coding practices. Give your team the code scanning tools they need to avoid contributing to data security vulnerabilities.

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6. Back Everything Up

One major aspect of establishing a complete data security strategy alongside your coding practices is the ensure you are prepared for worst-case scenarios. This goes along with the idea of giving your developers the tools they need to adequately perform their duties. A data loss even can eliminate essential data relationships and metadata that negatively impacts the development environment as a whole.

A recent data backup and the ability to quickly recover that data will ensure proper functionality and enable your developers to produce the best applications and updates possible.

Salesforce coding best practices often have a lot to do with the direction, approach, and tools made available to your team members. A failure to provide a proper coding environment will result in poor code quality and error-prone products. Keep these factors in mind when putting together your Salesforce DevOps strategy.

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FAQs

What is source code management?

Source code management is a method of tracking code changes in a shared repository with a tool like version control.

Why should I use Salesforce best practices?

Coding errors can result in failed deployments, buggy releases, and data security risks. Adhering to Salesforce coding best practices increases the chance of avoiding these negative outcomes and streamlining operations.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is the next iteration of DevOps, which introduces data security considerations throughout the development lifecycle instead of just at the end.

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6 Salesforce Coding Best Practices

1. Utilize Static Code Analysis

2. Implement Source Code Management

3. Don’t Put Speed Before Quality

4. Automate as Much as Possible

5. Keep Data Security in Mind

6. Back Everything Up

FAQs

Develop high quality, secure code!

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