KodeLens

You just received a request for a new feature. On the surface, it seems simple—add a new checkbox to the Contact object and create a small automation. But your gut reaction isn't excitement. It's a knot of anxiety.

You know that touching the Contact object means wrestling with that one monolithic trigger. You know that a "quick" change will require navigating a maze of old, interconnected code. This feeling has a name: you're paying the price of technical debt.

In software development, technical debt is the implied cost of rework you incur by choosing an easy, limited solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. It's the shortcut you took yesterday that you have to pay for—with interest—every single day afterward.

Technical debt in Salesforce is particularly insidious. It accumulates silently, feature by feature, until one day you realize your org has become slow, fragile, and terrifying to change. Recognizing the signs is the first step to paying it down.

Sign #1: Every Project Takes Longer Than It Should

This is the most common symptom. A request that the business thinks should take two days ends up taking two weeks. Your team consistently misses estimates, not because they are unskilled or lazy, but because of a constant stream of unforeseen complexity.

Why it happens: Years of accumulated code and automation have created a system that is tightly coupled and tangled. Changing one field requires understanding and modifying ten other things—a trigger, three Flows, a validation rule, and an outbound message. There is no such thing as a "simple change" anymore. Every line of code is connected to a hidden web of dependencies, and mapping them out is 90% of the work.

The pain: This slowly erodes trust between the development team and business stakeholders. They can't understand why "small changes" take so long, leading to friction and frustration on both sides.

Sign #2: A Deep-Seated Fear of Making Changes

Does your team seem visibly hesitant to touch certain parts of the system? When a change is requested for a core object like Account or Opportunity, do they immediately advocate for building a new, separate process rather than modifying the existing one?

Why it happens: This fear is rational and born from experience. Your developers have been burned before. They made a seemingly safe change that caused a critical, unrelated feature to break in production. When the system is no longer predictable, the safest option is to not touch it at all.

The pain: This leads to "code rot" and architectural decay. Instead of improving and refactoring the core system, developers build endless patches and workarounds. Each workaround is another layer of debt, making the core problem even worse for the next developer.

Sign #3: The Org Relies on "Tribal Knowledge"

A critical piece of automation for calculating sales commissions is failing. The only way to understand how it works is to ask Susan, the senior architect who built it seven years ago. But Susan is on vacation for the next two weeks. The business is blocked, and the team is effectively blind.

Why it happens: The code is uncommented, the documentation is non-existent, and the logic is completely unintuitive. The system's most critical functions exist only in the minds of a few key people.

The pain: This creates a massive business risk and a fragile team. It makes you dangerously dependent on a small number of individuals and creates knowledge silos that prevent junior and mid-level developers from ever growing into senior roles.

Sign #4: A High Rate of "Regression Bugs"

You just deployed a new feature. A week later, the support team reports that a completely unrelated part of the system—something that has worked for years—is now broken. You fix one bug, and two more pop up.

Why it happens: This is a direct result of tangled code combined with inadequate test coverage. Without a comprehensive suite of unit tests, the downstream impact of any change is impossible to see. The developer makes a change, tests their specific feature (which works perfectly), and is completely unaware that it broke three other processes.

The pain: This destroys user trust in the IT department and the Salesforce platform itself. It also pulls your developers away from building valuable new features and forces them into a reactive cycle of constantly fighting fires.

Sign #5: You Can't Answer Simple Questions About Your Own Code

A product manager asks a straightforward question: "Can someone give me a complete list of all the things that happen when an Opportunity stage is set to 'Closed Won'?"

Silence.

No one on the team can give a complete answer without a multi-day investigation.

Why it happens: The logic is scattered everywhere—across Apex triggers, Flows, Process Builders, and validation rules. There is no single source of truth. This inability to quickly discover and understand existing functionality is the ultimate sign of overwhelming technical debt.

The pain: This makes strategic planning impossible. If you don't know what your system currently does, how can you confidently plan for what it will do next?

Conclusion: It's Not Too Late to Pay It Down

If these signs feel familiar, you're not alone. But they are not just "the way things are"—they are symptoms of a real, costly problem that needs to be addressed.

Technical debt is not a moral failing; it's a natural byproduct of building software under pressure. The key is to manage it proactively. The first step is to make the invisible visible. You can't fix what you can't find. Start by using modern tools to map out your existing logic and truly understand your codebase. Tools that allow you to search your code by meaning, not just keywords, are essential for identifying the scope of the debt and planning how to tackle it.