Every Salesforce team knows the feeling: what should be a 30-minute deployment turns into a six-hour marathon of broken dependencies, frantic rollbacks, and delayed features. One of the most common reasons for this is Salesforce technical debt. Every hardcoded ID, every quick fix, every skipped test adds to the cost of the next release.
The good news, though, is that managing Salesforce technical debt doesn’t have to require a massive refactor or months of planning. It simply means treating debt like backlog work and folding it into the rhythm you already use.
In this guide, we’ll show you exactly how to do that — with a five-step framework for surfacing and addressing the right debt, plus a roadmap for starting with Process Builder to Flow migration.
What technical debt actually costs your Salesforce org
Technical debt is the real and mounting cost of rework that creeps into your org every time a quick fix takes precedence over a sustainable solution. In Salesforce, there are a few different ways this shows up, each undermining your ability to deliver:
Code debt shows up as hard-coded IDs that break between environments, Apex classes that fail under bulk loads, and test coverage that technically clears the 75% bar but does little to validate actual business logic. These shortcuts make deployments brittle and slow down every future release.
Configuration debt accumulates in duplicate approval processes, sprawling sets of nearly identical email templates, and the kind of feature bloat where half the “solutions” in the org sit unused — but still clutter user experience and degrade performance.
Automation debt is the silent, but deadly. Overlapping Process Builders and Flows often target the same objects, creating recursive loops, unpredictable behavior, and debugging sessions where tracking down a single field update can take days.
Documentation debt surfaces whenever context is missing. Without clear guidance on why something was built, new developers default to creating redundant components rather than modifying existing ones.
People debt emerges when critical knowledge is concentrated in just a handful of individuals. If those team members are unavailable, progress can stall and the team might resort to hasty workarounds.
Architectural debt traces back to foundational missteps — like introducing dozens of custom objects where standard ones would have worked. These decisions lock you into rigid patterns that limit agility for years.
The result of all this is an org that’s harder for users to navigate, harder for admins to manage, and harder for developers to deploy changes across.
Recognizing the tech debt patterns that slow your releases
Not all technical debt weighs your org down equally. Some issues are just background noise, while others actively block deployments, slow performance, or open up compliance risks. In mature Salesforce environments, certain patterns crop up again and again: sprawling configuration that confuses users, layers of overlapping automation that create unpredictable behavior, bloated access models that don’t stand up to audit, and the trail of abandoned components left behind by years of quick fixes.
The 80/20 rule applies here — a small share of debt drives the majority of deployment problems, performance issues, and maintenance overhead. The challenge is knowing which debts to tackle first, because targeting the high-impact patterns delivers the biggest payoff.
Building systematic debt reduction into your development process
The fastest path out of technical debt is weaving debt reduction into the same rhythm you already use for feature delivery. Here’s a five-step approach to make it sustainable:
1. Score debt items by impact and effort
Not all debt is equal. Some issues quietly sit in the background, while others actively slow down your releases or create compliance risks. To make sense of it all, give each debt item two scores:
- Business impact (1-5): How much this slows delivery, risks errors, or affects end users.
- Remediation effort (1-5): How difficult it will be to fix.
Your priority should be the debt that’s scored as high-impact, but low-effort. For example, an inactive Process Builder that still fires on every Opportunity save might score Impact 5, Effort 2. That makes it a high-priority task.
2. Write debt stories in business language
To make debt reduction visible and valuable to stakeholders, capture it as backlog stories written in business terms. For example, “As a developer, I need configurable record IDs so deployments don’t break between environments.” This phrasing makes the task specific (configurable IDs), testable (does a deployment succeed across environments?), and valuable (reliable releases for the business).
3. Build documentation into development
Technical debt often snowballs when context is missing. If future teams don’t know why a rule, Flow, or object exists, they’ll create something new instead of improving what’s already there. The antidote is lightweight, living documentation: clear naming conventions, useful component descriptions, and commit messages that explain why changes were made. This keeps your org understandable and prevents redundant components from creeping in.
4. Break big tasks into smaller increments
Trying to launch a massive cleanup project often runs into resistance — leaders see it as slowing down delivery without a clear benefit. Instead, break large remediation efforts into smaller chunks.
For instance, instead of “migrate all Process Builders to Flow,” create backlog items like “migrate Opportunity assignment automation to Flow” so that each segment of work delivers progress without overwhelming the team or the business.
5. Track progress with meaningful metrics
To prove the value of debt reduction, track it alongside your usual delivery metrics. One useful measure is the Technical Debt Ratio (TDR), which compares the effort spent on maintenance (bug fixes, patching, refactoring) to the effort spent on new features or innovation. The TDR formula is:
TDR = (Remediation Cost / Development Cost) × 100
A rising ratio shows that maintenance is consuming more capacity, while a falling ratio indicates you’re freeing teams to deliver new value. Pair that with concrete indicators like:
- Improved deployment success rates
- Increased test coverage quality (not just the 75% minimum)
- Reduced lead times from commit to release
From plan to practice: Start tackling tech debt with Process Builder to Flow migration
If you’re looking for a single action that proves the value of technical debt reduction, migrating from Process Builder to Flow could be it. This step aligns with Salesforce’s long-term roadmap, delivers immediate performance improvements, reduces maintenance complexity, and eliminates a common source of automation conflicts.
Choose the highest-impact automations for migration
Don’t try to migrate everything at once. Instead, identify the best candidates for early wins by looking at:
- CPU consumption: Automations that frequently hit limits
- Maintenance frequency: Flows you constantly have to update or fix
- Business criticality: Processes that directly affect revenue, compliance, or customer experience
This helps you prioritize where migration will deliver the most impact without overwhelming your team.
De-risk migration with systematic testing
One of the biggest fears teams have is the new Flow behaving differently from existing Process Builder logic. That’s why parallel testing is important. This means running the new Flow alongside the old Process Builder to validate that the logic matches exactly before cutting over.
Anticipate and address common pitfalls
Process Builder and Flow aren’t identical, so plan for a few key differences. Flows handle records in batches, while Process Builder often runs one record at a time. The order of operations can also shift during migration, and recursive logic may behave differently — a Flow might re-trigger where Process Builder wouldn’t, or vice versa. By knowing these pitfalls up front, you can design migrations that avoid unexpected regressions.
Prove value with metrics
Migration is a perfect chance to make the benefits of debt reduction visible. Document before-and-after metrics like CPU time reductions, faster save operations, and simplified maintenance workflows. These numbers tell a compelling story to stakeholders who want evidence, not just reassurance.
Position as a proof of concept
A successful Process Builder to Flow migration does more than clean up automation debt — it shows your team and your stakeholders what’s possible. It’s a proof of concept for broader debt reduction: one category fixed, with measurable improvements to system reliability and team confidence.
How Gearset simplifies technical debt management
The five-step approach we’ve outlined — scoring debt by impact, writing it into backlog stories, documenting, breaking it into increments, and tracking metrics — gives you a sustainable way to tackle debt.
But the reality is that without the right tools, teams often struggle to act on these good intentions. Debt lingers because cleanup feels risky, testing is slow, or deleting unused components is a guessing game. Gearset removes those barriers by turning high-risk, manual tasks into predictable workflows.
Spot and prioritize the right debt
Gearset’s Code Reviews lets you run static code analysis across Apex, Flows, Lightning Web Components, Visualforce, and Aura, so you can surface violations, security vulnerabilities, and dependency risks early. Because Code Reviews is built into Gearset’s complete DevOps solution, you can flag issues in the same UI you use for deployments, enforce standards automatically, and even apply autofix recommendations that turn hours of remediation into minutes.
Enforce standards with Code Reviews’ quality gates
Gearset’s Code Reviews includes quality gates that make standards enforceable across your DevOps pipeline. Every pull request or CI job is automatically checked against those thresholds, so new debt never slips into production unnoticed. Combined with protection modes, this keeps teams focused on preventing fresh debt while steadily improving legacy areas. Instead of a one-time cleanup effort, technical debt management becomes part of the everyday rhythm of development.
Turn backlog items into safe, achievable tasks
Technical debt stories often stall because teams don’t feel safe tackling them. Gearset removes that hesitation. Instead of writing destructiveChanges.xml files by hand, you can select unused fields, automations, or templates for retirement and let Gearset generate the manifest automatically. Each deletion is logged for auditing, and if anything breaks, rollback snapshots mean you can undo the change instantly. Debt items that once felt too risky become clear, actionable items that fit naturally into your backlog.
Build documentation into the process
Org Intelligence builds on Gearset’s automatic record keeping — metadata deployment history, commit messages, change monitoring, and audit trails — by adding fast, centralized insight into how your org is structured. It shows dependencies across fields, Flows, automations, and permissions, with historical context for auditability and troubleshooting. Because these insights live in a shared interface, they spread context across the team and become the living documentation that helps prevent debt and gives future developers and admins confidence to build on what’s already there.
Measure progress with real data
Gearset gives teams visibility into DevOps performance metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, and success rates, all in one place. When you can see hard numbers on how often you deploy, how long changes take, and how reliable those deployments are, you can prove that debt reduction isn’t just cleanup for its own sake. That proof builds trust with stakeholders, helps teams prioritize, and shows that the time spent addressing technical debt pays back in real improvements to release speed and stability.
Tackle technical debt before it slows you down
When you identify the high-impact patterns dragging down your org, build remediation into your development process, and rely on a complete DevOps platform to handle what manual methods can’t scale, debt reduction becomes systematic and sustainable.
The 80/20 approach ensures your limited time targets the debt that matters most: automation chaos, configuration sprawl, and missing documentation that forces developers into redundant work. Gearset helps you focus on those areas by taking the risky, manual parts out of the process. With automation, code reviews, problem analyzers, and rollback capabilities, the work shifts from stressful guesswork to a predictable, scalable process.
Ready to see how automated debt management works in practice? Start your free Gearset trial today to get full visibility into your technical debt. Or book a demo to see how other Salesforce teams are using Gearset Code Reviews to catch issues earlier, enforce standards automatically, and keep their orgs running smoothly with fewer errors and rework.
