A simple change in Salesforce shouldn’t take hours — but sometimes it does. You set out to modify a simple validation rule, but now you’re sifting through 15 separate automation components to avoid breaking something unexpected. That custom field addition? It takes three hours of dependency analysis for what should have been a 20-minute task. Even minor page layout changes require cross-team meetings, because no one can confidently say what the downstream impact might be.
This growing gap between approving a change and safely deploying it is technical debt in action. In Salesforce, this technical debt shows up as deployment time inflation — routine changes become slow, risky, and expensive. If you leave this technical debt unmanaged, it becomes a barrier to scaling and a hidden cost embedded in every change.
In this article, we’ll break down Salesforce’s technical debt into six key categories, explore how small cracks can lead to deployment disasters and compliance risks, and show how Gearset can help you move from constantly cleaning up debt to preventing it in the first place.
What is technical debt in Salesforce?
Salesforce technical debt is what happens when quick fixes you make today create big problems tomorrow.
Imagine you’re tidying up but you don’t have time to do it properly so you shove everything in a drawer. Problem solved, for now. But the more times you do that, the messier it gets — and one day, you can’t even fit anything else in.
Salesforce works the same way. Every time we add a field, Flow, validation rule, or automation without thinking about how it fits into the bigger picture, we’re shoving something “in the cupboard.” It works in the moment, but over time it becomes harder to change things without breaking something else.
It’s important to understand the difference between Salesforce technical debt and just having a messy org:
A messy org is clutter that builds up in an org over time — unused fields, duplicated automations, inconsistent naming conventions. It creates friction and slows people down, but with disciplined cleanup and stronger governance, it can usually be brought under control.
Technical debt embeds brittle patterns in your architecture, limiting flexibility and eventually creating a scalability wall that no amount of surface-level tidying can fix.
Technical debt also impacts you financially. As complexity grows, a growing portion of your technology budget gets redirected from innovation toward managing the consequences of past decisions. Development teams lose time navigating systems, chasing down dependencies, and firefighting unexpected behavior.
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The six categories of Salesforce technical debt
Understanding these six categories will help you spot technical debt early before it slows down your team.
Configuration debt: When declarative choices compound
One of Salesforce’s greatest strengths is its flexibility. Teams can build powerful functionality without writing a single line of code. But over time, that flexibility can lead to layers of automation, fields, and permissions that become difficult to manage and even harder to change safely.
Here’s why:
- Automation sprawling across multiple tools: A single record save might trigger six separate automation paths built by different teams over several years. A Workflow Rule from 2019, a Process Builder from 2020, multiple Flows from 2022, and an Apex trigger added last quarter — all trying to run at once, often in unpredictable order. This results in unexpected behavior, performance issues, and high-risk deployments.
- Excessive custom fields: For example, over time, the Account object might end up with 347 custom fields, with more than half not being actively used. Changing or removing these custom fields (even unused ones) means sifting through hundreds of potential dependencies.
- Overlapping permission sets: You might find twelve different permission sets with overlapping access, no clear documentation, and no reliable way to know who actually needs what. If that’s the case, making a single security change can take weeks, simply because no one’s sure what’s safe to adjust.
Individually, these issues seem manageable, but combined, they create a landscape where even simple changes require excessive caution or they’ll quietly generate a significant layer of technical debt.
Code debt: Governor limits as strategic warning signs
Code debt often becomes visible through platform constraints, especially when systems grow and usage scales. Apex code written for today’s needs might not hold up under tomorrow’s data volumes, and the consequences often show up at the worst possible time.
Common causes of code debt include:
- Non-bulkified Apex that hits Salesforce governor limits: A trigger that works fine when processing 100 records may fail completely at 1,000 — not because the logic is flawed, but because it wasn’t designed to scale. Suddenly, critical business operations stall, and development teams are pulled into emergency refactoring that derails planned work.
- Hard-coded dependencies that make deployments fragile: Sandbox or user IDs embedded directly in code seem harmless at first until they cause deployment failures in production. What should be a simple release turns into multi-day troubleshooting, delaying delivery and damaging stakeholder trust.
- Relying on vanity tests: Vanity test coverage — hitting the required 75% by executing code paths without actually verifying outcomes — creates a false sense of security. Bugs slip through, technical risks go unnoticed, and teams assume the system is more stable than it really is.
Architectural debt: Design flaws that prevent scaling
Architectural debt is the accumulation of flawed or short-sighted design decisions that block scalability, clarity, and strategic growth. This can cause issues like:
- Data model bloat: You might find 15 custom objects supporting a business process that could realistically be handled with five. Each object brings its own relationships, fields, and dependencies, making reporting difficult and changes risky. A single reporting initiative can require months of data model restructuring just to deliver usable insights.
- Overcomplicated security models: Between role hierarchies, profiles, permission sets, and sharing rules, access control can become deeply tangled. Even small permission changes require lengthy investigations to assess risk. As a result, admins grow hesitant to make updates, and necessary improvements to security posture are delayed or avoided entirely.
Integration debt: External dependencies as business risk
Modern Salesforce orgs rarely operate in isolation. They’re connected to Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs), marketing platforms, finance systems, and data warehouses. But with every integration comes a new layer of risk. Integration debt is what happens when those external connections are fragile, outdated, or built without long-term maintainability in mind.
Major risk areas here involve:
- API version retirement: Integrations built years ago may rely on retired API versions. Everything runs smoothly until Salesforce retires that version. Suddenly, your integration returns
410 GONEerrors, and entire business processes stop overnight. Order syncs fail. Renewals don’t process. Revenue gets impacted because an invisible dependency has expired. - Integration brittleness: Many orgs rely on point-to-point connections with no monitoring or error handling. When these integrations silently fail, no one notices until critical data is missing or out of sync. Business continuity depends on these connections, but without stability or observability, they become a constant liability.
- Missing error handling: Many integrations lack retry logic, monitoring, or alerting. If a sync fails over the weekend, no one knows data is missing until Monday. Silent data corruption becomes a hidden liability, affecting forecasting, compliance, and customer experience without any clear signal of what went wrong.
- Data silos between systems: When Salesforce diverges from the system of record — the authoritative source of truth for that data, often an ERP or HR platform — reporting becomes unreliable. Regulatory violations can occur if customer data is inconsistent across platforms, especially in industries governed by strict audit or privacy standards.
Environmental debt: Platform evolution as inherited liability
Salesforce releases three updates a year, introduces new tools, and eventually retires legacy features. That continuous innovation is a strength, but it also imposes a maintenance burden on every org.
Even if the original automation was well built, once Salesforce deprecates a tool like Process Builder, continuing to rely on it becomes an inherited liability. Over time, the cost of staying put grows through performance warnings, compatibility issues, and limited support.
Lightning migration is another example. Visualforce pages that once met every business need now require conversion to Lightning Web Components. While Salesforce hasn’t retired Visualforce, building new functionality on it creates mounting debt — what should be a straightforward maintenance task becomes a full development project, adding unexpected costs and effort for even minor changes.
Documentation and people debt: The risk multiplier
Documentation and people debt are tied to what your team knows, remembers, or forgets. When knowledge lives in people’s heads instead of systems, it causes several problems:
- Knowledge concentration in single points of failure: Critical logic might live in the mind of one developer or admin — the only person who truly understands how a specific automation works or why a particular field behaves the way it does. When they’re unavailable, every deployment decision slows down. When they leave, that knowledge can disappear entirely.
- Undocumented business rules: For example, a 200-line Flow that validates revenue recognition logic might look sound, but without explanation, teams can’t say whether it reflects current policy, how it connects to reporting, or what happens if it’s changed. This uncertainty causes hesitation, delay, and in many cases, organizational paralysis around even minor updates.
- Day-to-day friction from inconsistent standards: When fields storing similar data are named Customer_Value__c, Client_Priority, and CustomerRating, developers and admins waste time tracing functionality, mapping dependencies, and second-guessing what should be straightforward decisions.
When technical debt becomes a business crisis
Most of the time, technical debt is just a drag on productivity. But there are moments when it snowballs into a full-blown business crisis — here are a few scenarios where that happens:
Major release deployment disasters
A cross-functional team spends months building a new feature set. Everything passes sandbox testing, but when the deployment goes to production, it fails with cryptic errors — or worse, it succeeds but breaks core processes in the background.
The culprit is often hidden dependencies between new components and undocumented legacy automation. Because test environments don’t fully replicate production, these issues only surface when it’s too late. The result is delayed go-lives, shaken stakeholder confidence, and emergency rollbacks during critical business periods.
Compliance audit failures
Auditors request a full history of changes to a revenue recognition process. But no one can explain why certain fields were updated, who approved specific validation rules, or what a piece of undocumented Apex code actually does. Without documentation and traceability, critical business logic becomes a compliance liability. In industries governed by SOX, GDPR, or similar regulations, this can result in significant financial penalties or legal exposure.
Critical integration breakdowns
A weekend order sync to the ERP fails silently. On Monday morning, finance discovers missing transactions, and marketing realizes that failed data syncs have triggered thousands of incorrect customer emails. Often, the root cause is a retired API version, an outdated third-party connector, or hard-coded credentials that expired without warning. By the time anyone notices, revenue-impacting processes have already been disrupted.
These are just a few of the scenarios where technical debt can can ripple beyond the dev team — disrupting critical processes, eroding trust, and impacting the entire business.
How technical debt impacts strategy and innovation
Technical debt doesn’t just cause firefighting in the moment — it reshapes how teams plan, budget, and innovate. Its long-term impact can quietly slow down progress, drain resources, and make it harder for the business to stay competitive.
The maintenance overhead challenge
Development teams spend a significant portion of their time dealing with the consequences of debt instead of building new features. Simple requests, like adding a field or updating a process, come back with estimates in the range of three to six months because making it safe requires extensive remediation and testing first.
The financial impact
Debt consumes the budget. Studies show that some organizations are diverting over 20% of their technology spend away from innovation and toward resolving debt-related issues.
The business agility breakdown
Market opportunities don’t wait. But when every change requires months of technical preparation, competitive responses slow to a crawl. New products, process optimizations, and integrations get delayed or shelved entirely. In extreme cases, the platform becomes incapable of supporting business growth without risky and expensive reengineering.
Gearset transforms debt reduction from project to process
Reducing technical debt means building processes that prevent debt from accumulating in the first place. Gearset’s DevOps platform enables teams to make that shift, turning debt management into an integrated part of day-to-day Salesforce delivery.
With Gearset Code Reviews, every proposed change — from Apex to Flows to Lightning Web Components — is scanned for potential risks before deployment. The platform detects governor limit issues, security vulnerabilities, and architectural anti-patterns, while also enforcing consistent naming conventions and flagging missing documentation on Flows, fields, and objects. This proactive approach catches “clicks and code” debt before it reaches production. Gearset also automatically analyzes component dependencies, revealing all connected items instantly. This eliminates the manual investigation that can turn small deployments into hours of detective work. By detecting missing dependencies ahead of time and visualizing their impact, Gearset helps teams deploy with confidence, even in complex orgs.
Git-based version control, made accessible to the whole team, creates a single source of truth for every change. With a permanent audit trail and alerts for unauthorized production changes, teams can avoid the documentation debt caused by untracked modifications and stay compliant with ease.
Teams can deploy confidently knowing they can revert instantly if needed, thanks to Gearset’s rollback functionality. This reduces Mean Time to Recovery and gives stakeholders the assurance to address long-standing technical issues.
By integrating these capabilities into everyday workflows, Gearset helps teams reduce existing debt and stop new debt from forming, protecting both delivery speed and long-term scalability.
Eliminate your technical debt with Gearset
Salesforce technical debt is a strategic business issue that impacts agility, compliance, and long-term growth. Addressing that debt requires more than occasional cleanup. It takes a proactive, continuous process that prevents complexity from becoming a barrier to delivery.
With automated dependency analysis, intelligent deployments, comprehensive quality gates like Gearset Code Reviews, and complete version control, teams partnering with Gearset can make confident changes faster, while keeping risk low.
Start your free Gearset trial today and see how integrated DevOps capabilities can prevent debt from building up and reduce investigation time from hours to minutes.
You can also book a demo to see how Gearset can help organizations like yours scale Salesforce operations safely and sustainably.
