Is your Salesforce instance slowing down, throwing random errors, or taking weeks to deploy simple changes?

You might be facing hidden technical debt.

In this video, Katie McAfee from Cloud Adoption Solutions breaks down “the hidden cost of bad code” and reveals how hidden architectural complexity can sabotage your system. She takes you step-by-step through why technical debt accumulates unnoticed, the major red flags to look for—including messy Apex triggers, risky SOQL queries inside loops, and outdated Visualforce pages—and how these issues create a “scalability wall” that halts business growth.

Most importantly, Katie shares actionable ways to fix these challenges through bulkification, trigger consolidation, and governance so you can transform your Salesforce org into a reliable, high-performing foundation for growth!

Ready to clean up your Salesforce org and scale without friction?

Don’t let legacy code hold your business back. Partner with Cloud Adoption Solutions to modernize your architecture, eliminate bugs, and boost system performance!

Let us know if you have any questions or if you have any requests for our next CAS Come and See Video!

Watch now!

youtube.com/watch?v=lmHR4u8DdlQ&feature=youtu.be

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, everyone. I’m Katie McAfee from Cloud Adoption Solutions. Today, I want to talk to you about something that most Salesforce teams eventually encounter: technical debt, and how a quick review of Apex triggers and architecture can reveal hidden risks in a Salesforce environment. We call it “the hidden cost of bad code.”

One of the most common things we hear when starting conversations with organizations is this: “We think we might have technical debt, but we’re not sure.” Honestly, that’s completely normal. Salesforce environments evolve over time. New features are added, new developers join projects, and business requirements change. It is very common for companies to suspect technical debt but not yet know exactly where it exists.

How Technical Debt Accumulates

Salesforce environments rarely stay static. Over time, organizations experience new users, new developers, legacy code, and legacy functionality. Each change makes sense at the time. However, as the platform grows, those layers of customization can gradually make the system more complex.

Technical debt doesn’t show up immediately. On the surface, the system appears to work perfectly. But over time, organizations may begin noticing things like slower deployments, random bugs, governor limit errors, and features that take weeks to build instead of hours. These are often early signals that architectural complexity may be building underneath the surface.

Where to Look: 3 Key Areas

When reviewing a Salesforce environment, sometimes the easiest place to start is very simple. Open one object, then take a look at three key areas:

1. Apex Triggers

2. SOQL inside loops

3. Visualforce pages

1. Apex Triggers

The first place we often look is Apex triggers. A common warning sign is when an object contains multiple triggers written at different times. Modern Salesforce architecture generally recommends consolidating logic into one trigger per object with structured handler classes. When many triggers exist, it often means the system has evolved organically over time—or that all the triggers were added at once without proper architecture. You want to avoid both scenarios.

When multiple triggers run on the same object, problems begin to appear. You may see an unpredictable order of execution, triggers firing on other triggers, recursion, governor limit issues, and deployment failures. At that point, debugging becomes very difficult because multiple pieces of automation are interacting at once, and sometimes no one is completely sure which trigger runs first.

When triggers begin interacting with one another, even small changes become risky. Developers sometimes describe these situations as a Jenga tower: every change affects the stability of the system, and that’s when deployments start feeling unpredictable.

2. SOQL Queries Inside Loops

Another common signal of technical debt is SOQL queries inside loops. Code like this might work perfectly when processing a small number of records (like maybe ten), but as data volume increases, that pattern can quickly hit Salesforce governor limits. Something that worked with ten records might fail when the system processes thousands.

As data volume grows, inefficient queries can cause issues like CPU time limits being reached, SOQL limits being exceeded, records failing to save, and user-facing errors. These problems usually don’t appear during early development; they surface later as the organization grows.

3. Legacy Visualforce Pages

Another area where we sometimes see technical debt is legacy Visualforce pages. Visualforce is still supported, and many organizations rely on it successfully. However, large legacy Visualforce implementations can become difficult to maintain, incompatible with newer UI patterns, and tightly coupled with older Apex logic. Over time, this makes even small enhancements more difficult.

The Scalability Wall

Eventually, technical debt can create what many teams experience as a “scalability wall.” Teams may start noticing slower deployments, unstable releases, and reduced development speed. The system still works, but it becomes harder and harder to extend.

Something interesting happens at this point: most organizations don’t discover technical debt during initial development. They discover it when they try to grow—when the platform suddenly needs to support more users, more automation, or more complex processes. That’s when hidden architectural issues tend to surface.

Remediation & The Value of a Technical Audit

The good news is that most technical debt is fixable! With improvements like trigger consolidation, bulkification of Apex logic, modern Lightning architecture, and stronger governance practices, Salesforce environments can often be simplified and stabilized significantly.

This is where a Salesforce technical audit becomes valuable. A structured review typically evaluates areas like Apex architecture, automation design, data volume readiness, and legacy components. The goal is to identify architectural risks and create a clear roadmap for improvement.

At Cloud Adoption Solutions, this is the type of work we help organizations with every day. We partner with teams to identify hidden technical debt, modernize legacy architecture, improve system performance, and create scalable Salesforce environments.

The goal isn’t just fixing code. The real goal is helping Salesforce become a reliable foundation for growth—a platform that can support the organization as it scales without slowing down development or increasing operational risk. We want the best for your system!

Conclusion

Thanks for taking the time to learn about technical debt and how it can be remediated. Hopefully, this gave you a few ideas to think about in your own Salesforce environment. If you ever suspect your system may be experiencing some of these challenges, a technical review can often provide valuable clarity.

At Cloud Adoption Solutions, we are here to help you succeed with Salesforce. Thanks again, and we’ll see you in the next one!