Businesses in general are moving quicker than ever, updating their systems, and producing more services in order to stay ahead of their competitors. The demand for their teams to stay ahead of the game has required the agile adoption of services that will help teams become more efficient and successful in their processes. At the forefront (and backend) of this are the DevOps teams, making sure operations are functioning through systems management, project creation and maintenance, and program deployment.
Companies using Salesforce as its main CRM operating system are unique because individuals developing programs and applications don’t have to come from a developer background to get started in the field. However, one main factor remains important, no matter your experience or background: code quality. At the base of every project, program, or application created, code is what drives success. Deployment security, functionality, and longevity starts with code health. Unhealthy code could lead to project failures or malfunctions, which in turn requires your DevOps team to go back and review each line of code. Sourcing code errors after deployment reduces team productivity, project efficiency, and company ROI.
Read More: Complete Guide to Salesforce DevOps 2021
Fortunately, there are many solutions that offer static code analysis solutions which can alleviate this issue. Static code analysis is the process of performing code review early in the development pipeline. Code errors are picked up before deployment, saving teams a lot of time, energy, and money in the review process.
Why Your Code Health Is Important
Using static code analysis solutions for your Salesforce development helps to reduce the chances of errors post deployment. It will help you in the following areas:
- Code Vulnerabilities – Early detection of vulnerabilities is vital. Vulnerabilities may remain hidden, revealing themselves only when they are the costliest to fix.
- Technical Debt – Technical debt can be referred to as a “hidden backlog” or skeletons in your codebase closet. If not tracked appropriately, technical debt can silently rack up hundreds of hours of what many developers consider to be truly tedious work.
- Best Practices – By following a set of standardized best practices you can avoid adding technical debt and vulnerabilities into your code.
- Team Productivity – Tools that assist in responsibly tracking the quality of your code will alert developers of issues early in the coding process. It is common knowledge in the industry that the sooner an issue is found the less labour intensive the solution.
- Project Efficiency – When you put it all together, static code analysis allows early code vulnerability detection, in which you’re able to correct an issue before it becomes a problem. In turn, this requires less involvement of multiple teams and fewer team members, offering overall higher project efficiency.
Test Yourself
Wondering if your code is up to par? If you’re interested in knowing the health of your code, CodeScan offers a free Quick Code Scan tool that allows you to run a quick code health analysis of your Salesforce environment. Through this quick, one-time scan, you will get insight into your code health: number of code bugs, vulnerabilities, technical debt, code duplications, and more. Go ahead, test yourself!
Stephen Lockard, Premium Support Engineer at AutoRABIT, contributed to this article.
Stephen is a software engineer with experience across multiple industries and platforms. As a technical expert in deployment pipelines and release automation, he has made a career of helping enterprise customers achieve their DevSecOps goals.