7 habits of high-performing Salesforce development teams

We have collected some useful and tested tips to help you boost your day-by-day developer life.

Streamlined agile process

• Use an issue tracking tool
• Stick to your agile ceremonies - they matter!
• Pro tip: put boundaries on interactions with the business to protect your team from interruptions

Regular team retrospectives

• Safe space for regular team discussion
• Keeping meetings short and regular
• Encourage sharing constructive feedback
• Pro tip: bring fruits and cookies to retrospectives so no one will miss them!

Using a “Definition of Done”

• Create a simple checklist for what it means to complete a development task (e.g. internal demo with a business rep, all unit tests must pass, etc)
• Pro tip: make updating your internal documentation a part of the definition of done to keep it current at all times!

Having technical standards

• Best practice around: security standards, testing requirements, code documentation, etc.
• Be cautious: too much rigidity on style requirements can be frustrating for some developers, be extra careful.
• Pro tip: focus on what really matters and avoid being overly prescriptive to encourage diversity of approach

Not sharing development sandboxes. Using git instead!

• Help your team embrace git without fears, the learning curve is totally worth it
• SFDX is best, but git works well with traditional metadata too!
• Pro tips: Keep your workflow simple and encourage small changes. Don’t go overboard with your branching strategy.

Automating vulnerability scanning

• Tools like Clayton can detect vulnerabilities, design and quality problems automatically, at the point of check-in
• Pro tip: integrate with your vcs and use quality gates to make vulnerable code impossible to merge

CI/CD

• Use tools like CircleCI and TravisCI to get started quickly
• Automatically deploy to your sandboxes or scratch orgs every time new code is integrated
• Use the SFDX CLI or the ant migration tool
• Pro tip: use apex:execute to sanitize your data in full copy sandboxes as part of your deployments. Never send accidental emails to customers anymore!

What is your business's biggest Salesforce challenge?

Book a free, 30-minute call with Salesforce CTA and Clayton founder Lorenzo Frattini to discuss your business's biggest Salesforce challenge. Talk to us about technical debt, security best practice, hiring new devs, rapidly scaling teams, dummy unit tests and offshoring development. Book a slot here.