Salesforce Development Best Practices every developer should follow

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The companies that keep their eyes on becoming customer-centric are stepping up to implement Salesforce to benefit from its CRM capabilities. Salesforce helps companies by providing a unified, holistic customer experience, with a 360-degree view of customers, and knowledge about prevailing trends. But to achieve all of it, it is important that the developers are aware of Salesforce development best practices to craft a solution that suits the business needs.

When done the right way, Salesforce development can help a company meet its business goals with the help of features that improve performance and efficiency. Following Salesforce development best practices can help to:

• Build user-friendly applications with industry-related features
• Integrate different applications in Salesforce for unified access
• Create dashboards, calendars, and custom reports
• Helps to improve the way the sales team communicates with customers
• Build features to handle customer queries, feedback, and deliveries
• Add built-in analytics capabilities to create predictive reports 
• Build or customize different mobile and web apps according to unique business needs

Salesforce Development Best Practices 

Before starting with Salesforce development, it is essential to take time to understand the goals, roadmap, architecture. and determine which features are needed for the Salesforce platform. To do so developers need to follow Salesforce development best practices to ensure the development is done right.

1. Understand Salesforce Architecture 

Before starting with Salesforce development, it is a good idea to understand Salesforce architecture. Developers should be aware of:

• The different layers, their components, and the interactions between them.
• Understand the difference between the core platform and the packaged apps running on it.
• They should also know the communication and data flow between different servers.

2. Leverage the Sandbox

Although Salesforce does not allow developing modules and customizing its features in a live environment, platform app builders make sure to use the sandbox for development, as it does not affect the performance of the system.

There are three options of the sandbox to choose from:

• Developer sandbox to create new features
• Partial sandbox to see the effect development on your system
• Full sandbox to deploy customizations and check their functioning

3. Follow a Consistent Coding Style

It is possible that there might be different Salesforce developers working on a project, this is why it is important to follow a consistent coding style. Having a consistent pattern of coding can help ease the development process in the long run. 

Adhering to common coding patterns can set common guidelines for the stage and also add consistency so all developers agree on standards and follow the same.

4. Use Triggers

Developers tend to use trigger frameworks to cut down the development effort, especially when the business is continuously growing. Using triggers helps to eliminate logic and enforce consistency across the platform. 

It helps to make unit testing, making changes, and maintenance easier. Cloud platform developers need to make sure that all the triggers work in a consistent manner, giving full control over the execution.

5. Test Thoroughly

Any Salesforce solution developed would only be good when necessary testing efforts are given into it. Considering that the Salesforce platform will be used every day by your entire workforce, it is important to be sure that the platform runs efficiently. Properly testing every functionality and feature developed helps to make the solution runs as expected.

6. Work on Documentation

Another great practice is to document everything that programmers are working on. This practice to log every development effort can help other admins and Salesforce developers know where development and changes have been made. It will further prevent them from making changes when not required.

Hire a Team that follows Salesforce Development Best Practices

With efficient Salesforce development, companies can get a solution that exactly matches their business requirements. Following the Salesforce development best practices can help developers to build a solution just as expected.

Getting qualified Salesforce developers is the first step to efficient Salesforce development. We at 360 Degree Cloud have certified Salesforce experts who can understand your specific business needs and suggest features and capabilities relating to your business needs. Contact us to know about our Salesforce services.