The Speed vs. Quality Tradeoff in Software Development: Is it Possible to Have Both?

Salesforce encourages its customers to think of the platform not just as an application for automating predefined workflows but as a tool to build customizations and applications that optimize and drive their business.

For example, marketing teams might create custom lead-scoring models to prioritize high-value prospects, while sales teams could develop quote generators or order-tracking applications. These are just a few examples – the possibilities for customization are endless, allowing businesses to tailor Salesforce to their unique needs and processes.

The value isn’t just in building these enhancements, though. It’s about how quickly businesses can put these new features in the hands of their end users. A study found that companies with increased developer velocity grew innovation by 55%.

There’s just one problem: It turns out that when you move too fast, things tend to break.

The Unicorn of Good, Fast, and Cheap: Does it Exist?

There’s a popular saying that states that you can't have something that is "good," "fast," and "cheap" all at the same time. Instead, you need to choose two of these attributes and make a tradeoff on the third one.

When it comes to software development, however, there is often an expectation to deliver high-quality work quickly while keeping costs low. This is a recipe for disaster or, at the very least, disappointment.

If you’re a Salesforce admin or developer, you’ve likely experienced one (or more) of the following challenges.

Challenge #1: Testing in unrealistic development environments

Sandboxes are crucial for developing and testing complex customizations effectively. Without a production-like lower-level test environment, teams hope, rather than know, that their code and configurations will work in production. The problem is that Salesforce has an intricate web of data relationships, which makes getting accurate, production-like data into a sandbox difficult. 

For that reason, many developers decide to forego creating sandbox environments that mimic production, which allow bugs and errors to easily make their way into production. According to the Systems Sciences Institute at IBM, the cost to fix a bug found during implementation is almost six times higher than one identified during design. If you’re struggling with getting a realistic environment to test in, a data seeding solution is a good place to start.

Challenge #2: Getting bogged down by cumbersome manual workflows

Salesforce developers rely largely on manual workflows via Data Loader or Excel to propagate data and manage their sandboxes, which can waste days per sprint and result in stale, outdated production data. The development cycle often outpaces the ability to refresh the sandbox to get the latest copy of the metadata that fits those new requirements. Salesforce has native restrictions that make it further challenging to maintain sandbox environments and adhere to storage limitations.

These manual workflows aren’t just tedious. They take valuable time away from actual development work. 72% of developers say that they spend more than two hours just setting up their dev environments. By automating the data seeding process, you can reduce this time dramatically. 

Challenge #3: Detecting errors and protecting production data 

When teams push their code and configurations to production, it can be difficult to know whether the change negatively impacted their Salesforce environment. Without a tool to compare data and metadata, the only way to uncover differences between production and sandbox environments before and after deployment is to download and compare large numbers of . CSV reports or Weekly Export files in Excel using V-Lookup. That’s why most admins and developers don’t even bother. 

As a result, end-users are often the ones finding the problems, after the damage is already done. If not found quickly (or at all), errors in deployment can cause unplanned downtime and affect a company’s bottom line. A backup and recovery tool that lets you easily detect changes and compare metadata is essential to avoid these issues.

The Cost of Inefficient Development 

Given the emphasis on velocity, it can be tempting to take shortcuts in the development process to move faster. But as we touched on, doing so can have more significant consequences than you realize.

Pushing unrefined code into production creates "technical debt" – the accumulation of choices or shortcuts that make future development more complex and expensive. While some technical debt might be strategic, a significant portion is accidental. Within the Salesforce ecosystem alone, it's estimated that companies grapple with more than $3 billion in technical debt remediation costs. 

The most significant consequence of technical debt is reduced productivity. For developers (and admins, to an extent), this comes in the form of time spent preparing sandbox environments or fixing errors instead of coding. Admins are forced to manually spot metadata changes in production or even fix and restore corrupt data after a data loss.

The impacts extend to end users as well. At best, bugs can cause crashes, unexpected behavior, or data loss, leading to frustration and hindering user productivity. At worst, errors might even cause service outages or halt operations entirely.

Innovate with confidence using Own

Releasing buggy software often stems from unrealistic testing environments and can lead to the need to fix bad code in production, creating a vicious cycle.

At Own, we provide solutions for on-platform development that can help to end this cycle. Thanks to accurate test data, more frequently refreshed sandboxes, and faster production cycles, developers feel confident about meeting deadlines. If an error does make its way into production, we protect your data through near-instant notification, analysis, and rollback of bad metadata code and data corruption or loss.

IDC estimates that Own enabled developers to be 12% more productive. Check out our datasheet or visit our website to learn how we can do the same for you.