How to Improve Salesforce Code Quality

How to Improve Salesforce Code Quality? Let’s join us to understand the Salesforce Best practices to improve code quality in Salesforce. Good Quality of code helped to stay away from Future Tech Debt in Salesforce. Here are some tips ti improve code quality.

How to Improve Salesforce Code Quality

Here is a few simple steps that can improve the code quality in Salesforce.

  1. Follow Coding Conventions
  2. Write Clean Code
  3. Follow Salesforce Best Practices
  4. Use Static Code Analysis Tools
  5. Manual Code Review
  6. Adopt continuous integration

Why do we need Code Quality in Salesforce?

Why do we need Code Quality? Bad code works too! Don’t fix what is not broken. Let’s understand why we need it in Salesforce.

Best practices for Salesforce Code Quality.

Follow the below best practices to write good code in Salesforce.

  • Easy to understand by other developers : readable by developers other than the one who developed it.
  • Easy to maintain : lower chances of accidentally introducing bugs
  • Modified without fear of breaking anything : Lot of developers take great pride in making the code compact – trying to do multiple things on one line – which might be impressive, but makes the code much harder to read and understand

How to Measure Code Quality?

Let see the Code Quality Metrics

  1. Reliability
  2. Maintainability
  3. Testability
  4. Potability
  5. Resuability
  6. Security
  7. Well-Documented

Let’s see all the points in details.

#1. Follow Coding Conventions

First thing first, We should follow the coding conventions for any programming language. Apex is the same as Java so we can follow the java coding conventions.

  1. Salesforce Naming Conventions Best Practices: The naming convention in Salesforce is a rule to follow as you decide what to name your identifiers like class, variable, constant, method, etc. But, it is not forced to follow. So, it is known as convention not rule. Naming conventions make the application easier to read and maintain.
  2. Code Layouts and Formatting Salesforce: A good developer should strive to use a consistent layout and format. It will make life easy for other developers and code reviewers.
    • Use Prettier
    • ESLint
  3. Code Comments Best Practices: When any developer looks into your code he should understand what is going on in your code easily. This means your code should be “self-documented”.
    • Write comments for complex functions
    • Write a brief comment at the top of each file
    • Write comments at the top of each class

#2. Write Clean Code

Follow the below rule to write clean code in Salesforce.

  • Keep your methods short
  • Don’t repeat yourself
  • Methods should do just one thing
  • Clear, intention revealing names
  • Comment to clarify not explain
  • Leave everything better than you found it.
YouTube video

#3. Follow Salesforce Best Practices

Now at this point, we know coding best practices. But we also need to follow Salesforce’s best practices to improve the coding quality.

3.1 Apex Best practices

Apex code is used to write custom and robust business logic. As with any language, there are key coding principles and best practices that will help you write efficient, scalable code. Check Apex Code best practices document to learn more.

3.2 SOQL Best Practices

When dealing with Large Data your SOQL query may return so many Objects that the limit on heap size is exceeded and an error occurs. Check out Apex SOQL’s best practices in Salesforce and how important are when you’re dealing with large databases and learn how Lightning Platform Query Optimizer works for LDV.

3.3 Apex Test Class Best Practices

To write effective test cases, a developer needs to ensure to include the Apex test class best practices.

3.4 Follow Trigger Framework

Learn how to completely and cleanly control your Apex code with Trigger Frameworks, why they’re useful, and the various ways to implement them. This session will talk about the Apex Trigger Framework in Salesforce and the benefit of using a trigger framework. How many trigger frameworks are available in Salesforce, which one is a lightweight apex trigger framework and a Comparison of different approaches?

3.5 Lightning Web component best practices.

Lightning Web Components (LWC) is a new Salesforce development method using open web standards like standard JavaScript and HTML which means developers who have never worked with Salesforce can now jump right in and existing developers can now use standard techniques and tools never before available. In this post, we will learn about Lightning Web Components(LWC) Best Practices.

#4. Use Static Code Analysis Tools

Never spend more than 60 min on manual code review. Try to use Static code Analysis tools.

  1. Apex PMD: PMD is a very well-known source code analyzer for Java and many more languages. It also supports Apex.
  2. Checkmarx: Checkmarx provides a great tool to secure your apex and visualforce code. It’s easy to integrate with your salesforce org and provides you with a whole report.
  3. CodeScan: This AppExchange tool is really easy to use and install in your salesforce org. It helps developers to identify bugs and increase the quality of your code.
  4. Improve Your Code Quality with the Salesforce CLI Scanner.
  5. Clayton: Clayton is a next-gen tool that does everything you need for your Salesforce application to be the best. It’s very easy to set up and use.

#5. Manual Code Review

Code review (sometimes referred to as peer review) is a software quality assurance activity in which one or several people check a program mainly by viewing and reading parts of its source code. At least one of the persons must not be the code’s author. We can do code reviews with Static Code Analysis Tools but manual code review is also very important.

Check Code review checklist. You can use Salesforce DevOps process to review the code.

YouTube video

5.1 Expert Code Review

Let’s see what an expert code reviewer thinks about doing a code review. Here is the expert level code review checklist.

6. Adopt continuous integration

Using continuous integration, a product is made to incorporate and integrate each code modification on each commit (continuously), by any and all developers. an automated build then verifies each check-in, letting teams detect issues early. Every time merge launches an automated code build and test sequence, which take a moment to run.

If any error found, the code build doesn’t run, and the CI system prevents it from advancing to the next step. The team then gets a report and can fix the error immediately. Use Salesforce DevOps to code quality in place.

Conclusion

I hope all these points will help you to Improve Salesforce Code Quality. Let us know if you think more points should be considered in this list. We would love to add more points in this post. Last and important point to improve your code quality use VsCode for development so you can use VsCode extension for productivity.

Amit Chaudhary
Amit Chaudhary

Amit Chaudhary is Salesforce Application & System Architect and working on Salesforce Platform since 2010. He is Salesforce MVP since 2017 and have 17 Salesforce Certificates.

He is a active blogger and founder of Apex Hours.

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