Table Of ContentSalesforce Anti-Patterns
Create powerful Salesforce architectures by learning from
common mistakes made on the platform
Lars Malmqvist
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
Salesforce Anti-Patterns
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To Damiana, Ada, and Pino. To my mother, Inger Bejder, and the memory of my father,
Finn Malmqvist.
– Lars Malmqvist
Contributors
About the author
Lars Malmqvist has spent the past 13 years working as an architect and CTO within the Salesforce
ecosystem. He has worked on over 40 Salesforce implementations, ranging from simple out-of-the-
box scenarios to advanced, bespoke, multi-cloud solutions for large global brands. He is a 29-time
certified Salesforce CTA with degrees in anthropology, mathematics, and technology management,
an MBA from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of
York. Currently, he is a partner at Implement Consulting Group.
I would like to thank my wife, Damiana, for her undying support and my children, Ada and Pino, for
their constant inspiration.
About the reviewers
Ashvin Bhatt is an enterprise architect, technical writer, trainer, and speaker with over 11 years of
experience with the Salesforce platform working on various clouds. He has trained over 600 people
on Salesforce through various initiatives. He is a certified Application Architect and holds a wealth
of experience with various Salesforce products. Ashvin is the co-organizer of the Salesforce Architect
Summit and has been a speaker at various events, such as Dreamforce and TDX. He has worked in a
variety of domains such as high tech, advertising, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, and pharma,
to name a few. He believes in sharing his knowledge through community-led initiatives to help foster
learning and innovation.
Rafael Gutiérrez Castillo is a Salesforce architect with multi-cloud implementation experience. With
more than 10 years of working experience, he started his career in the education industry, developing
leadership programs for university students.
He has worked in different positions within the Salesforce ecosystem, as a business consultant, tester,
solution consultant, and solution architect.
Working as an associate manager at Accenture, he designs solutions that bridge the gap between
business processes and technology and advises companies on their digitalization and transformation
journeys. Being the proud owner of 24 Salesforce certificates, he is passionate about automation
processes, solution design, process management, innovation, and leadership.
Table of Contents
Preface xi
Part 1: Technical Anti-Patterns
1
Why You Need to Understand Salesforce Anti-Patterns 3
Understanding anti-patterns 3 How great architects learn from mistakes 8
From pattern to anti-pattern 5 An example: The Hero anti-pattern 9
Where do anti-patterns come from? 7 Hero (development life cycle and deployment
planning) 9
An anti-pattern template 7
Analyzing the example 15
How can anti-patterns deepen your
Summary 16
architecture skills? 8
2
How Not to Mess Up Your System Architecture 17
Muddling up the systems landscape 18 Org complications 33
Stovepipe 18 Ungoverned Org Proliferation 33
A Big Ball of Mud 25
Knowing the takeaways 38
Too much coupling 29
Summary 40
Intense coupling 29
viii Table of Contents
3
How Not to Get Confused about Security 41
Getting confused about shared Declarative Is Always Safe 50
responsibility 41
Sharing isn’t always caring 54
Shared Belongs to Salesforce 42
Spaghetti Sharing Model 54
Mistaking other things for security 46
Knowing the takeaways 59
Compliant Is Secure 46
Summary 60
4
What Not to Do about Data 63
Mistaking Salesforce for a regular Unplanned Growth 71
database 63
Synchronizing excessively 74
Salesforce as Relational Database 64
Unconstrained Data Synchronization 74
Forgetting about governance 67
Knowing the takeaways 78
Disconnected Entities 68
Summary 80
Part 2: Solution Anti-Patterns
5
Unpicking Solution Architecture Troubles 83
Picking the wrong thing 83 Making a mess of code 104
Ignoring the ecosystem 84 God class 104
License-based solutioning 87 Error hiding 107
Applying the thing wrong 91 Knowing the takeaways 110
Assumption-driven customization 91 Summary 111
The Golden Hammer 94
Engineering overflow 97
Automation bonanza 97
Overweight component 100
Table of Contents ix
6
Keeping Integration Straight 113
Muddling up the integration Chatty integration 125
landscape 113
Getting the patterns wrong 130
Middleware in name only (MINO) 113
Integration pattern monomania 130
Service proliferation syndrome 117
Knowing the takeaways 134
Interfacing indecently 121
Summary 136
Fat interface 121
Part 3: Process and Communication Anti-Patterns
7
Keeping the Development Life Cycle from Going off Track 139
Misaligning the process 139 Proposed solution 148
Big bang release 140 Results 148
Project pieism 144 Better solutions 149
Unpacking the pipeline 146 Testing without testing 149
Using packages to create silos 147 Dummy unit tests 150
Example 147 Knowing the takeaways 153
Problem 148 Summary 154
8
Communication without Mistranslation 155
Communicating too much 155 Drawing diagrams with excess
creativity 164
Cognitive overload 156
Non-standard documentation 164
Being unclear in several ways 158
Knowing the takeaways 167
Ambiguous solution 158
Groundhog day 161 Summary 169
