Find and remove technical debt
Elements.cloud helps you find and remove tech debt in Salesforce by providing clear visibility into metadata usage, so you can prioritize and eliminate what’s killing your agility and preventing you implementing Agentforce effectively.
What is technical debt costing your business
95 %
User productivity improvements.
60 %
Reduction in security incidents.
3 x
Faster feature delivery with reduced rollbacks.
50 %
Lower compliance violation costs.
Smart features to identify and remove tech debt
Metadata dictionary
Elements.cloud automatically creates a comprehensive metadata dictionary that captures everything in your org, giving you a single source of truth to easily see and understand what you’re working with.
Its automated insights and dependency analysis provide the clarity needed to confidently assess impact and estimate effort when planning changes.
Analytics 360
With Analytics 360, you get real-time, comprehensive analysis of your org’s metadata, including a clear view of technical debt, complexity, health, governance, and security. It highlights areas that need attention to reduce risk and improve org agility.
Impact Assessment
With Impact Assessment, you gain full visibility into your org’s dependencies, allowing you to understand the scope of any change, estimate the effort required, and reduce technical debt while accelerating change without unexpected disruptions or costly rework.
Have an AI-powered conversation with your org grounded in metadata documentation, impact assessment and dependencies, or grounded in your security model of profiles and permissions.
Permissions explorer
Overlapping profiles and permission sets create security risks, make access management complicated,, and increases time to make changes. With full visibility into user permissions, dependencies, and redundancies, you can streamline access, reduce risk, and ensure compliance.
Get the visibility that enables you to plan how you to migrate to the new permission set-driven security model. Identify overlapping permissions that can be combined, and eliminate redundant permissions that open up security vulnerabilities.
1 #
Change Intelligence Platform
600 +
Customers
Organizations who are in their element
Frequently asked questions
Functionality that is not used, or no longer used is technical debt.
Technical debt that doesn’t impact system performance or slow down future development is not an issue.
Technical debt slows down future development because it increases the impact assessment of any change, and risks hitting limits such as the maximum fields for an object.
Our research shows that 50% of custom objects are never used. 40% of custom fields are never populated. Time and effort were wasted planning, developing, testing, and deploying these.
A metadata dictionary that analyzes usage such as field population and last modified date will identify technical debt. It can also provide the dependency analysis so you can estimate the effort to remove the technical debt.
80% of development effort should be on new features and 20% should be on tech debt remediation. This 20% should be directed toward the tech debt that is having the greatest impact on Salesforce agility.
The four quadrants of technical debt is a classic 2 x 2 matrix where the axes are how dangerous, and how knowledgeable. So the top right quadrant is “planned where the impact is understood” and bottom left is “didn’t know that I didn’t know”.
There are 5 reasons for technical debt, and the bottom 3 fit into the 4 Quadrants because they are technical debt that was within the control of the implementation team.
- Business change: the operational processes have changed so the functionality is no longer used
- New Salesforce release: functionality that was custom development is now available in the core platform
- Deliberate: architectural or design decisions were made understanding the impact (top left and right)
- Incremental: earlier architectural or design decisions are forcing new decisions (top left and right)
- Accidental: insufficient business analysis, poor architecture/design, or poor knowledge of the platform (bottom left and right).
You need to take a deliberate approach with time budgeted in each project to reduce technical debt where it has the greatest impact. Rarely is there a business case to launch a “tech debt reduction project”. You need a metadata dictionary to be able to support any tech debt reduction efforts.