Preface

Salesforce is the world’s leading enterprise systems platform. This is a position it has reached over the last decade, with its scope having grown from its roots in sales and customer service to encompass a wide range of business domains.

However, as Salesforce has grown, so have the complexities of the technological environments that contain it. And with that growing complexity, a number of common mistakes have emerged that often end up derailing Salesforce projects in a number of interesting ways.

These mistakes are what we will learn to call anti-patterns and investigate in a structured manner in this book. There are quite a few books on Salesforce architecture already available on the market today, but they all approach the subject from a normative view, grounded in good practice.

In this book, we flip that perspective around. We look at bad practices that commonly occur in Salesforce projects, and that, in fact, can seem like a good idea at the time you make the decision.

By doing that, we see what happens when things don’t go to plan – when you don’t make the right call, and your solution suffers as a consequence. That gives a great background for us to review key architectural concepts and good practice as it applies across a range of scenarios.

In this book, you will get information structured into the seven domains of the Certified Technical Architect (CTA) exam roadmap. That way, while all the information is based on real-world examples, you will also be able to directly apply it in your journey to becoming a CTA, should that be a path you are on or are considering.