Selecting the proper tools is one of my personal favorite pillars of the Center of Excellence. Here are three themes regarding tooling:
1. When to Build vs Buy
One of the first questions to ask is, under what conditions should you build a custom piece of functionality or buy an existing product? The guidelines say if an existing product fulfills most of the requirements and is within budget, then purchasing it is probably the right thing to do. Custom builds are favored when neither of these two conditions are true.
There may be other factors which you need to consider, such as do you have the right people to not just build, but maintain the functionality. And is the vendor supplying the app committed to the app.
2. Which Tools to Use
Salesforce does many things well. But there are gaps in its functionality. That’s where 3rd party apps come into play. But even for a specific need, there are usually more than one app that may satisfy your needs. So an evaluation process is needed.
Here are some questions to consider when evaluating multiple apps:
- Which app is easier to use?
- Which app can be extended?
- Which app is better supported?
3. DevOps
Tools that support development and operations require additional consideration. For example, you’ll need to decide how you will move data and metadata between the various sandboxes and then to production. How will you support hotfixes, record bugs and change requests, and other mechanisms of continuing improvement and delivery (CI/CD)
The takeaway
The decision making process for tooling is a fun exercise, but one that requires lots of detailed decisions. Having a strong technology assessment criteria is important for projects and organizations of all sizes.