Manage Technical Debt
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe technical debt.
- Explain why it’s important to manage technical debt.
This badge was produced in collaboration with community member Joy Shutters-Helbing, application engineering leader. Her work in the community inspires the concepts and best practices found in this badge. Learn more about partner content on Trailhead.
Bring AW Computing into the Era of AI
AW Computing has grown over the years, becoming an international company. It recently acquired an AI research startup, AI-to-Z. This opens up a lot of opportunities for the company, including the deployment of an internal AI agent to help the AW Computing services organization handle repetitive, time-consuming support tasks.
Leadership wants to quickly merge the companies’ service operations so they can train the AI agent on AW Computing’s existing products and processes, on top of AI-to-Z’s portfolio. But a problem lurks just below the surface—technical debt. In this badge, you play the role of Salesforce administrator for AW Computing. You investigate the issues blocking the project and help eliminate them.
AW Computing’s merger and acquisitions (M&A) team is raring to go. So let’s get started!
Pay for Past Mistakes
Both service teams use Salesforce, so AW Computing’s leadership thinks it will be a simple merge. But when you and the team take a closer look at AW Computing’s Salesforce deployment, you see a pattern. Critical data and metadata aren’t as organized or as clean as you initially thought. And with disorganized and dirty data, it’s nearly impossible to train AI. You discover AW Computing is suffering from technical debt.
Technical debt, or tech debt for short, happens when best practices aren’t followed and shortcuts are taken during the design and implementation phase of a project. It results in issues that an organization has to deal with later on—slow system response times, incomplete features, or in AW Computing’s case, disorganized data and out-of-date automation.
AW Computing’s plans for service modernization with AI cannot move forward until this is handled.
Sign Up for the Developer Edition Org with Technical Debt
To complete this badge, you need a special Developer Edition org that contains AW Computing’s data and technical debt. Get this free Developer Edition, and connect it to Trailhead now so you can complete the challenges in this badge. Note that this Developer Edition is designed to work with the challenges in this badge, and might not work for other badges. Always check that you’re using the Trailhead Playground or special Developer Edition org that we recommend.
- Sign up for this free Developer Edition org with AW Computing’s technical debt.
- Fill out the form:
- For Email, enter an active email address.
- For Username, enter a username that looks like an email address and is unique, but it doesn't need to be a valid email account (for example, yourname@example.com).
- For Email, enter an active email address.
- After you fill out the form, click Sign me up. A confirmation message appears.
- When you receive the activation email (this might take a few minutes), open it and click Verify Account.
- Complete your registration by setting your password and challenge question. Tip: Save your username, password, and login URL in a secure place—such as a password manager—for easy access later.
- You are logged in to your Developer Edition.
Connect Your New Developer Edition Org to Trailhead
- Make sure you’re logged in to your Trailhead account.
- In the Challenge section at the bottom of this page, click the org name and then click Connect Org.
- On the login screen, enter the username and password for the Developer Edition you just set up.
- On the Allow Access? screen, click Allow.
- On the Want to connect this org for hands-on challenges? screen, click Yes! Save it. You are redirected back to the challenge page and ready to use your new Developer Edition to earn this badge.
Now that you’ve connected your org and have your credentials, next learn more about how to manage technical debt. Make sure to select Check Challenge to Earn 500 Points before moving on to the next unit.