What Does a Salesforce Developer Do? Roles, Responsibilities, and Key Skills

Salesforce developers are Salesforce-certified professionals with technical expertise to work across the Salesforce platform. They code and leverage no-code or low-code tools to build applications and facilitate integrations that cater to your business challenges. Fluent with Salesforce’s technical stack, their expertise is not limited to development, customization, and integration. They provide technical training and support to your teams, handling the technical intricacies for you. 

What else does a Salesforce developer do? This blog outlines their roles, responsibilities, and key skills. 

Let’s get started!   

Roles and Responsibilities of a Salesforce Developer

We have listed some of the key roles and responsibilities that a developer performs for your business. 

Understanding Your Unique Business Requirements

A Salesforce professional closely collaborates with you to understand your business needs and challenges. Through their expertise, they suggest applications that can be developed or integrated to overcome those challenges. They create a plan to guide you on how the development process will proceed. 

Customizing and Managing Salesforce Org

Developers customize your Salesforce Org as per your needs. They configure out-of-the-box features available in the Org and develop additional functionalities that are required for your business’s scalability. 

They ensure security, manage your users and data access, ensure the right users have access to the right resources and APIs, and facilitate seamless integrations with other Salesforce products or third-party applications. They are responsible for performing a health check and keeping the Org up to date with the latest innovations and advancements.  

Building and Managing Custom Applications

Developers create, deploy, and maintain a variety of apps within the Salesforce platform. Using Salesforce-specific programming languages such as Apex, Visualforce, and Lightning Components, they adhere to coding best practices. 

They develop custom apps to cater to your unique business needs. Automated applications improve your business’s productivity, while mobile-supporting applications allow easy access and offline availability to business teams. Developers also ensure the upkeep of these applications, making them future-proof. 

Integrating Applications 

With their expertise, developers can suggest which Salesforce product or third-party solutions can extend your Org’s capabilities. They carefully plan the integration process by analyzing the most efficient integration method, whether APIs or middleware tools like MuleSoft, and facilitate seamless yet secure integration. They accurately map data objects and ensure easy flow between the systems.

AppExchange Listings 

Not only the development, but developers are also responsible for packing your application into a managed or unmanaged package. They ensure it meets Salesforce standards before listing it over the AppExchange marketplace.  These professionals create compelling descriptions, add screenshots and demo videos to showcase your app, allowing its reach to other businesses looking for a similar solution.  

Developers handle the technical aspects of the listing and approval process, making necessary revisions and resolving issues if the app fails the review process.

Creating Technical Documentation 

Salesforce developers create clear and concise technical and operational documentation of the solutions they develop.  

Technical documentation could be anything from code, API, and integration. These include detailed information about data formats, APIs used, data mappings, workflows and error-handling mechanisms. 

Operational documents such as process maps and data dictionaries help visualize a process and document all Salesforce elements along with their relationship. 

This ensures fellow developers and business teams understand the functionalities and workings of the solutions.  While keeping the documents up-to-date, they ensure easy accessibility to relevant users. 

Testing and Quality Assurance  

Salesforce developers ensure the quality of your solutions and integrations by employing a variety of testing methods.  Through functional testing, they verify that the solution is working correctly and resulting as expected.  With unit testing, they ensure that individual components function as intended, addressing any issues or errors immediately to prevent future occurrences.  Additionally, they test the system using different roles and permissions to evaluate the user experience thoroughly.

Communication and Support 

Developers offer support to your technical as well as non-technical teams, on-call or in-person, to address issues with the platform or solutions. They proactively communicate issues with you, diagnose and troubleshoot code or application errors, and assist your business teams in improving the existing functionality.

Key Skills of a Salesforce Developer

Salesforce Platform

Formerly known as Force.com, it is a Platform as a Service (PaaS). Developers use it to build custom solutions such as applications and websites through low-code and code-extensive capabilities.  Salesforce developers’ proficiency in this skill transforms them from coders to business solution architects. 

Apex Programming Language

Developed by Salesforce, this is a building block of any Salesforce application. Similar to Java, developers write Apex code to add custom business logic, automate processes, build and execute flows, and transaction control statements. 

Visualforce

It is a tag-based markup language through which developers can create custom UIs for mobile and web apps, that support dynamic and advanced experiences. It simplifies multi-step process building, adds business logic, creates custom dashboards to visualize data, and much more. 

Lightning App Builder

Salesforce Lightning is a drag-and-drop interface offering low-code capabilities that developers use to customize the application layout and pages of mobile and web applications. 

Salesforce Lightning and Aura Components

These are reusable blocks of code that enable a developer to build dynamic, scalable, easily customizable and responsive UIs that accelerate the development process.

Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL)

SOQL is a query language like SQL, used to get data from Salesforce database. Developers use it to fetch information from objects like accounts, contacts, or custom objects. It helps them quickly access and filter large amounts of data, which is useful for building applications, automating tasks, and creating reports with real-time information.

Salesforce Object Search Language (SOSL)

Salesforce developers use it to search for text across multiple objects, like accounts, contacts, and opportunities, simultaneously. This helps quickly find records that contain specific keywords or phrases, making it useful for building search features in apps.

Salesforce Products 

Salesforce offers a wide range of solutions including Sales Cloud for sales automation, Service Cloud for customer service management, Marketing Cloud for personalized customer journeys, and Commerce Cloud for seamless e-commerce experiences and more.

Developers are proficient in customizing and integrating Salesforce products as per your unique requirements to enhance your business processes. By understanding the functionality and features of each product, they leverage the right product for the right use case. Staying up to date with the latest Salesforce advancements and releases allows them to adopt new capabilities and deprecate old ones. 

Conclusion 

A Salesforce developer plays a crucial role in customizing the CRM as per your business needs. From tailoring features and automating tasks to integrating third-party tools, they help you get the most out of Salesforce and improve efficiency. 

If you are willing to hire a Salesforce developer, Smart IT Staff can help. We are a global staff augmentation firm with 200+ certified Salesforce developers ready to join your team. Whether you need extra hands for a project or want to fill in IT skill gaps on an immediate basis, we provide skilled professionals to get the job done right.