Salesforce Well-Architected Is Back: Why Salesforce’s Architecture Revival Matters for QA
Salesforce quietly retired its Salesforce Well-Architected program after Dreamforce 2024, and the ecosystem felt the loss. Now, in response to community demand, Salesforce is relaunching it at Dreamforce 2025.
This revival represents a critical shift in mindset. Architecture defines what is testable, maintainable, and reliable. In this new era, QA begins long before the first test script is written. It starts with design.
What the Well-Architected Program Is
Well-Architected was Salesforce’s official architecture framework. It provided structured guidance and design principles for building trusted, scalable, and maintainable solutions.
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It acted as a bridge between architects, developers, and implementation teams. As Salesforce expanded with Data Cloud, AI, and automation, architectural complexity grew fast. Without a consistent framework, many solutions became fragile and harder to test.
The Mistake of Retiring It
Salesforce has publicly acknowledged that retiring Well-Architected was a mistake. After Dreamforce 2024, the program went quiet. Updates stopped, documentation froze, and architects lost a common language to validate decisions.
The silence left a gap. Teams made architectural choices in isolation, leading to inconsistent patterns, higher technical debt, and greater strain on QA. Without shared design standards, testability suffered. What could have been prevented early had to be patched later.
Why Architecture and QA Belong Together
Before any test is written, architecture determines what can be tested and how stable it will be. A well-structured foundation gives QA room to focus on insight and improvement rather than firefighting.
| Architecture Focus | QA Implication |
|---|---|
| Modularity and clear boundaries | Modularity and clear boundaries Components can be tested independently, reducing overlap and noise |
| Defined integration contracts | Predictable data flows make regression and API testing more effective |
| Observability and instrumentation | Logs and metrics allow QA to find, trace, and fix defects faster |
| Error handling and fallback logic | Clear recovery paths make resilience and edge testing possible |
| Performance and scalability | Architectural planning limits performance surprises under load |
| Evolvability and adaptability | Modular systems reduce regression risk when adding new features |
Weak architecture limits what QA can validate. Strong architecture makes quality measurable and repeatable.
What’s Changing in the Relaunch
The Salesforce Well-Architected program will officially relaunch at Dreamforce 2025 with updated content, new contributors, and renewed focus on community involvement.
At Dreamforce, architects will have a new Architect Vista Theater inside Trailblazer Forest: a space with technical sessions, whiteboarding areas, and meet-the-architect discussions focused on real-world design patterns.
Salesforce will also relaunch its Architect website and resource library, keeping this guidance available after the event. The reboot will be less theoretical and more practical, showing how to apply architectural principles to Agentforce, Data Cloud, and AI-driven solutions.
Strong architectural guidance does more than prevent technical debt. It helps teams speak the same design language, reduces ambiguity in how solutions evolve, and gives QA a predictable foundation to validate against. When design intent is clear, testing becomes faster, more focused, and more insightful. The Salesforce Well-Architected framework returning at Dreamforce is therefore not just a technical milestone but a cultural one for the Salesforce ecosystem.
Why It Matters
The return of Salesforce Well-Architected is more than a course correction. It signals that Salesforce recognizes how architecture, testing, and delivery are connected.
For architects, developers, and QA professionals, this is a chance to reconnect around a shared foundation of design integrity. Quality starts in architecture, not in remediation.
The return of Well-Architected reminds every team that quality is built, not inspected. It reinforces the idea that thoughtful architecture makes testing simpler, delivery smoother, and results more sustainable over time.
It is good to see Salesforce putting foundations back where they belong. The ecosystem is stronger when architecture and quality walk together.
Quality is not an add-on. It grows from the first blueprint.