Common use cases for declarative customization

It's important to understand one of the biggest differentiators of Salesforce in comparison to other CRMs. Salesforce provides a lot of tools and features to maximize declarative customization (through point-and-click tools). In fact, while configuring Salesforce to suit your business needs, in 80% of cases, you will be able to solve your requirement with declarative functionality. For the remaining 20% of the use cases, you'll need some kind of programmatic development.

Becoming a certified platform developer does not mean that you solve everything with code. Customers, consultancy agencies, and Salesforce all expect a Salesforce developer to be able to use the easiest tool to achieve a solution and, therefore, most of the exam will assess whether you are able to distinguish what can be achieved through declarative configuration and what cannot be, hence, reverting to a more programmatic approach.

In Chapter 3, Declarative Automation, we'll dive deeper into ways to automate your business through declarative tools and programmatic options. For now, let's just recap the most commonly used declarative features that Salesforce offers an admin out of the box.