Some Important Things to Note While Testing Salesforce

Testing itself is not easy, and when it comes to Salesforce testing, things could be a bit more complicated for the beginners. As many of the Salesforce classes kept standardized and you don’t have any control over or cannot customize, it is also not easy to find what is wrong with them and where to fix. Whenever you get something broken, the worrying hunt starts in order to check whether you have clashes with any in-built CSS codes or inherited any classes wrongly.

The debugging process could be dreadful not only to the novice testers but even for the expert architects. Given these facts, you don’t also think that testing in Salesforce is too difficult to accomplish. If you try to incorporate some best practices and strategies with the help of effective tools, one can save a lot of time and effort in terms of testing and get some reassuring results. This is not an exhaustive list of tips but would be ideal for a beginner to start with Salesforce testing in an effective manner.

Following testing best practices

The development language of Force.com platform is APEX, which is a high-level programming language. It comes with many in-built mighty features that will help you to run and monitor the test cases in a standardized manner. Given this, Salesforce testing is not different from the general testing. So, we will not get into the obvious tricks in this article, like using the comments to define function usages or doing 100% code on unit testing.

Need for code portability

On Salesforce development, code portability is the primary requirement, which all the experts will agree to. You shouldn’t make the code dependant on any external data. You may write codes that use data externally for validation or may rely on external data like usernames and other user-induced data, but having a high-level dependency may ultimately tamper the application functionality while moving towards the production environment.

You need to ensure that each set of codes is made smartly in order to cover all possibilities of null or data which is not present. You must also aim at using the relative URLs as well as SOQL queries to help with the data records. Along with this, while testing on Sandbox, you should also test for the use-cases with no data in it. If you find it passing such case scenarios, it may ultimately pass the environment too.

Maximum code coverage

The directive of Salesforce is that any unit test itself must cover about 75% code, excluding the test classes and methods. Only by meeting this criterion, Salesforce lets you deploy the package AppExchange apps or apex code. However, these are just kept as baseline standards, and you should try to cover 100% as an ideal approach.

In reality, providers like Flosum.com set the code coverage based on user priorities. You may aim to cover all types of uses cases in the tests if possible, and test for each positive as well as negative use cases. You could practice optimum expertise by speculating and analyzing all the bad things possible and stay yourself prepared for anything which you haven’t anticipated.

Write test cases in classes and controllers.

The conventional practice in terms of Salesforce development is of creating unique controllers and classes for individual functions. It will make coding easier, organized, and portable. However, the top benefit of doing so is that the code is made easily reusable. The same concept could be applied to test classes also.

Now, it is easy to build separate test classes as well as controllers, but this approach may not be so efficient sometimes. On the other hand, portability is much easier if you can include the test code in the original class code and controller itself. Doing this, you will not miss out on test classes while migrating from the Sandbox to the production.

Assert testing

You can find a special class in the Apex to check conditions, known as the System.assert(). It is a wonderful feature which will let the tester to check for conditions. It can check whether the given function is performed in the expected or not. You can check the Salesforce forum to know more about the functionality and also look at the System Class page of Salesforce.

By using the assert(), especially the System. assert Equals() and NotEquals() for the critical functionalities; it will help you to ensure that the codes are perfectly executed and also ensure that there is no data getting written erroneously if in case the code goes wrong.

Bulk data testing

Apex triggers could be effectively used to start the data operations through the SFDC API. It can also be used to trigger various actions. As Apex codes are executed usually in bulk, it will further become essential for the tester to test the use cases to handle larger data sets for the use cases, which consist of APIs. It is also important to ensure that your codes don’t offshoot the governor limits. If not, you may ultimately get messed up with the data. Doing this in a perfect manner comes from many years of experience in Salesforce migration.

Various testing tools

Testing of Salesforce applications and functionalities are usually carried out on the browser or other unique environments that are eclipse-based. The modern-day browsers come packed with various debugging tools, and eclipse also has such capabilities for debugging. You can effectively combine these debugging with the test classes to ensure optimum results.

However, those who are looking forward to more tools for testing Salesforce, now Force.com has launched another mighty tool for Apex debugging, which is called Apex Interactive Debugger along with a chrome extension as Salesforce Lightning Inspector for testing of the Salesforce Lightning.

Testing of Salesforce using automation methodologies is also possible, and Salesforce also now has some built-in capabilities in order to connect with the Jasper Control Center API to schedule and run test tools. Moreover, Salesforce is a constant development platform, and more and more tools in terms of development and testing are being released day by day by the provider as well as the third-party contributors towards this platform.