As those in the military say, “The more you sweat during peacetime, the less you’ll bleed during war!” The same goes for software development. While we’re all in a rush to get our CRM application up and running, any bugs or errors left undiscovered in the development process can come back to haunt us later.
Why Enforce Testing?
For this reason, the Salesforce CRM beats other CRMs because it is one of the few applications that not only encourages a test-drive development, it enforces it. 75% of APEX code written in a Force.com application must be covered by unit tests before it can be deployed to production. This forces testing to become a planned activity during development, rather than an afterthought.
The Testing Methodology
Salesforce provides its own testing framework. Here, developers can write test cases for their own code to check for bugs. Developers can implement test code with either Test Classes – code written solely for testing – or Test Methods. Even though you are limited by your licensing agreements on how many resources you can use, the Test Classes approach does not count against your organizational limit for APEX code. So you’re free to test until you’re confident in your own code without worrying about breaching your organizational limit.
Test Data Made Easy
The result is an innovative and creative approach to software testing methodology. By writing code to set up the “test data” and using it within the test method, running the test and deleting the test data can be completely automated. This relieves a lot of the discomfort and headaches of creating, running, and deleting your own test data. Also, the test method never commits anything to your database, so there’s no need to worry about deleting it later.
A Future Lifesaver
While this may seem like a small improvement, testing is important. The life of your developer is made easier with Salesforce’s testing architecture. Not only will the developer no longer have to worry about getting stuck with the blame for any errors, but the testing method goes a long way to improving the quality from the ground up of the overall application.
