Testing and Debugging

Some of the most important activities as a Salesforce professional will be testing and debugging. Setting up your testing plan will depend on the types of environments you set up for the path to production. These environments will be a combination of one or more sandboxes and your final production Salesforce instance. Once the path to production is defined, there are several stages of testing.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics in detail:

• Understanding the path to production
• Setting up the path to production
• Understanding testing types
• Using debug logs

With the help of these topics, you will be able to set up your Salesforce sandbox strategy and create a testing plan for your deployments.

This chapter starts to broach more advanced topics related to code development. If you’re new to Salesforce administration, some of these areas may be daunting to you right now. For the scope of this...

Technical requirements

For this chapter, make sure you log in to your development org and follow along as we work through the different testing and debugging features available to a system administrator.

Understanding the path to production

The path to production is the strategy for how new features and bug fixes are delivered to your live production Salesforce org. There are different scenarios that require different strategies, including:

• New Salesforce implementations
• Smaller enhancement projects
• Bug fixes

In this chapter, we will cover the new Salesforce implementation scenario.

Business use case

You are the Salesforce admin for XYZ Widgets. XYZ Widgets has been using a legacy system and has decided to move to Salesforce. You are tasked with setting up the environment strategy.

Setting up the path to production

As a best practice, you will set up the following strategy for your implementation. This strategy includes different types of sandboxes and how to use each one in the process of getting code and functionality to production:

Figure 20.1: The path to production

1. The developer sandboxes are used for building...

Understanding testing types

Now that we have a defined path to production, let’s look at the different types of testing. There are generally five types of testing that will be conducted:

• Unit testing
• System testing
• UAT testing
• Production testing
• Regression testing

Unit testing

Unit tests verify whether a particular piece of code is working properly. This type of testing is done by developers as they build code. Salesforce requires 75% code coverage. Code coverage indicates how many executable lines of code in your classes and triggers have been exercised by test methods. This is important in that code can be developed in sandboxes and tested by users without unit tests. To push that code to production, the unit tests must be written and covered.

Not all implementations include code, and this type of testing is needed only when there is code being written.

System testing

This testing takes place in the SIT sandbox...

Using debug logs

As an admin, when a user reports an issue, you try to recreate it and resolve it. At times, you are unable to figure out why the issue has occurred, so you need to take a look under the hood. Salesforce offers a feature to view debug logs. The debug log contains information about each transaction, such as whether it was successful and how long it took. Depending on the filters set by your trace flags, the log can contain varying levels of detail about the transaction.

Business use case

Sam, the sales rep, has reported an issue when creating an account. When you, as the administrator, try to recreate the issue, you are unsuccessful. You will set up a debug log to get a deeper understanding of what is happening.

Creating a debug log

Let’s create a debug log for Sam. We will start on the Setup page as shown in Figure 20.2:

Figure 20.2: Navigating to debug logs

On this page, we will take the following steps:

1. Click on Setup...

Summary

In this chapter, we understood what the path to production is and how to set it up for different scenarios. We explored the different types of testing and how they relate to the path to production and various sandbox types. Finally, we discovered how debug logs can help us further investigate issues reported by users.

With this final chapter, we have completed this book and tried to cover as many use cases and examples as possible. I hope that this encourages you to continue your journey with Salesforce, and experiment with more use cases using your development organization and Trailhead.

Questions

1. What does SIT stand for?
2. What does UAT stand for?
3. What type of sandbox works well for data migration?
4. What type of testing is done in the SIT sandbox?
5. What type of testing is done by developers?
6. How does a debug log help troubleshoot?

Further reading

• Debug logs: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.code_viewing_log_details.htm&type=5
• Get started with testing: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/test-lightning-web-components/get-started-with-testing

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