Why? One main reason: Public test classes combined with a tool like HardBoil will revolutionize unit testing in Salesforce!
Imagine a world where functional users (yes, functional users!), not developers, actually setup all of the unit tests through an interactive process that...
- Saves developers countless hours of writing boilerplate code.
- Drastically reduces human error in staging test data, checking pre-conditions and asserting post-conditions.
- Produces clean, self-documenting and easy-to-read test code.
- And trains functional users to learn the data structures and respect data quality, all at the same time!
Here's the immediately achievable concept: Create a single, public test class (perhaps using HardBoil) called something like
EnterpriseTestDb. Then, all one has to do is start every test method by instantiating EnterpriseTestDb as follows:// Stage test data.
EnterpriseTestDb db = new EnterpriseTestDb();
// Set test parameters.
Account largeAccount =
db.getAccountByName('Acme Corporation');
Contact mainContact =
db.getContactByName('John Doe');
...The best parts about all of this, again, is that...
- Not a single second of developer time was needed to create potentially hundreds of test records that can support every single unit test in the entire org!
- Functional users learned the data structure by setting up all of the test data for their developers!
And the long-term concept? Automatically generating test methods already setup to check pre-conditions and assert post-conditions, thereby allowing developers to simply fill in the code in each test method to move from the pre-condition to the post-condition.
In short, I can't wait for this new world to arrive.
