Audit9 Blog

Once again the annual Dreamforce event has been and gone leaving most practitioners with an uncomfortable knowledge deficit in terms of the real detail of the wealth of new innovations announced. This autumn period, post-Dreamforce, is often a time for investigation; piecing together information gathered from press releases, blog post, social media and event session […]

This post provides some general best practices in regard to Apex Unit Tests. This isn’t a definitive list by any means, as such I’ll update the content over time. Top 10 Best Practices (in no order) 1. TDD. Follow Test Driven Development practice wherever possible. There is no excuse for writing unit tests after the […]

The biggest area of risk on any Salesforce implementation project is the data model. In my view this assertion is beyond question. The object data structures and relationships underpin everything. Design mistakes made in the declarative configuration or indeed technical components such as errant Apex Triggers, poorly executed Visualforce pages etc. are typically isolated and […]

This post presents a basic model for the control of change within a Salesforce development process. Best practice suggests that all non-trivial projects should implement some degree of governance around environment change, i.e. Change Control. This is perhaps obvious, what isn’t necessarily obvious is how to achieve effective change control without introducing friction to the […]

Once again it’s official the summer is over and winter is approaching – Winter ’15 that is. Sporting a nice Eskimo logo, the new release rolls out across the sandbox instances imminently, with the main production pod upgrades occurring in mid October. The detailed rollout schedule can be found here and the all important Winter […]

Live Agent – What is it? Live Agent enables real-time, online chat between an organisation and its customers, prospects etc. The chat sessions can be initiated via clicking a button or link on a web page, or via automated invitation based on page access metrics etc. For the end user, it can be very convenient […]

Challenge – outside of the ISV development model there is no concept of an application namespace that can be used to group the technical components related to a single logical application. To mitigate this issue, and to provide a means to isolate application-specific components, naming schemes such as application specific prefixes are commonplace. Risk – […]

In a typical development process requirements are captured and the information synthesised to form a solution design. The constituent components of the solution design are ultimately translated into physical concepts such as a class, page or sub-page view. This analysis, design, build cycle could be iterative in nature or fixed and may have different degrees […]

A very common challenge addressed by architects working with Salesforce is the definition of an appropriate release methodology. By this I mean the identification of the Salesforce orgs required to support the project delivery whether serial or concurrent in nature, the role and purpose of each org and critically, the means by which change is […]

Custom Apex Triggers execute on standard CRM objects (Account, Contact, Lead etc.) and custom objects in response to all data modifications applied via the Salesforce web application, API transactions and custom Apex script. As such it is imperative that trigger code adheres to patterns that promote performance and maintainability, guards against recursive behaviour and most […]