Apex Developer Guide

Apex Developer Guide
Release Notes
Getting Started with Apex
Introducing Apex
Apex Development Process
What is the Apex Development Process?
Choose a Salesforce Org for Apex Development
Choose a Development Environment for Writing Apex
Learning Apex
Writing Tests
Deploying Apex to a Sandbox Organization
Deploy Apex to a Salesforce Production Organization
Adding Apex Code to a AppExchange App
Apex Quick Start
Writing Apex
Running Apex
Debugging, Testing, and Deploying Apex
Apex Reference
Appendices
PDF

Writing Tests

Testing is the key to successful long-term development and is a critical component of the development process. We strongly recommend that you use a test-driven development process, that is, test development that occurs at the same time as code development.

To facilitate the development of robust, error-free code, Apex supports the creation and execution of unit tests. Unit tests are class methods that verify whether a particular piece of code is working properly. Unit test methods take no arguments, commit no data to the database, and send no emails. Such methods are flagged with the @IsTest annotation in the method definition. Unit test methods must be defined in test classes, that is, classes annotated with @IsTest.

The @IsTest annotation on methods is equivalent to the testMethod keyword. As best practice, Salesforce recommends that you use @IsTest rather than testMethod. The testMethod keyword may be versioned out in a future release.

Note

In addition, before you deploy Apex or package it for the AppExchange, the following must be true.

  • Unit tests must cover at least 75% of your Apex code, and all of those tests must complete successfully.

    Note the following.

    • When deploying Apex to a production organization, each unit test in your organization namespace is executed by default.
    • Calls to System.debug aren’t counted as part of Apex code coverage.
    • Test methods and test classes aren’t counted as part of Apex code coverage.
    • While only 75% of your Apex code must be covered by tests, don’t focus on the percentage of code that is covered. Instead, make sure that every use case of your application is covered, including positive and negative cases, as well as bulk and single records. This approach ensures that 75% or more of your code is covered by unit tests.
  • Every trigger must have some test coverage.
  • All classes and triggers must compile successfully.

For more information on writing tests, see Testing Apex.