Topic: Fixing bugs
Target Group: Admins, Developer
Complexity: Low
We all have to fix bugs from time to time. I love hunting for bugs like a lone wolf, stalking through the dark forest of Flows, Default Values, Debug Logs, and cryptic Bug reports.
While it’s fun sometimes, often it’s a lengthy and frustrating process.
There’s a better way, get yourself a business guide.
I found experienced Users can make the best bug hunting partners.
More often than not, a bug is not so much a technical problem as a misunderstanding of a business process.
Technical bugs are easy to find, business process misunderstands are the real problem. Finding the reason for a wrongly calculated discount is so much harder to pin down than a null-pointer exception.
Sandra was an experienced and motivated finance team member. Sandra used to guide me through the depth of our invoicing process.
Together we hunted down quite a few nasty bugs.
What we used to do:
1) Preparation
After receiving a bug report, I prepared the Code, Flow or other places which might be the reason for the bug. With that preparation, I’d walk over to Sandra for a fun hunting session.
2) Hunting together
While Sandra walks me through the business process, in parallel I walk her through the Salesforce logic. I’d do something like live-translation of everything we have in Salesforce: “Here we take the country discount and add it to the User discount. If a country discount is empty, we take 5% default discount.” This way, we could compare, if the business process matches the logic built in Salesforce.
Usually, Sandra would spot the error quite easily: “Oh no, the default discount should not be applied here, it’s applied later in the ERP.”
3) Fixing
I’d try to fix the issue right there and Sandra would test my fix. Sitting right next to each other made for some really fast feedback loop. I’d fix it until Sandra was satisfied.
4) Pay off
Hunting bugs as pack bugs is lots of fun and so much more efficient. What can be weeks of trying to figure out what went wrong can be done in an hour or two.
5) Happy End:
After years of helping the Salesforce team, Sandra became an amazing Salesforce Admin and fixed many more bugs.
Disclaimer: This works only in certain circumstances. As an In-House consultant, I had the luxury of having direct access to Users. As an external consultant, I try to get access to 1-2 business experts.