Tests, Individual Account, Lead Converstion

I've learned a bunch over the last 2 weeks and I wanted to pass it on.

If you have a setup with a Bucket account, like Individual, and you've written Apex code that uses a Bucket account, you may want to make some changes to how you test that code.

This all started as I was deploying code to a client of mine and during the deploy to production I got an email about an unhandled exception in a lead trigger. Turned out that while I was deploying code someone filled out a form on the website and a lead was created. That lead was auto-converted via a trigger we have, but was unable to complete because it couldn't get exclusive access to the Individual account.

Why couldn't it? Because during a deploy, all your tests run. And a whole lot of my tests expect and use the Individual account. So, when my lead conversion test was running, it was locking up the individual account for some seconds, and if production tried to edit that account, there was a conflict, causing the form submission to fail.

We figured this out with help from salesforce.com dev support. And I've spent quite a while changing all my tests so that when the tests run they don't rely on an Individual account, but use a testing individual account that is created in each test.

Do you have this problem? Here's an easy way to find out. In a sandbox get rid of your individual account by changing it's name or some other way to make it invisible to your code. Run all tests. Do they pass without the individual account? If they don't, your tests are relying on production data which can cause you problems. The greatest risk in my code is around lead conversion. Salesforce lead conversion will update the bucket account and we have to blank out some fields, so we have to update it in most cases. If you are testing against live data this is what will lock things up in your production environment.

If you have any questions about what this means to you, ask away, I'm happy to help out.