Force.com Advanced Developer Programming Assignment Complete!

February 3rd, 2010

I just finished the Programming Assignment and wanted to provide some input for anyone taking it in the future. Without giving away the assignment here are my thoughts:

Allow plenty of time – The instructions suggest you allocate 20+ hours to complete the assignment. I think this is somewhat low as it took me roughly 30 hours to develop, test and deploy. Start early and knock it out before the the exam deadline. I got wrapped up on a project and, of course, finished it in the night before. I tend to work better under pressure.

Read the requirements thoroughly and often – The requirements are narrative in form; something you would expect to receive from a customer. I went through the requirements and created my own design doc which outlined objects, sharing model, triggers, controllers, Visualforce pages, workflow, security, etc. This is the document that I worked from.

Build in Production and code in Sandbox – I did virtually everything in Production which limited the amount of time needed to deploy. I built everything that I could in Production and then once I felt the solution was solid, I refreshed a Sandbox and cranked out the Triggers, Controllers, utility classes and Visualforce pages. Essentially declarative work was done in Production while code development was, of course, done in the Sandbox.

Test, deploy and retest – The test cases took some time but I wanted really strong test coverage. I think I only had one class with less than 100% coverage. After deploying all of my code to Production, I loaded some test data and went through all of the use cases to make sure it functioned as expected.

The essay portion at the testing center was fairly straight forward and took about 30 minutes. It was 6 questions as to how, why and for what reasons did I design the application the way I did.

Categories: Salesforce

6 Comments

Todd February 5th, 2010
Congrats on the finish, I’m sure you’ll do fine!

I spent even more time, 40-something hours and really ran out of time to do the proper amount of testing (particularly on the scalability). That surprised me because I think of myself as on the fast side. I hope it doesn’t come back to bite me but I feel reasonably confident.

My process was about the same as yours except one thing. I built everything in the sandbox and pushed up. Is there an advantage in your mind to doing some in production, then refresh, then code?
jeffdonthemic February 5th, 2010
I think there are definitely advantages to doing the declarative stuff in Production and then refreshing it to the sandbox. I wrote an in-depth article last summer that you may find interesting.
Todd February 7th, 2010
OK, yes that makes sense.

Because I’m the only force.com developer in my shop the benefits are not as obvious; but I can see there still are some. Thanks for the informative blog!
Luke C February 8th, 2010
Mazel tov! Thanks for posting your experience with it, I’m gearing up to do it this year (Maybe at Dreamforce to save $300) and it’s encouraging to hear how you’re proceeding. Until Change Sets are stable, it’s definitely advantageous to do as much as you can in Production. If only we could get away with that in our client’s orgs more easily!
Ahmad February 8th, 2010
Hey Jeff,

I have a beginners question I needed some guidance on. Unfortunately there aren’t may resources on VisualForce. Can you take a look at the link I included as my website and let me know what you think? Thanks
Jeff Douglas February 9th, 2010
Ahmad, I added an answer to the stackoverflow URL. Hope this helps.