In my previous post, I walked through the process of discovering, diagnosing and reporting a legitimate platform bug. As I mentioned previously, on any platform as large and complex as Force.com, bugs are inevitable. Every OS has them. Every framework has them.
One of the biggest considerations when evaluating a platform bug is when it a appears. For example: if a bug appears on a new API version, and the platform is versioned – you can avoid the bug by either working around it, or by staying with the old API version until it is fixed.
If a bug is just there – and has been there for a while, you can either come up with a workaround, or just not use that particular feature – because the bug has always existed, there’s little or no risk the bug will impact code that you ship.
But, if a bug appears on the platform and breaks existing code – that’s a big problem. That’s why Salesforce puts in such a huge effort to test new releases, running every unit test (including customer unit tests and package tests) on the new version to detect any possible breaking change. Unfortunately, the DataDotComEntitySetting bug was this type of bug.
As it turns out, the problem related to a security setting on that particular object – one that I presume is used by Data.com Clean when enabled. It’s also not a common problem – it impacted our application and that of one other ISV (who started seeing sudden errors appearing with customers who enabled Data.com clean).
The good news is, that once we were able to reach the right people at Data.com to convey the impact that the problem was causing, they were phenomenal. They provided us with access to a sandbox with data.com to verify both the error and confirm the fix, they kept us updated as to the progress, and today – confirmed that a patch has been pushed out to production.
So – it’s a happy ending.
But, happy ending notwithstanding, it did point out one area that I hope Salesforce will work to improve. You see, the application I’m working is large and complex – and makes use of many platform features. So I’ve probably run into (and helped discover) more than my share of platform issues. Over the past few years I’ve noticed a dramatic improvement in the ability of the Salesforce frontline support to confirm, prioritize and address platform bugs. I’ve noticed a marked improvement in the Known Issues site – and the quick identification of workarounds where possible (and remember, for a developer, a workaround is as usually almost good as a fix). I’ve seen rapid and accurate responses on StackExchange.
I don’t know how Salesforce is organized internally, but from where I sit, the Data.com support group hasn’t quite gotten the message yet. Yes, they were great at confirming that a platform bug existed, but after that – things got… difficult. I won’t go into details, but it took some pretty extraordinary efforts on our part to finally reach the right people where we were able to have a good discussion and get real feedback that we could work with and convey to our customers. Anyway, I’m confident that they’ve learned as much from the experience as we have, and I am thrilled to see this particular platform bug dead and buried.
