Software Testing on the Salesforce Platform

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Introduction

Since the start of my developer journey with Salesforce, there's one phrase I've trotted out with remarkable regularity:

"When I have more time I'm going to write a book about testing". 

Typically this would be when I was reviewing unit tests and found the developers unable to tell me why they'd created a particular test, other than it caused a few lines of code to be executed and thus covered for deployment to production. Other times it was after talking to graduates to find out that UK universities still don't cover unit testing in Computer Science degrees, and they didn't really know how to get started. I'm now at the point where I have more time, so after talking the talk, it's time to start walking the walk. 

TL;DR - it's a work in progress, but available for purchase on Leanpub at Software Testing on the Salesforce Platform

How to Publish?

I didn't want to go the traditional route, but also didn't want the vanilla self-publishing experience. Instead I was looking for some kind of iterative mechanism where I didn't spend a year creating a single point in time snapshot and then never returned to it (outside of spending another year on another point in time second edition etc). I also didn't want something that cost $50+. While that's not a huge amount of money in places like Western Europe and the USA, there are other locations where it's prohibitive. 

I remembered reading that Steven Sinofsky wrote his Hardcore Software book on Substack, but when I dug into this it was a $100/year subscription over 2 years, so considerably more expensive rather than less. Also, while this was a reasonable way to break up the writing, there's no easy way to combine all the newsletters back into a book, hence he published it as a book too. 

Enter Leanpub

I was familiar with Leanpub having bought a couple of books when I was learning Node.JS, and when I looked into publishing on that platform it was pretty much a perfect fit for what I was trying to do:

• Publish Early, Publish Often.

This is a core principle of Leanpub  - rather than waiting until everything is complete, you can publish as soon as you feel you have enough content to make it worthwhile, then you push out updates as and when you feel it is appropriate. This also allows you to pivot based on reader feedback. It also allows you to give up if there is zero interest I guess :)

•  Readers Pay Once
  
  Rather than paying out for the initial edition, then paying again for each future edition, once you buy a book on Leanpub you get all the updates included forever. 
  
  
• Flexible Pricing
  
  I can set (and change) the price as I desire. I also have the option to set a minimum price (what I will sell it for) and a suggested price (what I'd like to sell it for). That said, there's nothing to stop someone paying more than these prices if they really want to spend $50 or more!

Version 1

The first version of Software Testing on the Salesforce Platform weighs in at 147 pages and has a suggested/minimum price of $5.99 - it is by no means the finished article, as I still have a lot of ground I want to cover. There is potential downside to purchasing at this time, in that I'm under no obligation to complete it so this might be all you get. I do intend to finish it, and I feel that it represents value for money in its current form, but your opinion may differ. 

To reiterate on the pricing, if you buy this version then you get every subsequent version free forever. The price will increase as I add content, so early adopters are rewarded for believing in me with a chance to get in at the rock bottom.

When you purchase on Leanpub an account is automatically created for you - this isn't to allow me to pester you, but to allow you to access the latest version when it is published. 

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