As a cloud architecture consultant I have always applauded Salesforce for requiring 75% test coverage for deployments. I just wish that it was a minimum per class rather than an average per org. Why? Because things change and over time the average in production can come down to the point where adding a new change set that is at 75% when averaged with what is in production drops the total average. Because of this, I have set the standard for my team as 95%, which always got us through this issue until recently.

Another team had run a deployment that removed methods previous tests relied on. When my change set was validated, I was surprised to see the following error:

What was most vexing about this is that none of the classes in error were touched by my change set. Usually this can be fixed with a recompile, but not this time. What to do? Well, someone else had gotten a deployment through (there are multiple teams working in the org), so I knew there had to be some solution. And there was! Sparing you the dozen things I tried that did not work, here is the solution:

And the proof:

© Scott S. Nelson