checks and balances.....

I'm moving to diesel from gas and am just getting ready to start learning to tune my truck. All of my experience has been with gas so I'm just trying to get started more than anything else. I'm wondering what approach is used to build tables with. Such as how do you guys verify your tunes? An example with gas would be to log AFR error% and adjust the ve table to bring your table in line. I'm just trying to figure out how to set up my maps to verify my changes when I do start making them.