Salesforce is, without a doubt, the most popular and recognized customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Due to its system being flexible and supportive of companies across every industry and every size, it requires continuous testing and regular maintenance, and constant upgrades of features in order for the businesses to remain competitive.
But what is Salesforce? Why is Salesforce testing important? And how can teams overcome the challenges of Salesforce testing?
This QA checklist covers everything that the team needs for successful testing of Salesforce. It discusses topics ranging from the different types of Salesforce testing that should be executed to the best practices for Salesforce QA across different types of projects.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is the first cloud-based CRM system that’s highly recognized across the globe. Founded by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez in 1999, this CRM platform aids users in selling, marketing, analyzing, and connecting with clients and prospective consumers.
SFDC (Salesforce Dot Com or Salesforce.com) provides a variety of standard features designed to better manage relationships with both prospects and customers. This CRM also supports engagement and collaboration with internal employees and business partners by securely storing data in the cloud.
Why Salesforce QA Testing is Important
Like any software application, SFDC testing must be performed during each development cycle to make sure that the system retains the expected functionality for all users. Having a dedicated Salesforce QA team to regularly measure the integrity of the system, will contribute to success and allow users to integrate new features as they become available.
Salesforce testing should be routine for business because of it:
- Confirms that code and configuration are functional
- Verifies that the system can support all business processes
- Establishes that the system’s initial build meets approved requirements
- Allows QA teams to identify issues in initial phases so that the development team can provide fixes
- Checks the working conditions and behavior of the application
- Increase the overall quality of the system to improve the User experience
Challenges of Salesforce QA Testing
It’s essential that every QA checklist discusses how to retrieve relevant test data that is both protected and fresh. Yet, it can be difficult for your Salesforce quality assurance team due to challenges in SFDC testing, which can limit the quality and relevancy of test data.
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Expensive to Maintain Multiple Salesforce Sandboxes
One sandbox can take as much as 20–30% of the total cost of your production. The cost of Salesforce QA testing can really add up, especially when it’s ideal to maintain multiple sandboxes.
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Irrelevant Data Prevents Full Testing
Setting up your Salesforce sandbox with sized-to-fit data that’s relevant means sorting through an overwhelming amount of irrelevant data. But testing with the wrong data can lead to unnecessary defects in production, despite fully testing your sandbox.
Getting relevant, sized-to-fit data is not easy, especially when SFDC testing is done in smaller sandboxes that can only fit part of the production’s data. Weeding out all irrelevant data means filtering and refining your test data while maintaining the integrity of the relationships for your selected data.
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Difficult to Protect Confidential Data
Legal consequences befall a company whenever an unauthorized user retrieves personal or confidential information. And it can easily happen when we perform testing in Salesforce with real data. Without anonymizing sensitive data before sending it over to your sandboxes, your data can be vulnerable to attacks across environments.
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Delayed Release Deadlines Due to Slow, Inefficient Development Cycles
An efficient development cycle tops every QA checklist, but this isn’t always possible when testing Salesforce. Sandbox refreshes can take hours or days to complete. Using the Salesforce data loader tool “dataloader.io” to move data between Orgs is a time-consuming, manual process, particularly when not using a full sandbox. When trying to load data, problems arise as unnecessary triggers and automatic workflows fire from your sandbox.
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Maintaining User Permissions Sets on Sandboxes and Production
It’s difficult to move the metadata object permission profiles between different environments, ensuring both quality and security along the process, and maintaining compliance in Salesforce. QA testing teams need to thoroughly test environments and applications to ensure there are no vulnerabilities, issues, or defects.
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Salesforce Seasonal Releases
Salesforce announces seasonal releases for rolling out new features every year in the Spring, Summer, and Winter. This is great for allowing users to take advantage of new functionality released by Salesforce. However, it could concern testers during regression testing. Platform changes frequently break existing tests, so proper testing is required as a way to continually repair and improve automated tests.
Types of Salesforce QA Testing
Be it environmental or execution, make sure that your QA checklist features all types of Salesforce testing, including these crucial compatibility and user experience tests for applications. That way, your team can develop and perform all necessary test scripts designed to validate the soundness of the system
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Unit Testing: This type of testing is performed initially by the developers when functionality is developed, to verify if Happy Paths are working as expected for the application. This helps find issues at very early stage of development.
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Functional Testing: Salesforce QA teams validate the application against the functional requirements and specifications. This type of Salesforce test reviews each function of the software by providing appropriate input and measuring the output against the functional requirements.
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Persona-based Testing: Salesforce has different sets of users with different permissions assigned to them on the application. It is important to verify the application according to the different roles and permissions assigned to the users.
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Integration Testing: This type of Salesforce testing integrates software modules logically that are tested as a group. Because modules are coded by different programmers, these tests aim to expose any defects when these modules are integrated into the application.
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UI/UX Testing: As Salesforce supports two types of views, Classic and Lightning, we can always verify the user interfaces and user experience for software applications. It helps to identify issues and ensure that the users have a positive experience while using the application.
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UAT TestingU A T Testing: This type of Salesforce testing encourages intended system users to test Salesforce in order to confirm that the application can support intended business processes. This SFDC testing follows a test script based on business practices where testers verify whether or not Salesforce performs as expected.
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Regression Testing: Performing tests to verify whether or not code and configuration releases affected any existing user processes or Salesforce functionality. As a type of Salesforce test that appears on every QA checklist, testers keep a running list of expected behavior and create test cases applicable across development cycles.
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Sanity Testing in Production: Executing tests within production repeats testing previously performed by the Salesforce QA team in other environments. This type of Salesforce testing confirms whether or not the configurations and code pushed into the production environment deployed successfully.
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Load Testing: This type of SFDC testing reviews the system’s performance under a specific load. Testers examine how well Salesforce behaves with multiple users accessing the system simultaneously.
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Security Testing: As a vital test for your QA checklist, testers uncover threats, vulnerabilities, and risks within the Salesforce application. This type of Salesforce test identifies possible weaknesses and loopholes within the application in order to create solutions that prevent cyberattacks and unauthorized invasions.
Best Practices for Salesforce QA Testing
Salesforce may support complex scenarios for its users, but it’s a simplified testing cycle that leads to strong, streamlined practices. Follow the best practices on this salesforce quality assurance checklist so that your next development cycle is efficient and effective.
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Technical Best Practices
- Create and validate test cases as real user profiles
- Confirm test data is prepared to validate the report’s functionality
- Execute all applicable testing, including functional testing, regression testing, UI testing, and system testing as well as these Salesforce-specific automated tests
- Recreate all classic tests for Salesforce’s Lighting Web Component lightweight framework
- Run all automation testing through reliable automated testing tools
- Construct and test user roles using Workflows
- Timely update test cases as per the updated requirements from business
- Provide full QA testing coverage with all the positive and negative scenarios on sandboxes
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Project Management Best Practices:
- Recruit all necessary testers across test cases, including technical experts, business stakeholders, and target users
- Deploy and test regularly
- Establish clear testing guidelines
- Set up feedback templates for testers
- Proofread all tested content within the system to verify it’s correct and appropriate for the user
- Use project management tools like Jira, Rally, Azure, and Redmine
- Follow project management methodologies like Agile or Kanban
6 Reasons Why You Need to Implement Salesforce QA Testing for your Business
By implementing automated testing services in your Salesforce system, business operations become much smoother, with lesser dependence on manual troubleshooting and fixes. Mentioned below are some of the ways in which businesses can benefit by integrating Salesforce testing in 2023.
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Get More Test Coverage
With automated testing, testers can execute hundreds of test cases, and cover any number of scenarios and eventualities, which can be both likely and unlikely. Moreover, with automated Salesforce testing, businesses can adapt to new updates and releases quickly, as they already have the scope for running new tests.
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Plan Testing More Efficiently
By negating the need for manual testing, businesses can reduce the risk of human errors, thereby ensuring that the test data is reliable. Studies have shown that constant repetitive tasks increase the chances of human errors, and the longer a tester works on the same project, the greater the risks of making errors. Hence, the implementation of automation testing can completely negate such errors.
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Schedule Repeat Tests
Once test cases have been set up, they can be repeated numerous times by simply clicking a button. This reduces the dependence on manual testers required to run large-scale testing programs. By setting up a schedule for repeat tests, testers do not have to manually trawl through the same process for hours, or even days, at a time.
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Generate Automatic Reports
Once the tests have been completed, it’s necessary to generate detailed reports to evaluate the successful and unsuccessful aspects of the Salesforce platform. Typically, generating these reports manually is a time-consuming business, but, with the implementation of automation, these reports can be generated automatically, thereby reducing the chances of manual errors. Tests can be easily recorded and saved, making it easy for testers to watch recordings at a later point to gain more valuable insights.
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Free Up Testers Schedules
With the implementation of automation, testing experts can dedicate their time to designing bigger projects and improving CRM performance. Rather than spending their time overseeing and running existing test initiatives, they can focus on strategizing new test ideas and initiatives.
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Identify Issues Quickly
The main objective of running any kind of software test is to find issues and their root cause that may prevent the Salesforce CRM from functioning efficiently. Tests can locate broken lines of code, or configuration issues that need to be addressed quickly by testers. With automation, the whole process can be streamlined.
Implementing Salesforce QA Testing into Your Practices
Salesforce, when developed and tested correctly, can deliver value and increase ROI for its business. Sufficient SFDC testing and a thorough understanding of the software application can prevent deployment delays, increase efficiency and introduce instant returns.
Ready to implement best practices within your Salesforce QA testing process? A great place to start is by partnering with a QA services provider like QASource. Our team of SFDC testing experts is skilled in Salesforce testing and can help you refine your QA checklist so that your team can enjoy the benefits of streamlined testing practices. Get a free quote today.
