Salesforce, the leading customer relationship management (CRM) tool, is widely adopted across industries and company sizes for its flexibility and support. However, businesses must continually test, maintain, and upgrade their Salesforce systems to stay competitive. This is where Salesforce QA testing, a crucial process that ensures the system's quality and alignment with business needs, comes into play.
But what is Salesforce? Why is Salesforce quality assurance necessary? And how can teams overcome the challenges of Salesforce testing?
This comprehensive QA guide will equip your team with the knowledge and best practices for successful Salesforce QA testing. It covers various topics, from the types of quality assurance Salesforce should execute to the best practices for Salesforce QA across various projects.
Salesforce is the first cloud-based CRM system that’s highly recognized worldwide. Founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez, this CRM platform aids users in selling, marketing, analyzing, and connecting with clients and prospective consumers.
SFDC provides various standard features designed to improve the management of relationships with prospects and customers. This CRM also securely stores data in the cloud, supporting engagement and collaboration with internal employees and business partners.
Quality Assurance (QA) Salesforce testing ensures a setup meets quality standards and business needs. It checks functionalities, integrations, customizations, and workflows to find and fix performance, user experience, or data integrity issues.
QA Salesforce testing plays a pivotal role in maintaining Salesforce's reliability, efficiency, and security. It employs various methods to ensure all system parts function correctly and can handle real-world scenarios. This not only paves the way for a smooth and error-free Salesforce experience but also boosts business operations and productivity. This empowerment allows businesses to reach their full potential, knowing their Salesforce system is robust and error-free.
The ultimate goal of QA Salesforce testing is to deliver a robust and error-free Salesforce experience. Ensure the following components can enhance overall productivity:
Like any software application, SFDC testing must be performed during each development cycle to ensure that the system retains the expected functionality for all users. Having a dedicated Salesforce QA team to measure the system's integrity regularly is not just good practice, and it's a necessity for businesses to stay competitive and thrive in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Quality assurance Salesforce should be routine for business because of the following:
When it comes to Salesforce quality assurance, your checklist should cover a range of tests. These include environmental and execution tests, as well as crucial compatibility and user experience tests for applications. By developing and performing all necessary test scripts, your team can ensure the system's soundness.
Salesforce may support complex scenarios for its users, but a simplified testing cycle 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.
By implementing automated testing services in your Salesforce QA system, you can streamline your business operations and reduce reliance on manual troubleshooting and fixes. This not only enhances the quality and reliability of your Salesforce system but also boosts your overall business productivity and efficiency.
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 quickly adapt to new updates and releases, as they already have the scope for running new tests.
By negating the need for manual testing, businesses can reduce the risk of human errors, thereby ensuring that the test data is reliable. 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 mistakes.
Once test cases have been set up, they can be repeated numerous times by 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.
Once the tests have been completed, detailed reports must be generated to evaluate the Salesforce platform's successes and failures. Typically, generating these reports manually is time-consuming, but with automation, these reports can be generated automatically, reducing the chances of manual errors. Tests can be quickly recorded and saved, making it easy for testers to watch recordings at a later point to gain more valuable insights.
The main objective of running any 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.
Effective Salesforce QA testing requires the tools to ensure thorough testing and seamless integration. Here are some of the top tools widely used in the industry for Salesforce testing:
Selenium is a powerful open-source tool for automating web applications. It supports multiple programming languages, including Java, C#, and Python, and is highly extensible. It is best for automating UI tests and regression testing for Salesforce applications.
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TestComplete is a versatile automated testing tool that supports many web, mobile, and desktop applications. It offers robust capabilities for testing Salesforce and is best for automated functional and regression testing.
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QTP/UFT is a widely used commercial testing tool by Micro Focus. It provides comprehensive testing capabilities for a variety of applications, including Salesforce. It is best for comprehensive functional and regression testing of Salesforce applications.
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JIRA and Zephyr offer potent solutions for test management and defect tracking. While JIRA is primarily a project management tool, Zephyr enhances its capabilities for QA testing. It is best for test management and monitoring for Salesforce projects.
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Copado is a native Salesforce DevOps platform that provides tools for continuous integration, delivery, and automated testing. It is best for DevOps and continuous testing for Salesforce.
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Overview: Cucumber is an open-source tool that supports behavior-driven development (BDD). It allows the creation of test cases in plain language, making it easy for non-technical stakeholders to understand. It is best for BDD and collaborative testing for Salesforce applications.
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In 2024, AI is revolutionizing Salesforce testing with several key trends given below:
One of our clients faces significant challenges with its native application due to limited scalability, high costs, and inefficiencies, which lead to errors and inconsistencies. To address these issues, the client decided to migrate to Salesforce. QASource facilitated this transition by identifying the migration scope, setting realistic goals, and mapping existing data to the Salesforce model. The implementation and rigorous testing ensured a seamless integration with the client's workflows. As a result, the client achieved improved scalability, reliability, and flexibility, significantly reducing operational costs and enhancing overall business operations.
Yet, your Salesforce quality assurance team may find this difficult due to challenges in SFDC testing, which can limit the quality and relevancy of test data. However, to address these challenges, QASource recommends the following best practices:
Challenge 1: 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 add up, especially when it’s ideal to maintain multiple sandboxes.
Solution: Optimize Sandbox Usage and Costs
Challenge 2: Irrelevant Data Prevents Full Testing
Getting relevant, sized-to-fit data is complex, especially when SFDC testing is done in smaller sandboxes that 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.
Solution: Streamline Data Management
Challenge 3: Difficulty in Protecting Confidential Data
A company faces legal consequences whenever an unauthorized user retrieves personal or confidential information. Without anonymizing sensitive data before sending it to your sandboxes, your data can be vulnerable to attacks across environments.
Solution: Enhance Data Security Measures
Challenge 4: Delayed Release Deadlines Due to Slow, Inefficient Development Cycles
Sandbox refreshes can take hours or days to complete. Using the Salesforce data loader tool “dataloader.io” to move data between organizations is a time-consuming, manual process, mainly when not using a complete sandbox. When loading data, problems arise as unnecessary triggers and automatic workflows fire from your sandbox.
Solution: Accelerate Development Cycles
Challenge 5: Maintaining User Permissions Sets on Sandboxes and Production
Moving the metadata object permission profiles between different environments is challenging, as well as ensuring quality and security along the process and maintaining compliance in Salesforce.
Solution: Streamline Permission Management
Challenge 6: Salesforce Seasonal Releases
Salesforce announces seasonal releases for new features every spring, summer, and winter. However, it could concern testers during regression testing.
Solution: Proactive Release Management
When developed and tested correctly, Salesforce 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.