Salesforce is arguably one of the most trusted CRM platforms on the market. However, wrapping your head around the Salesforce system is not always an easy task. To get the most out of any software, including Salesforce, it is essential to first understand the basics.
This article discusses the Salesforce testing process: what it is, how it benefits your business, and the different implementation types.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is one of the leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) tools on the market. It helps more than 150,000 businesses improve customer service and connect with customers in meaningful ways by identifying their needs and addressing their issues.
The tool helps your sales team manage contacts and opportunities to increase conversions. Salesforce also allows your team to gather data from third-party apps so they can monitor all information in a single dashboard, thus improving their productivity.
So, if you’re a business that values what its customers want and need, you should take advantage of Salesforce’s highly flexible and customizable CRM platform to address their concerns.
What is Salesforce Testing?
Salesforce is a complex enterprise tool that requires proper setup to ensure it works according to your preferences.
Furthermore, the platform undergoes major update releases annually, each of which could cause issues to the features you’re using. Although Salesforce does a great job preparing their customers for updates, it is important to ensure that all features you have set up are working correctly.
Salesforce testing enables you to perform a series of tests to guarantee that the update did not affect the core functionality of the CRM platform in your business.
The majority of Salesforce testing you’ll run pertains to regression tests. After running through some tests, they help you determine which features you’re using in your organization were affected by the update.
On the other hand, testing custom or third-party features requires a different approach because they are built from within your organization without any support or documentation from Salesforce. In this case, testing involves your QA team and developers, business analysis, and people with the knowledge and expertise in using the platform.
Also, testing takes place at the beginning and end of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Only then will you be able to determine if your custom features are free from bugs and issues.
Benefits of Salesforce Testing
We’ve already discussed the main reason for Salesforce testing. At this point, you must develop a well-defined testing process for your organization so you can swiftly troubleshoot the software every time a major update takes place.
Below are the benefits of setting up Salesforce testing procedures for your business:
Helps developers get the most out of Salesforce
As mentioned, you must get your QAs and your developers on board in the testing process. By getting them involved from the very beginners, developers quickly learn the ins and outs of Salesforce.
From here, they’ll be able to determine their weaknesses with the software and improve on them. At the same time, developers can create better custom features and integrations to help connect the different applications you use for your business into Salesforce and improve your overall productivity.
So, once the next major update rolls, they are more well-adapted to the changes and can implement the fixes to bugs and issues faster, especially on your custom app builds.
Reduces the risk of data leaks
The last thing you want for your organization is to lose the trust of your customers. One of the most common ways businesses lose trust is through data leaks.
A major Salesforce update could cause a data breach, no matter how small the chances are. And the only way for your business to detect this is by having a testing process covering security and hardening issues.
Ensures the software is fit for its purpose
If the major update has put a damper on your sales process due to custom features not working properly, you may have to jump ship to another software that will accommodate all your needs.
A testing process covering all the grounds related to sales and marketing helps you determine if you should continue using Salesforce or if the issues are too much for you and your team to handle.
Types of Salesforce Testing
When testing Salesforce in your organization, you must cover all the necessary bases to ensure that you won’t experience any issues with the platform in the future.
To do this, you must perform the two types of Salesforce testing methods discussed below. Both complement each other and must be used to identify bugs in your testing efforts.
Manual testing
Manual testing involves executing a set of test cases without any intervention from a business process automation tool.
Before starting the test, all requirements, such as affected features, are gathered and analyzed. Next, your team prepares the test cases following the documentation and principles covered in your process.
As you proceed with the tests, you mark each case with a pass or fail grade. Regarding the latter, determine the defect resulting from your tests. Your developers will fix the bugs causing the issues.
Finally, replicate the event that caused the issue and see if the same thing happens. If not, that means your developers resolved the problems.
Manual testing benefits your organization mainly because it tests non-functional requirements such as UI, performance, usability, and more.
Automated testing
Unlike manual testing, automated Salesforce testing requires an automated tool to carry out the test cases.
This testing type allows you to analyze critical functionalities such as website pages, CTA buttons, and variables necessary to your CRM strategy.
Before launching automation testing, you must first define what your automation suite can and can’t do for the test cases. Also, ensure that there are no additional significant updates on the platform so you can run your test cases on the latest and stablest version thus far.
Automated testing is ideal for time-consuming cases because it executes them much faster than manual testing. You can also execute them more frequently so you can test whether changes to one part of your integration affect your existing Salesforce flows.
Your organization can also reduce costs and resources because the majority of the testing process runs using tools. That said, because Salesforce frequently pushes new updates, you will want to ensure that your automation platform of choice does a great job of handling these changes without requiring manual updates. Testim’s smart locators are an example of using AI to improve the stability of the tests even when the objects change.
Conclusion
Salesforce is a powerful CRM platform, but it’s only as good as how you use it. In particular, you have to develop a testing process that allows your organization to adapt to its major updates.
By running a Salesforce testing strategy following the points mentioned above, you ensure that your sales performance runs smoothly and at optimum levels at all times.
Author Bio: Rebecca DiCioccio is the Marketing Manager at Paperform. Outside of work, Rebecca can be found exploring the outdoors or with a book in hand. Rebecca’s background in copywriting and a keen interest in SEO and digital marketing mean she understands the importance of staying up to date with the latest trends in a dynamic and ever-changing industry.
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