Salesforce is, without a doubt, the world’s leading cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. In addition to its numerous advantages, Salesforce can help you understand your customers better and improve their satisfaction, eventually resulting in your company’s growth. With Salesforce becoming increasingly critical, businesses look for more sophisticated and efficient ways to ensure the quality of their Salesforce projects.
Testing plays an essential role. With Salesforce’s complexity and advanced customization capabilities, bugs are likely. The goal is to ensure that before you deploy your Salesforce project into production, you can identify and fix any issues.
User acceptance testing, also known as UAT, is an essential testing type for modern software developers and quality assurance professionals. The general idea is to test the project against actual users and determine if it covers their needs and expectations. This blog post will teach you about UAT in Salesforce, the tools you’ll need, best practices, workflows, and various other topics.
What Is UAT in Salesforce?
To start things off, let’s first cover what user acceptance testing is in general and how it applies in Salesforce. UAT is a testing technique where end users evaluate if an application meets performance standards before it goes live in production. UAT takes place late in the development cycle, and the test cases created are indicative of real-world scenarios. The entire process occurs in a dedicated testing environment where data is the same as what real-world users are likely to encounter.
Considering that one of the essential objectives of UAT is to ensure that the application meets all operational requirements, end users familiar with the application’s business requirements usually participate. Ultimately, based on their feedback, you’ll get a clear picture of your application’s current state, which will help you determine what actions to take next.
Salesforce UAT serves as a means to confirm or deny that a desired Salesforce version meets the business requirements before deployment. UAT should always be a part of your Salesforce testing strategy so that end users can validate whether or not the project satisfies the needs and fulfills specific criteria.
Expand Your Test Coverage
UAT Workflow
User acceptance testing is a multistep process that includes the following:
Planning: The first step is analyzing the business requirements. Knowing the purpose and what you expect to get out of it will help you develop an optimal test strategy. At this step, you’ll define the tools, how many hours you need, the key deliverables, etc.
Preparing test cases: You’ll create test scenarios and test cases based on the requirements from the previous step. These will cover the core functionality of your Salesforce project.
Creating an appropriate testing environment: In this step, you’ll need to set up a suitable UAT test environment that will replicate the production environment and contain real-world data. When the environment is ready, you must train your testers to use them and test the application efficiently.
Running the tests: Once the environment is ready, you’ll execute the test cases you created earlier. All results are recorded, and any issues should be fixed and retested.
Analyzing the outcome: The last step is analyzing the outcome. Then you’ll determine whether the application meets business requirements and can be used in the real world.
UAT Types
Before releasing your Salesforce project, you must evaluate its value and usability. Below are some of the most common user acceptance tests you can implement.
Alpha testing: UAT alpha testing is conducted by an internal team in the developer environment. Developers, business analysts, software testers, etc., are all suitable to participate. This type takes place early, and the goal is to identify issues before the end users test the application.
Beta testing: Beta testing occurs late in the UAT environment’s development lifecycle. The purpose is to select only critical users and allow them to test specific features. The users will provide helpful feedback.
Operational acceptance testing: This type of testing focuses on the application’s functionality. It ensures that critical processes are in place, including data security, maintenance, and performance.
Black box testing: Testers are only given the test cases and the business requirements. They have little or no knowledge of the internal code structure.
UAT Best Practices
Below are some best practices to implement in your Salesforce project and make the most out of user acceptance testing.
Create an efficient user acceptance testing team: You need to decide who will do the testing carefully. Selecting people who are potential users or familiar with your application is essential. The team can have different job roles if their feedback is constructive and unbiased.
Train your UAT testers: Testers should know precisely the goal of the user acceptance testing. The proper guidance and a detailed description of what your testers will test can improve UAT quality. Also, providing guidelines about how to document feedback will ensure consistency.
Be flexible: Test cases have specific steps, but testers shouldn’t be discouraged from slightly deviating from them. They should use the application as they usually would to surface problems the developers didn’t expect.
Maintain clear communication: UAT is an ongoing process, and its success depends on clear and constant communication. Efficient interaction can mitigate misunderstandings and improve UAT quality.
Use helpful UAT tools: UAT testing can be a challenging task. It is highly recommended to use tools that will allow you to simplify the process and increase its efficiency.
UAT Tools
As mentioned above, using tools appropriate for UAT testing can improve efficiency and save you from wasting valuable resources. Here are a few options you can find on the market:
Atlassian Jira Software: Jira is a well-known tool used mainly for project management and issue tracking purposes. Jira can help you determine your business requirements, develop test cases, document issues, and assign tasks to team members. Also, it can help simplify communication between different parties, create reports, and perform other tasks necessary for effective UAT. You can also extend Jira’s functionality with additional tools to meet your Salesforce UAT testing requirements.
Tricentis qTest Platform: qTest is a test management platform that offers several tools essential for UAT testing. It has a user-friendly interface to help you manage all the tasks necessary for high-quality UAT. Furthermore, with qTest, you can easily scale your testing requirements. Lastly, it allows you to integrate with other tools you might be using, like test automation or development tools.
Testim: Testim is an AI-based test automation solution with features to help you deal with Salesforce’s complexity that other automation testing tools can’t match. It enables you to write clean tests, handle Shadow DOM components, and efficiently manage custom objects. Additionally, it offers smart locators for effectively testing dynamic pages and many more valuable features to elevate your Salesforce end-to-end testing success. Click here to learn more about what makes Testim the optimal solution to automate Salesforce testing.
Conclusion
Salesforce is unquestionably the most popular CRM that helps companies run essential day-to-day operations. It’s a holistic solution that allows you to design and enhance your project’s functionality based on your organization’s business needs. To get the most out of Salesforce, performing different types of testing, including UAT, on your projects is essential. It will save you valuable resources and help you improve your business overall.
