Salesforce QA and The Role Of The Team To Accelerate Projects

In any organization, the Salesforce QA team has a lot on its shoulders. Even as development demands accelerate at breakneck speed, QA has to maintain top standards. There are a lot of native Salesforce tools that are indispensable for QA that are native to the platform. However, these need to be coupled with the right organizational structure and end-to-end tools to make reliable Salesforce QA possible at scale.

Salesforce is a platform that serves as the foundation for so many others. Connecting payment gates, commerce sites, marking platforms, and other tools allow enterprises to seamlessly manage experiences for employees and customers. Because of this, QA needs to be able to test inside and outside of Salesforce. They also need to be involved in development at the beginning, rather than acting as a final barrier to delivery.

Salesforce QA Tasks and Capabilities 

The quality assurance team is responsible for all things testing in the Salesforce development process. Alongside the developers, they will cover seven testing types: 

Functional

Unit

Functional testing is foundational, as it's about validating the software meets the specific requirements outlined. There are a number of functional testing opportunities in Salesforce. 

The software is broken into its smallest possible pieces and tested to isolate problems. These tests are often written by developers, but QA should have a role in helping design them and set desired specifications. Salesforce allows users to run unit tests on classes, methods, sets of classes, and entire organizations via Apex Unit Tests. 

Automated

Load

Repeatable actions with predictable outcomes are often automated in a testing environment to improve efficiency. A classic example is regression testing, where you must do many meticulous actions across multiple platforms each time code is changed. Third-party tools support automated testing in most cases, though most are aimed at experienced developers.  

Salesforce load testing is referred to as performance testing, with solutions native to the platform to ensure accurate measurement of throughput, resource utilization, response times, and breaking points.  

Manual

Deployment

This type of testing targets processes not outlined elsewhere that are not repeatable or predictable. The test is adapted specifically for the task at hand. These tests often involve subjective elements: how does the application look? Is it easy to use? Does the design align with our brand? 

QA will handle pre and post-deployment activities, report and aid in prioritizing bug fixes, and ensure backups are in place. 

Security

Security in QA is different from other tests and is often handled by developers. Penetration testing is a common task that seeks to actively uncover vulnerabilities. Salesforce allows organizations to audit within their software, but there is minimal protection as data travels to third-party tools and clouds. Another crucial part of security testing is checking configurations are correct and do not expose data or create vulnerabilities. 

The Salesforce QA team will have to be prepared to work with platforms outside of their own as they develop tests. Even the most basic process, like an e-commerce sale, will require data to travel between Salesforce, payment gateways, shipping vendors, and more. As a result, Salesforce QA teams can not just rely on the tools available natively. They have to go further.  

Shifting Quality Left in the Development Lifecycle

This means involving QA in development as early as possible. In many organizations, QA is the bottleneck at the end of their Salesforce development process. The QA team must clear applications and features before they are released. But with short schedules, there is rarely time for adequate testing. Releases are delayed and defects make it into production. The QA team is stressed by their unsustainable workload. Developers receive feedback too late to implement changes and after they’ve already moved on to other tasks. To fix defects, they have to dive back into an old project and figure out what went wrong — the relationship between cause and effect is unclear.

Integrating QA with the development team helps you design software with quality in mind. Instead of QA coming in at the end, they’re fully involved in the entire process, helping to set specifications, testing, and providing feedback along the way. When there’s a problem, the developers know right away, while they’re still working on the project. Defects can be fixed when they’re small and have few or no dependencies. QA is no longer overwhelmed by a deluge of large releases and unsustainable testing.

However, to support QA’s involvement early in the software development lifecycle, you need tools that allow them to execute frequent, fast tests and maintain test scripts. The more time QA and development teams spend writing and maintaining test scripts, the less time they have to focus on new features and improving processes. 

Automating QA with Low-Code Tools 

To remove the testing bottleneck and free up QA to contribute earlier in development, you need ways to automate Salesforce testing. However, a lot of test automation tools are code-heavy and require an experienced developer or engineer to create and maintain tests. This poses a unique challenge for many Salesforce QA teams. Often, they will include business experts and testers who have more knowledge of business requirements than complicated programming languages. While there may be engineers on the team, overloading them with test creation and maintenance is not sustainable. It also re-introduces gaps in feedback. QA and the engineers go back and forth about test creation to make sure all requirements are met.

The obvious answer is a low-code testing solution. This allows developers and QA professionals to build test cases based on keywords or even screen recordings. These simplified interfaces allow the user to create all the tests they need in a point-and-click approach, while providing access to some coding for greater customization as needed.

Another big problem in Salesforce testing is maintenance. The platform is constantly evolving and offering new things. That innovation has been amazing for businesses that are delivering complex, personalized experiences for customers and employees. However, it creates challenges when it comes to testing. As the platform changes, so do details in the journey. That affects the test case, which in turn affects the test. The QA team would have to go in and update all these tests every single time Salesforce changes to manage this.

An alternative option is AI. An automated testing tool could use AI to fix tests that break as the system changes. If new features cause the journey to change, the program updates along with it. That makes maintenance far more scalable. 

A strong Salesforce QA process is built around a team structure that includes QA from the beginning and gives them intuitive tools that make it easy to automate mundane tasks. With those out of the way, the QA team can focus on more challenging issues requiring strategic approaches. This empowers the Salesforce QA team to accelerate their reviews and speed development overall.