Salesforce is the number one Cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system 💻 In Layman’s terminology, CRM is basically used to manage the customer data in order to make the relationship better and in order to retain the existing customer. It stores different types of information like sales, details of different products, campaigns related to different marketing techniques, and many more.
There are so many CRMs available in the market like SAP, Salesforce, ZOHO, and many more. But when it comes to selecting or choosing the well-suited CRM, i.e highly flexible and customized at that moment in time, the stats that are available on the internet directly show that Salesforce is still ranked as the number #1 CRM.
Levels of CRM Testing
Like any other software product, Salesforce CRM testing must be performed at different levels, starting from unit testing, integration testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), verification testing, and regression testing 👨💻
As an initial Salesforce developer, Apex is the programming language that is based on the object-oriented principles that allow developers to execute flow and transaction control statements on the Salesforce platform server. Following is the list of different levels of testing in CRM (Salesforce):
Unit Testing
Salesforce unit testing is performed by the Apex developers. The Developer is responsible for writing the needed clauses that ultimately help in testing the overall coverage. Ideally, the minimum coverage should be 75% – only then the Apex code can be deployed to the production environment. If it is more than 75, even better.
System Testing
Testing the system as a whole is known as system testing. System testing requires much more domain expertise. This is the primary reason why system testing of Salesforce CRM is performed by the Salesforce consultants.
User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
Salesforce UAT is a process that lets the Salesforce consultants decide whether the expected release of CRM meets all the required business needs. Only if all the requirements are met, the code can be deployed to the production environment.
Regression Testing
Salesforce regression testing is conducted by the system users (or system testers) for ensuring that the newly developed code and configuration features are not impacting the existing processes in the system.
What is Salesforce UAT?
UAT stands for User Acceptance Testing. It is a very important part of the life cycle in order to ensure that a software application is in a good state to be deployed into the production environment 🔁 Salesforce offers the ability to perform manual testing on its platforms. Manual testing is conducted by a member of your QA team who is familiar with Salesforce’s functionality and the interface.
Basic Key Terminologies of Salesforce CRM Testing
Any person, whether a tester/developer/business analyst etc., must have a basic knowledge of these terminologies that are widely used in salesforce:
Salesforce Objects
The Salesforce platform stores data in relational tables. The records in these tables contain data for the structure of the platform itself as well as user-created data. In Salesforce, objects are sorted into 3 main categories:
- Standard Objects: These are the type of objects that are created for you by the salesforce itself. For example accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, etc.
- Custom Objects: These are the objects created by you based on your business processes.
- External Objects: The objects which you create a map to the data stored outside your organization.
Reports
It is a list of records that meet a particular criterion or condition which gives an answer to a particular question. These records are displayed as a table that can be filtered or grouped, based on any field.
Dashboards
In Layman’s terminology, it is a graphical notation of the reports. It shows data from source reports as visual components.
Why Salesforce Testing is Needed
The main agenda of testing is to boost the confidence in the software so that if the end-user uses the software he/she does not think that it is not working as expected. There are so many reasons as per my experience and knowledge that demonstrate we need salesforce testing:
- Changes in business logics.
- Changes at UI/UX levels.
- Changes related with a third-party and many more.
Therefore, as with any software application, any organization needs to carry out a quality assurance process before releasing its custom-built features on top of Salesforce to the production.
How To Provide the Access of Salesforce to Anyone
By entering the IP address of the desktop/laptop of those individuals to which we want to provide access the whole process is known as IP whitelisting 💡
Consider a situation where you want to access the Org (Say for Example Sandbox). To give you access to an Org, I just need your IP address (let’s say it’s 110.235.234.144)- The process is very simple & clear:
Step 1: Click on the gear symbol which is displayed at the top right-hand set of the screen
Step 2: Select the setup option
Step 3: Type network access under quick find option
Step 4: Input the IP address
What Makes Salesforce UAT Different in Comparison to Functional Testing?
There is no doubt that Salesforce UAT and functional testing both focus on the functionality of the application, but there is still the difference between the two types of Salesforce CRM process of testing 🔍
Firstly, in Salesforce UAT, QA follows a series of testing steps to verify that requirements perform as expected for the end-user. Now, if it comes to UAT, QAs check if Salesforce can support the necessary needs of the business if deployed to the production environment.
Functional testing in comparison tests specific functionality requirements and technical specifications of the application. The reason behind this is that these test cases are not user-focused. A salesforce test plan can receive passing results during functional testing but fail during salesforce UAT testing if the software application does not function as per the expectation.
Conclusion
There is no single doubt about this- Salesforce CRM is one of the leading CRM software(s) used by different types of businesses. It has an active community of huge developers and testers. Salesforce is also not just limited to a CRM, it has its own different clouds like sales cloud, service cloud, Marketing cloud, and many more ✅