Why should QA know the business principles of Salesforce?
Successful and responsible businesses do their best to ensure customer satisfaction. Companies are investing a lot of time and effort to satisfy the customer, emphasizing fast and efficient interaction with customers, thereby highlighting the need for effective customer relationship management (CRM) products in the market.
With a large number of CRMs available on the market today, each one provides its own set of benefits. However, Salesforce, the world's first cloud-based CRM, remains the market leader in helping its customers sell, serve, analyze, and communicate with customers in an accessible and smooth way.
Customer relationship management solutions are a must for any growing business. The system allows you to get a deep understanding of existing and potential customers, build close relationships with them and offer them various services. It also provides the insights you need to make data-driven decisions and tools to optimize your forecasting tasks, sales, and marketing, automate your customer support workflow, and more.
After all, CRM helps businesses maximize customer satisfaction and value, increase sales, and resolve customer issues faster.
QA should understand the business principles of CRM - this will definitely facilitate the work of a quality engineer and make their work more focused and accurate.
Why should Salesforce QA Engineer become a Certified Admin?
Salesforce testing requires knowledge of the same techniques commonly used in regular web testing. So why do Salesforce business principles have such an impact on the testing process? Most of the features in Salesforce are the so-called built-in features, which are tailored to the needs of a particular business. And when QA gets to work, it's very important to figure out what the problem is.
Whether this is an error that has arisen due to irrelevant customization, integration capabilities, or lack of business awareness of exactly what features the platform offers or an error that has occurred in the code because not all business needs can be configured and customized. To avoid misunderstandings in the process of working with a client (and development and testing is, if not direct, but still work with a client), QA, as a true quality specialist, requires sufficient knowledge and understanding of the entire platform.
What do you need to know? First of all, at least partially, the direction in which the client works - the domain. Indeed, depending on what the company is doing - be it banking or medicine, or retail or wholesale - the set of standard and custom settings, the use of 3rd party services, security settings, etc. will depend since different companies have different needs in using the platform.
In addition to domain knowledge and basic testing knowledge, you should also know how to build the Salesforce platform itself. This will give a broader understanding of what needs to be configured, how to avoid blockers, and whether to test the correctness of the configuration or check custom-written code.
Many things can be done in Salesforce using point-and-click administration, including automating tasks such as automatically creating tasks, updating fields, and sending emails.
This makes the setup process so interesting that the tester sometimes feels like a real developer, and this is also part of the QA job.
What basic Levels should Salesforce QA engineer understand to start a daily routine in testing?
Like every QA engineer, Salesforce QA engineer should understand the theory, have hands-on testing skills, and clearly understand feature customization. This helps to focus and conduct testing as efficiently as possible.
Salesforce goes through the same software testing life cycle stages as any other program, but it has some peculiarities.
So, what are the levels of testing present in Salesforce:
Unit Testing
Who conducts: Salesforce developers.
They can write, run, and verify test results using the testing infrastructure in Apex, which helps the developer determine code coverage.
Code coverage must be at least 75% to move Apex code to production.
Unit tests use Apex code annotated with the "testMethod" keyword.
System Testing
Who conducts: Salesforce consultants, QA.
They also check the system completely and conduct the so-called end-to-end testing to check the technical process performed in the back-end.
Consultants use several test scenarios based on specific results.
Allows diagnosing a problem using automatic system rules such as flow, validation, assignment, etc.
User Acceptance Testing
Who conducts: Salesforce users who will use the web app in real-time.
Testing is conducted in an environment similar to Production, it can be a partial or full copy sandbox (depending on the needs), and that's why the user sees only those needed elements.
The purpose of user acceptance testing is to eliminate errors that affect the user experience.
UAT is the last level of testing before running the code in production.
Production Testing
Who conducts: both the testing team and end users
This type of testing is mostly performed in a Production environment.
It is similar to system testing: the system is fully tested to ensure that the configuration and settings made by the development team work perfectly in the production environment.
Since testing takes place on a live system, the testing team has to be extremely careful when testing production.
Regression Testing
Who produces: both manual QA and automation QA
After implementing new changes, regression testing helps to check if these new features affect the existing functionality.
The testing team can use automation scripts for regression testing as the system is now stable, and the testing team can assign all recurring automation scripts.
If Salesforce is properly configured, designed, and validated, it delivers value and increases business ROI. Therefore, good and sufficient SFDC testing and a deep understanding of the software application can prevent deployment delays, improve efficiency, and introduce instant success.