Testing Lessons Learned from Complex Salesforce Implementations

Over the years, we’ve had the privilege of working with numerous global financial organizations, helping them meet their test automation requirements during their Salesforce implementation journeys.

As banks and financial institutions strive to modernize and streamline their operations, Salesforce has emerged as a powerful platform. However, implementing Salesforce for complex loan management is no small task. It involves navigating intricate workflows, integrating with legacy systems, and ensuring compliance with stringent regulations.

As a test automation product company, our challenge was to evolve our tool to seamlessly integrate with Salesforce, enabling our clients to reduce their go-to-market time and increase efficiency in change management. Our team has gained valuable insights from working on numerous complex Salesforce implementations. Here are some key lessons we've learned on our journey with Qualitia Boson.

1. Test Early, Test Often

One of the most crucial lessons we've learned is the importance of starting the test automation process as early as the first sprint. In complex environments where processes are intricate and data is sensitive, catching issues early can save significant time and resources. Early test automation allows you to identify and address potential problems before they escalate into larger issues that could derail the implementation.

Lesson learned: Salesforce implementations move quickly, typically in two-week sprints. Testers often have just one day, or if fortunate, two days to complete their testing. Even with a no-code/low-code test automation tool, keeping up with this pace can be challenging. We realized that our clients need a tool that generates Salesforce automation flows automatically, rather than one that requires manual creation.

2. Adapt to Continuous Change

Salesforce is a dynamic platform, with regular updates and new features that can introduce new complexities, especially in customized implementations like loan origination systems. Testing needs to be adaptable and continuous to keep up with these changes, ensuring that your implementation remains stable and compliant as Salesforce evolves.

Lesson learned: Each Salesforce release brings numerous changes across user journeys. Manually understanding and updating test automation for every change across all user profiles is a time-consuming and arduous task. We learned that the test automation tool needs to automatically detect and learn these changes, allowing users to decide whether to accept or reject them. This adaptability is crucial for keeping up with the platform's rapid pace of change.

3. Data Integrity is Critical

The integrity of your data is paramount. During Salesforce implementation, it’s essential to ensure that data is correctly migrated, validated, and tested to prevent errors that could lead to compliance issues or operational disruptions. This requires a robust data testing strategy that includes data cleansing, mapping, and validation at every stage of the implementation.

Lesson learned: A thorough data validation process is essential for ensuring that all data is accurate, consistent, and compliant with regulatory requirements. We realized that this functionality must be built into the test automation tool to ensure data integrity throughout the implementation.

4. Focus on End-to-End Testing

Financial services processes often involve multiple systems, including legacy systems, third-party applications, mobile applications, APIs, PDFs, and Salesforce itself. Ensuring that these systems work together seamlessly requires end-to-end testing that covers every aspect of the process. This includes testing integrations, workflows, and data flows to ensure that everything functions as expected from start to finish.

Lesson learned: Using different test automation tools for different types of applications is not feasible. To validate that all systems and processes work together harmoniously, the test automation tool needs to support a wide range of technologies. This is essential for ensuring a successful Salesforce implementation that meets the quality and compliance needs of your organization.

5. Automation Must Be 100% Reliable

Building test automation is no longer the primary challenge; keeping it relevant and reliable is. Reliability is non-negotiable and critical to ensuring that your test automation works as intended at all times. However, as technology evolves, maintaining automation can become a full-time job, and reliability can suffer. Many clients we’ve spoken to started their automation journey but struggled to sustain it after the first few sprints.

Lesson learned: To deliver 100% reliable Salesforce test automation, the tool needs a robust mechanism for handling dynamic UI elements, shadow DOM objects, and hidden identifiers. It also needs to understand how LWC components are rendered and linked to metadata. Ensuring this level of reliability is crucial for long-term success in test automation.

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