Salesforce UAT: Why Does It Matter
Tags: salesforce, uat
Published: 2023-03-09 05:14:28

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Since its launch in 2000 as a contact database, Salesforce has evolved as a great application development platform. Organizations can either use it in standard configurations across marketing, sales, and service  to streamline their business processes or can use its APIs to build custom enterprise applications. Whether you are creating a custom application or implementing standardized Salesforce configurations, user acceptance testing (UAT) is considered as the key to success.

The reason being Salesforce is a great investment for your company’s digital transformation initiative. However, it can only deliver results, if marketing, sales, and service teams embrace it seamlessly. For this, user acceptance testing plays a critical role.

**What is Salesforce UAT**?

UAT is the final round of Salesforce testing that is performed by end users in a sandbox or test environment to validate whether or not the applications can handle necessary tasks in real-world scenarios. Salesforce UAT ensures that it meets end users requirements and specifications. The importance of Salesforce testing can be interpreted from the fact that it provides end users with the opportunity to evaluate applications in real world scenarios. Based on this evaluation, they can either accept or reject the build.

**Challenges in Salesforce UAT**

**Timeframe for UAT**: UAT is the last phase of the testing cycle. Due to delay in the previous phases, UAT teams end up with less time to perform testing. This time crunch often creates problems when it comes to UAT.

**Solution**: Try to incorporate testing at the initial stage of development so that testing cycles keep up with development cycles. This can be achieved by incorporating test automation. As different testing phases are completed within timelines, you will have adequate time for UAT.

**On-boarding the right team**: You can only get the desired results out of UAT if you on-board the right team. At times, organizations on-board functional testers for UAT. However, function testing is different from UAT. The main objective of functional testing is to validate the functionality of an application. If you on-board functional testers, they will end up executing the same tests which they’ve already used in functional testing. It will kill the purpose of UAT.

**Solution**: Salesforce UAT focuses on validating whether apps are supporting the daily business needs. To ensure this, you need to set up a team of actual end-users. Since business users are the ones who are well-aware of critical business processes and will be using applications to accomplish their daily tasks, they can easily verify that applications are ready for production.

**Finding the right tool**: Doing UAT manually can be a very challenging task since it has many moving parts. Documentation, bugs reporting, retesting of bugs, communication with development teams, etc are some of these. Furthermore, UAT is performed by business users whose availability is also a daunting task. Doing this manually for them can be a very challenging task for them.

**Solution**: Since business users are non technical folks, you need to bring in zero code test automation that can be operated easily. The automation Salesforce testing platform should have robust reporting capabilities including snapshots and recording so that bugs can be reported easily. Last but not least, it should support test case documentation.

**Conclusion**

UAT shouldn’t be considered as a bottleneck. For better Salesforce adoption, end users should be encouraged to participate in the testing process. They should be supported with the right tools that alleviates burden on business users.