Highlighting the importance of testing during Classic to Lightning migration
Tags: salesforce, classic, lightning, migration
Published: 2022-12-28 17:16:17

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Migration from one enterprise application to another is a critical project which often requires a lot of effort, time, and money. Furthermore, there’s also a risk of business disruption associated with this. That’s why many Salesforce Classic users must be wondering if it is worth it to migrate to Salesforce Lightning. If you’re one such user and wondering the same, this blog is for you. Here, we’ll discuss why you should migrate from Salesforce Classic to Lightning. We’ll also discuss the importance of testing during Classic to Lightning.

What is Lightning?
Lightning is a modern interface that is designed to improve user experience. As it is designed to support mobile technology, it is highly responsive and offers faster and a more intuitive user experience across devices. Apart from interactive user interface, Lightning will receive continuous updates and new features in the form of Salesforce seasonal updates.

Benefits of Classic to Lightning migration
App builder: Lightning comes with a low code app builder that allows users to customize pages using pre-built components. Lightning enables customization with simple drag and drop. Some of the benefits of Lightning app builder include better UI, faster build times, and complete customisation.
Einstein analytics: Lightning comes packed with Einstein Analytics, an analytical tool that empowers business users with actionable insights. With Einstein, business leaders don’t have to juggle around the spread sheets as they can combine siloed information coming from ERPs, warehouses, and log files into meaningful actionable insights.
Personalized dashboards: Using dashboards, users can visualize their reports in one place. Dashboards can be configured using source reports, filters, and components to visualize what you need to as a part of your job. Furthermore, the color theme can also be customized.
New UI: Lightning comes packed with a more user-friendly interface. Leveraging improved flexibility and dynamics in Lightning users can swiftly move to and from desktop to mobile devices.
Since you’re now aware why you should migrate from Classic to Lightning and what are the benefits associated with this, let’s now discuss how you can ensure risk free Classic to Lightning migration.

Lightning readiness assessment
Once you’re ready for Classic to Lightning migration, the very first thing you need to do is “readiness check”. It helps you determine which critical business processes will be impacted, what are potential code issues, and what Classic features which you’re using now will not be available in Lightning. In nutshell, readiness check helps you understand the scope of migration and how much effort it will take to switch over.

Gap analysis
In case you want some process improvement, you need to perform a fit-gap-analysis. Since Lightning provides you an opportunity to improve process efficiency, you can eliminate bottlenecks by incorporating new features of Lightning.

Undergo the migration
This is the most important step as you need to migrate your Classic to a sandbox. As a “safe space”, sandbox allows you to test or experiment with different configurations, set up new apps, or make significant changes to your existing setup to incorporate new functionality. Sandbox allows stakeholders to test new features and offer critical feedback prior to launch.

Test your migration in sandbox
You need to test your custom apps, critical integrations, and reports to ensure critical business processes are working properly. Apart from different types of testing such as functional, security, database, etc, you also need to perform user acceptance testing to determine whether you business users are comfortable with the new change.

Go live
Once your key stakeholders execute different types of testing and give you a go ahead, you can now move to production.

Testing post migration
One of the biggest advantages of Lightning migration is continuous updates in the form of Salesforce releases. Salesforce rolls out updates thrice a year. You need to execute regression testing thrice a year to ensure business continuity.

Concluding
Testing is an integral part of the Salesforce Development Lifecycle (SFDC). Whether you’re migrating from Classic to Lightning or using Lightning you need to perform testing. Manual testing of Salesforce isn’t a viable option as business users are the key stakeholders. Their availability for testing is a big concern. Thus, it is recommended that you should incorporate automated Salesforce testing. With testing as a core, you reduce the migration failure risks, ensure better user experience and adoption of the new Lightning interface.