A Guide to Salesforce User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

Salesforce is a big investment in your company’s success. Salesforce is not simply a tool to manage clients. It’s actually a growth-enabler for your business, improving overall sales efficiency, increasing employee productivity, and reducing time to close. Although Salesforce offers numerous features that can boost business growth, the key to success lies in adoption by end business users. According to McKinsey, 70% of digital transformation projects fail. And one of the main reasons for this high percentage of failure is poor adoption by end-users.

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Read: User Acceptance Testing: The Key to ERP Implementation Success

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‍User acceptance testing (UAT) plays a critical role in addressing this challenge. Salesforce user acceptance testing ensures business needs are met prior to deployment, and gives business users the opportunity to explore the platform within the safe Salesforce UAT sandbox.

In this blog, we’ll explain why Salesforce UAT is so important, and will answer the following questions:

• What is Salesforce UAT testing?
• What are different types of Salesforce UAT tests?
• What’s the difference between Salesforce UAT and functional testing?
• Why is there a need for UAT for Salesforce?
• What are the best practices for successful UAT?

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| See how Opkey simplifies UAT for Salesforce: Schedule a demo!

^{What is Salesforce UAT testing?}

Salesforce UAT is all about testing the platform to confirm that it meets all the business requirements of end users. Here, business users perform a final round of testing to suggest whether or not the system is ready for deployment in production. Basically, Salesforce UAT verifies whether or not the system meets business needs before going live.

^{What are the different types of Salesforce UAT tests?}

• Black box testing: This is performed without prior knowledge of internal workings. An input is provided while testing. Then the output is observed (i.e., how the system responds to expected and unexpected user actions, response time, usability and reliability issues, etc.).

• Beta testing: This is a type of user acceptance testing where the product team gives a nearly finished product to a group of target users to evaluate product performance in the real world.

• Operational testing: This type of testing verifies the operational readiness (pre-release) of an application. It mainly focuses on readiness of the Salesforce CRM, which is supposed to mimic the production environment.

^{What’s the difference between Salesforce UAT and functional testing?}

Both Salesforce UAT and functional testing focus on the functionality of the application. However, there is a slight difference. Salesforce UAT involves verification that the application supports the necessary needs of the business users. On the contrary, functional testing is all about validating the specific functionality requirements and technical specifications of the application. Functional tests are generally functional-requirements focused, not user-need focused. A test can pass during functional testing if the technical functionality works correctly, but will fail during Salesforce UAT testing if they don’t function as expected for the designated user.

^{Why is there a need for UAT for Salesforce?}

Salesforce UAT is the only way to confirm or deny that a desired Salesforce application meets business requirements before deployment. UAT should always be a part of your Salesforce testing strategy so that end users can validate whether or not the project satisfies business needs, and so they increase adoption.

| Read: User Acceptance Testing: Why it Matter

^{What are the best practices for successful Salesforce UAT?}

If Salesforce UAT is not planned and executed properly, it can lead to poor adoption by business users, which negatively impacts ROI.  Here are some best practices for UAT:

• Create a UAT team of real end users : It’s vital that Salesforce UAT testing be carried out by actual end users. rather than a group of consultants. This will prove helpful in testing real-life scenarios, and will also help business users to learn to use the system before it is adopted company-wide.

• Get clear on prioritizing what needs to be fixed: A clear outline of acceptance criteria, severity and priority can avoid unnecessary delays in application release. All stakeholders should have clarity on what issues fall under business-critical categories and need to be fixed immediately as well as what can be deferred.

• Pick the right feedback tools: Dev teams rely heavily on end user feedback when it comes to resolving bugs. Thus, it’s important  that issues are clearly documented and explained in a way that developers can easily understand. To save time, consider empowering your UAT team with an automated feedback tool (like Opkey!) that can streamline manual tasks like reporting and tracking issues.

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Read: UAT Test Automation vs. Manual UAT Testing

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‍^Conclusion

A successful Salesforce UAT program will lead to early bug detection and better adoption. Through UAT, business users will learn their new system and how it will help make their jobs easier.

Since business user availability is critical, empowering them with proper test management tools so they can actively participate in UAT will lead to higher adoption rates and a better Salesforce experience.

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