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hello and welcome thank you for joining us today for the webinar the do's and don'ts of salesforce qa testing my name is diana i'm with crm science and i'm excited to see you all here um in today's webinar we'll go over some of the key aspects of successful qa testing but first on the next slide i want to do a quick call to action there's a lot of information for you to take in here i know that but i want to make sure that everyone on the call today knows how to stay in the loop um of all the content in salesforce tips and tricks that serum science puts together uh we present webinars on a regular basis we write a lot of blog posts and we present sessions at conferences obviously all of those are virtual this year but the easiest way to get access to our insights is to follow us on social media and if you look towards the bottom of this slides i've included our social media handles as well as the link to our website so stay tuned on those channels next i have some light housekeeping um there are a lot of people on the call today so all of you are muted uh john if you can move to the next slide thank you yeah but um we do encourage you to ask questions and you can use the zoom control panel for that the q a feature is there to ask any question you'd like we will answer your questions towards the end of the webinar and if we don't get to your questions we can always reach out to you via email after the webinar and then lastly we are recording this you will be receiving an email uh in the next couple of days with the replay as well as a pdf of the slides and with that i'd like to introduce you to john chen who will be uh presenting the rest of this webinar and just a quick mic test that it's working yes we can hear you awesome so thank you everybody for uh joining whether you're here live or watching the recording especially those of you who might be taking time out of your vacation i know this is a popular time so as diana said my name is john chen i am a sales force analyst here at crm science and have been for about five months now and kind of the way this came about was that i was finding on a day-to-day basis i was doing a lot of documentation and quality assurance and i wanted to share some of what i had been learning with others that weren't doing it as often and so uh it was recommended that i read a blog post about it uh which i did and uh if you are a game of thrones fan i would recommend you to read that uh there are certain references in there but also uh we did an internal webinar last week and now today we're extending that sharing to the community so i hope that no matter what role you're in whether you're a salesforce developer admin uh or somewhat new to the salesforce ecosystem i hope there's something new that you can gain here today so a quick run through for today's agenda i'll be addressing what i see as a common problem or misperception of qa why and when qa is appropriate i'll run through my 10 do's and don'ts and bear in mind that this isn't an all-encompassing list you know a to z what qa consists of these are merely you know tips and tricks that i've picked up and that i thought it might be beneficial for others to hear and then uh we'll also end with some qa q a so first i wanted to kind of address uh the the fact that qa is easily overlooked during planning and during a project uh there's not usually a whole um a whole a lot of time allotted to what's going to go into qa and and so if you would humor me by imagining this conversation playing out at your organization possibly so the stakeholder asks and will you do qa testing before you finish the project project manager responds qa oh sure we'll do that stakeholder says moving on to training and the project manager pulls out their clipboard whether physical or virtual and mark's qa off the checklist and and this is what i mean by having qa be an afterthought it's i i think this kind of conversation uh whether we want to admit it or not it happens a pretty common place uh in our industry where there's not you know a lot of strategic planning going into uh quality assurance and and there's no real expectations but i want to challenge us today to break out of this mindset and think of qa as a critical part of any project lifecycle i really believe that qa is what we make out of it and also i think it's a maybe lesser known fact that uh creed is the quality assurance director at dunder mifflin and i like what he's saying here one does not simply assure quality it isn't just a simple task so time for a pop quiz and we should have the pull functionality enabled so the question is you know this is kind of a generic project life cycle we have project kickoff to discover to design build validate and deploy but where in the cycle does qa belong where do you think it should go and i have four numbers four options for you there so there should be a poll that you can respond to looks like there it is so i'll give you a minute to choose between the four options all right i cannot see if the answers are coming in but maybe a few more seconds yep 80 has voted okay so i'll end the poll now so i can't see their responses but i'm guessing a lot of them oh there they are so a lot of you said three and four some of you said two and one so it's a trick question qa should be done throughout the project life cycle uh and this goes back to kind of the mentality i i don't see qa as a once and done uh planning designing and executing qa testing isn't just limited to uh what we refer to as the q and q a phase during planning so you know back here in the discovery phase q a qa testing strategy should be formed and while a lot of you know qa will be done during validation there should be a good amount of groundwork that's laid to prepare for a smooth qa process so so it is a trick question you know qa should really be a part of just about every uh every stage in the life cycle so moving on to the ten dudes and don'ts and i'm sure many of you are familiar with this quote attributed to ben franklin if you fail to plan you are planning to fail fun fact the liberty bell is probably seven miles uh east of where i'm sitting right now since we are based out of philadelphia but i would actually add a twist to this in terms of qa so planning is definitely really important but you actually need to plan to fail in qa so number one is do plan for failure and what i mean by plan for failure is that qa is meant to be you know not something that's really easy to pass issues should arise and that should be the expectation that qa will have questions and issues coming up and again it requires rigorous testing uh in order to have a high quality end product uh come out of the qa phase there needs to be comprehensive testing and you'll probably hear me use the words rigorous comprehensive quite a bit today and then there are no dumb questions so uh all the members of the project team especially the builders and developers they should be welcoming questions all good questions are good questions because as we know how the solution works is not always the same as the expected behavior and qa testers they're you know putting themselves in the use the shoes of the users and they might ask you know why does this button bring me to the home page when i expected me to bring me here well if these kinds of questions aren't encouraged and asked then those issues won't be exposed and the user experience will suffer so asking accepting questions are highly crucial i would say to to high quality qa so number two don't ask the builder to test so we before we go any further i can't claim credit to uh this comparison of of developers in farmhouse animals is actually one of my former tech leads that used to say uh this phrase pretty often he said you know asking a builder to test his or her own solution is like asking a fox to guard a hen house uh and what he was getting at was that you know builders they know for the most part how to pass their own solutions and they likely probably know how to how to make the bill but if they're not sadistic developer they'll make it pass so this is a real conflict of interest it'd be like you know asking a tobacco company to sponsor a study on the health effects of smoking you know once you find out they're the ones backing it you you are right to be wary and i think the same applies but it actually happens all too often uh in salesforce and any software you know development projects where the builder is the one testing their own products and that is it's sort of a cardinal rule so i would have expected many of you to hear it before um but to add to that it's not much better to ask the builder how to test because you know if you get the exact same test steps you're you know pretty much going to expect the same result as if the builder was doing it themselves so instead of being a puppet i would encourage you to go back to the requirements uh understand what the problem is that's being fixed and think for yourself you know what the best way to test the feature or the solution will be number three do map user stories to test cases so this is actually something that i found uh was really beneficial because when i when whenever we would do discovery uh there would you know as it typically happens user stories come about uh and then i was having trouble with uh you know of course these are documented but then usually it's stored away for later uh but how do you ensure that these are covered by your future testing uh these user stories and so what i started doing is to actually map out visually the as you can see the user stories on the left and the test cases that are covering those user stories and then of course with any project there will be changes uh if you know things will be added to the scope or things will be changed to phase one or phase two but you can always go back to the testing document and update it uh as it evolves and and when you actually reach qa it saves a bunch of time because you don't have to go back and dig up those initial requirements and if you've been updating it the whole time then you know that you know the test coverage will be there so there's a lot of tools to achieve this um draw.io is a free one out there but even if you're not doing it visually i would encourage you to keep track in something like excel or google sheets and i really do think it will help save time and it's worthwhile number four don't get lost in smoke testing so what do we know about smoke testing we know that it's meant to be light and basic it's also known as build verification testing so it's really meant to just cover basic functionality of a product so it's asking questions like are the main functions working is it stable i think how the term originated was from hardware testing so is it smoking literally but smoke testing is not a replacement for qa by nature is non-exhaustive and qa is very exhaustive but that's not to say qa or smoke testing i should say it doesn't serve a big purpose it actually can find uh and expose major problems early on so you know whether smoke there's fire if something is smoking uh then you know that there's major functionality you have to go and fix um but i would say qa is more like finding those small embers uh the sparks that could cause a fire to eventually break out if it's not caught but it's really looking in those finer details so you know basically qa testers are preventing fires and saving lives number five so number five is do document organize and repeat so many of you can probably relate to the cat in this picture dreading to start writing documentation but as somebody that does it on a daily basis here are some best practices i try to stick to documentation should stand on its own uh well-written testing documentation shouldn't need an additional explanation and really if you send it out to any project a team member they should be able to understand it well enough to use it to tests and to perform test cases also it when in doubt write the test steps and the documentation for a non-technical audience and of course this will change if you know the exact audience and can tailor it to them but i would always encourage you to you know not assume that there's a lot of salesforce knowledge from the end users that there aren't necessarily developers or you know very familiar with automations and salesforce process builders flows etc i would always err on the side of giving them more background and detail and context and error on the side of granularity so it actually is a delicate balance between being really straightforward and easily read and highly detailed and then when you use a naming convention pick one that's consistent unique and identifiable so i tend to like the semantic versioning which is kind of like software versioning i use it where you're doing 1.0.1 as major.minorfeature.user but there's a lot of really good naming connections out there as long as it can be uniquely referenced and it's consistent and identifiable those are the main things document early and update often so i referred to this earlier but it's always easier to start something and add on update periodically rather than wait until the end for all you procrastinators out there and it becomes kind of a mountain of a task so try to start as early as you can and update as things change or as more test cases are written and then copy trailhead so trailhead i am assuming everybody knows but it's i think widely considered the gold standard for documentation and walk-through guides and i think as a whole it's actually brought salesforce a ton of value uh over the years but there's you know things that still trail head does really well and this is just a snip bit but you can see you know on the side there are you know a table of references and there's you know the way that they're formatting and building and calling out and writing really detailed steps and you know of course it a lot goes into the actual writing of the each trill but taking you know what you can borrowing some of these tips and how to create it's really about creating a good user experience even in the documentation for those end users number six don't stick to one type of testing so in the word cloud you'll see a bunch of testing types this is actually just a small sample there's if not a thousand probably hundreds of different types of software testing out there and so i would encourage you don't stop after a single test passes we shouldn't be testing something in order to make it pass we should be testing it for failure think like your grandma so this is something i've heard of which is really to stress you know if you're simulating real world usage and multiple scenarios and multiple users think about you know somebody in your life maybe it's your mom or your grandma that's a little bit less tech savvy than your average user and how would they go about using an application and what kind of things would they struggle with so and this is uh related to things like chaos testing and uh you know monkey wrench testing sometimes it's called and then get familiar with the many many types of testing so learn how you know each is utilized what you know the purpose of each is and when it's appropriate to use and then when you're actually again during the planning phase doing um you know planning out how you're going to test and qa these testing methods should be defined based off of the scope and requirement to the project so as an example if you have a salesforce org with 5000 concurrent users there should probably be some element of performance and peak load testing to make sure that your sandbox is you know the type of testing that you're doing is going to translate into real world success in production number seven do prepare sufficient test data so test data is one of those things where it can be kind of assumed that it will get done and we will be ready uh but the the point i want to make here is that it's not always the same person or party that's responsible and so it's it's really important to assign the task of test data preparation early on uh give the party plenty of time of notice and then review the data requirements with them the testing will only work as well as the test data matches production data so consider some of these um criteria the volume of the data again if you have large volumes for things like performance testing variety of data testing all different kinds of use cases there are data dependencies for salesforce you know of course you have to import parent objects before child objects like accounts before contacts and opportunities pi data compliance and knowing um what regulations are out there to remain compliant as so masking or even removing personally identifiable information is common practice and then including both valid and invalid inputs and we'll actually talk about this in just a little bit so the main point is don't let test data cause delays don't make the mistake of assuming that the test data will be ready you know check in periodically during the project number eight don't rely 100 on robots uh so testing automation has actually come a long ways from uh when it first started and it can be something that's uh highly beneficial as a complement to manual testing uh i would say it's not an end-all be-all for qa testing at least not right now there are many strengths of automation things like performance testing integration or regression testing but right now there still is the need for manual qa testing and it's important to know those situations and in some circumstances it can actually be more cost efficient people think of automation as uh as being you know cost friendly but you have to think of you know the time and effort that goes into the training writing the actual test scripts and so forth so manual qa testing still needed for usability chaos testing exploratory testing etc and again right now human intelligence is still needed for every project automation is not necessarily it depends on the the skill uh if it's already in place in an organization um and and that's to say that's not to say that we're not getting it to a point with ai where in the in this you know the very near future it may be able to write their its own test scripts and you know learn from its own behavior machine learning but i don't see that happening you know as of right now and then i wanted to also you know use this example wally in the pixar movie he was programmed to clean trash so he had a really specific task he wasn't given the task of driving the spaceship or anything out of you know that scope and so i think the same applies to using automation correctly you know use it for its strengths and don't use it where it doesn't doesn't work as well number nine do negative testing so in this day and age testing negative has sort of a different meaning but here we want to focus on testing for the negative and the idea is you know every time a test is passing it's going through there's at least you know one if not five negative tests that can be done so negative testing includes things like testing for blank normal values invalid characters exceeding a character limit deleting the defaults and actually a good example of this is one of our clients is a retirement community and we've set up a screener app so that every visitor that's coming in especially you know during this time with kobe 19 has to report their body temperature so that it's taken on site and if the temperature is out of the range so if you you know say you're 50 degrees or 120 degrees something absurd then it will rightly populate an error and so that's an example of negative testing that is performing correctly number 10 don't rush the process so proper allocation of time for qa is really important and it's worth the time that it takes it's not worth it to skip out on qa you know we've all been there where a deadline is coming up and it it seems like qa is a natural fit for getting you know rushed or uh you know to skipped out on a completely sometimes but i believe that you know it is worth the time that it takes and especially with rapid release cycles and you know sometimes multiple sprints happening in a week i think as long as the planning and the expectations are there and they're set from the start it can still co-exist with uh proper qa you know qa testing isn't something that should be done very quick and dirty and again smoke testing itself is not enough qa is a team sport and the reason for that is that you know quality should be a team goal it shouldn't be all on the qa tester to do all the qa or be solely responsible for you know finding all the bugs there should be that team mentality where you know all the stakeholders involved in the project two varying levels should be involved in qa and then you know as the slogan says you know trust this process and you know unfortunately the sixers didn't do too well in the playoffs this year but uh the i think the slogan still rings true and qa is the last line of defense before the users get their hands on it so this can actually affect adoption because if the users are the ones finding bugs and errors uh the first couple times to get their hands on it they are less likely to actually adopt the the product even if it's you know highly valuable to them and can save them a ton of time if they're finding you know it doesn't do what they expect where there's just a lot of bugs then it's less valuable to them so those are the do's and don'ts i'll give you the slide summary and uh there will be a time for questions and i actually i wanted to highlight a few resources that i use that i think might be beneficial so there the top one is my blog post so if you haven't read it um feel free to and then there's also the an introduction guide i believe this is salesforce ben's blog to uh regression testing so if that's a new concept for you i would encourage you to read that and then reviewing the different types of software testing that was a good comprehensive explanation where i learned about different types of testing that i didn't know about before so now we come to the q a so if you have questions or you know anything to add to uh any of my tips any feedback i'm always open to you know hearing your thoughts and we already have a few questions that have come in uh one of them is you mentioned giving enough time for qa testing what do you think is a healthy ratio of development testing time healthy ratio that's kind of a loaded question but i think i cracked at it so that's i think i think it is highly dependent on the project and or the specific organization we talked about automation being used i think it's also depends on the complexity of the requirements but in general somewhere between 15 to 25 of the entire project should i i think is a good starting point to dedicate toward qa so that means uh you know maybe about 50 percent of the project is dedicated to the build time or development so uh perhaps you know a two to one ratio in that case but i've heard of companies like microsoft in the past doing you know one-to-one qa testing whether it's one-to-one developer to a qa tester or just the amount of time allotted so i think it really depends but that baseline is somewhere between 15 to 25 okay another question is how often should regression testing be done every sprint regression testing and that is actually a really good question because uh it goes back to um you know how much time and how much planning has been a part of it at the the initial stage of the project but you know sometimes it's not reasonable to do full regression testing on you know every single uh release but i think if it's automated then that should be reasonable every every sprint but if it's manual every time i would suggest uh perhaps every major feature release or if you can see that a new release is touching on many different parts to the organization of the deployment then i think it would be a good case to do full regression testing so that again is case by case um this one is interesting as well how do you prove the value of qa how do you make time for it when a project is already behind schedule yeah so that's kind of the uh million dollar question how do you prove the value to the business stakeholders um and i think one good indicator that you can always point to is that you know say you skip you skipped out on qa or you cut it short for a previous project and a lot of the the bugs and issues were risen up you know later on i think being able to point back to either projects where there wasn't enough qa time and those kinds of bugs came up or uh on the you know positive side where there was a good amount of time for qa and that didn't happen but i think it's always worth referencing you know possibly it's project that those stakeholders may have been involved in the past and you know they can see whether uh it was a success or if there had to be a lot of retooling afterwards but referencing that and you know having that be you know the kind of value uh to show you know this is what qa is doing and that's what we expected to do and then someone is wondering what you refer to when you said chaos testing can you provide an example sure so chaos testing i'm not going to provide an exact definition but it's um it's basically uh taking the approach where you're you're doing everything possible to try to break you know a uh a product so you're not clicking through necessarily logically uh maybe you'll hit the back button three times um right click and and do a lot of stuff where you know normally this isn't uh typical behavior but you want to see if you can you know break uh break the design break you know how a product or future has been built so hopefully that gives a little bit of context yeah we have a lot of questions i'm not sure if we're going to get to all of your questions um but this is a good one if you take over an existing org how do you get started with rolling into a qa process yeah so uh i think that is difficult i'm assuming it's taking it over to org where there hasn't been much qa done in the past and so actually i think uh have a little bit experience with that you know you have to start somewhere so whether you start with you know full regression test scripts of you know these are all the functionalities uh in you know the product or uh the org or you start smaller you start you know segmenting out you know these are some of the major uh functionalities that we want to make sure any new uh new releases are not breaking you know that's the whole purpose of christian testing but i think it's about breaking it up into manageable chunks and you know this is goes back to the you know start early and update often um and if it's you're already you know kind of brought into something i think yeah just making that as manageable as possible with breaking it up you know deciding which you need to write regression steps on now which maybe it's certain features are more directly related two new features coming in and then going back and adding when possible um all right let's do one more question and then if we didn't get to your question anyone um who's still here we'll make sure to uh to reach out to you after the webinar but the last question i think we can take is um what steps would you take in evaluating a good automated testing tool as it relates to your company sure good automated tool i actually haven't done a whole lot in testing automation i know there's you know good products out there like selenium but i think as with any software evaluation it's about how how good of a fit is for your use case and your for your future use cases so uh maybe there is a product that hits you know 10 out of 10 and has a lot of bells and whistles but it's also you know prohibitively expensive and there's another product out there that can uh do you know some of those same things but at a lower cost and you're not necessarily going to take full advantage of those bells and whistles um so i i think you know taking that into mind you know any software evaluation but the in terms of the automation itself you know some i would make sure you look at how the training curve is for creating those test scripts and writing the the programming and how much maintenance is is going to be needed to be done these are all things that you know are going to add up and be added cost because it's going to take up time and then you know obviously if the qa tester is not the decision maker which is probably the case but they should be highly involved in the process and actually be you know test test running you know a bunch of these their feedback should be be heard thank you john for answering all those questions um we are going to wrap up for today um like i said if we didn't get to your question um john and i will take a look at it later today um and reach out to you to answer your question um thank you so much for joining us um like i said we'll um we'll make sure to send the recording to you send a pdf of the slides to you so you have access to all of the links and resources that john shared over the next four over the past 45 minutes and of course feel free to share it with your co-workers who couldn't be here today so again thank you for joining and we hope to see you again next time take care you