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Why Do You Need a Salesforce QA?
5 min
20.10.2022
Updated: 19.06.2024
🚀 Imagine your Salesforce project with and without a QA specialist. Can you see the difference? Today we want to talk about QA in Salesforce, the pros and cons, business challenges and gaps in communication, and how to avoid them. The Routine Automation Senior Salesforce QA Specialist and Team Lead Natalia who runs a strong QA team in our company shared her vision in QA possibilities to finish projects with the best results in the end.
A Salesforce QA tester is a specialist responsible for fixing problems faced on the projects, planning and implementing different QA stages, getting into the task to understand it, and figuring out what results the client actually wants in the end.
Firstly, let’s imagine how the real Salesforce development process can be conducted. For example, we have a team of three Salesforce developers and one project manager on our side. In Jira, the project manager creates tickets for developers that should be done. Every ticket includes a description of the work. To do, in progress, and done columns of stages. As a result, the client can see these tasks in a done column on a dashboard and think that the work is finished. But it’s not. In fact, when the task is done, it doesn’t seem to be it. The task is done and gets prepared for testing.
We have the requirements to develop a webpage with buttons, different kinds of users can log in, and others. It’s all described in the task. When the task is finished, it goes into the ‘Done‘ section. But we can be stuck in a situation when the developer has made one and the client required another because the developer doesn’t investigate the client’s problem and just closed the required task, the scope of work was not enough correct. As a result, we may have black & white.
Sometimes there is no description of a task. A project manager fills the ticket based on the client’s information because there is not enough time or the client doesn’t know what actually wants. And as a result, such tickets often go into development with very little information on what to do.
Here comes a QA specialist. It’s a person who can from one side put themselves into the work at the ‘Done’ stage, and from the other side, QA starts from the ‘To Do‘ stage.
Clients wanted developers to test what they already had done by themselves. From their point of view, this is logical. For example, when you cut out a dress you can monitor whether the pattern is correctly done. However, such an approach doesn’t work in development. At least developers use their technical skills to finish tasks in a way that they understood the requirements. That’s it. But it seems to me wrong and illiterate just to hire only a team of developers and a project manager if it’s necessary. Mostly there are gaps between clients’ business, Salesforce development, and developers.
🧩 The more experienced QA, the better results clients can get.
An experienced QA asks clarifying questions to prevent problems at the start of the project. For example, it could be not a correct estimate. At the very beginning, it’s one estimation. We have a little description that can be finished in a couple of hours. Somehow you decide to ask clarifying question, and it turns out there is more description to be done, it’s another estimation.
🧩 The better QA knows the product, the more likely the tester will be able to help. And making the development process more efficient.
Let’s go through the next stages of software development: requirements, analysis, design, coding, testing, deploy. It’s quite possible that such a picture can be in the client’s mind. If such a person thinks that there is so much work to do and maybe there will be no need for testers, developers can manage all issues by themselves, so why should I overpay then? In reality, it doesn’t work like this. A competent QA should be present at each of the stages.
🧩 QA should be more attentive than a developer.
I found a problem, we put the ticket in ‘To Do’ or reject it. In any case, there may be several circles with only one task.
🧩 A good QA is QA plus BA.
If your client already works with a business analyst, there will be only a need for a quality assurance engineer to test tasks finished by a developer. But if we are talking about the opposite situation neither BA nor PM is working, someone should gather requirements. If the requirements-gathering process is correctly conducted, for me it will be easier to make tests. To understand what has been done and what has not.
If you consider BA as a specialist responsible for the analysis and who is an expert in business processes. There is no need to replace BA. But if we are talking about someone who is involved in a project, who can help manage paperwork, create a test plan, can use confluence, update the information, etc. You can delegate these duties to QA.
Thanks, Natalia, for your insights!
