6 Steps to Evaluate the Right Vendor for Your Salesforce QA Services

“Quality in a service or product isn’t what you put into it but what your customer gets out of it.” — Peter Drucker

What stands true for products also applies to Quality Assurance. QA is a proven method of enriching customer experience which, in turn, is a bigger brand differentiator than either price or product. Capgemini’s World Quality Report 2015–16 predicts that software testing will claim 40% of IT spend by 2018.

Salesforce is a popular customer success platform. Because most organizations don’t have in-house Salesforce QA teams, they prefer to outsource the job. But finding a dedicated QA partner that will be an ideal fit for your company, product, and the team takes research and deliberation, especially when the choices are plentiful.
Here are some steps to evaluate your options when you are considering outsourcing your Salesforce testing work:

1. Expertise in Salesforce Ecosystem

Salesforce has its own business processes. The testers who have never worked in Salesforce are more likely to slow down or harm your testing efforts. In contrast, a team of QA professionals who understand Salesforce and its suite of products—Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Community Cloud—will prioritize test jobs and make testing quicker and more efficient.

2. Well-Versed in Manual and Automation Testing (Lightning)

You will need skilled Salesforce professionals to evaluate your instance’s complexity effectively. An outsourcing partner can help you to avail the services of skilled software QA testing professionals with adequate experience and domain knowledge. In addition to being proficient in various types of software testing, professionals have domain expertise and experience with manual and automation testing.

Manual testing is best suited to Exploratory Testing, Usability Testing (Human observation is the most important factor here.), and Ad-hoc Testing. Automated testing is the preferred option in Regression Testing, Load Testing, Repeated Execution, and Performance Testing.

3. Project Management Skills

Salesforce test automation requires proper planning and a very streamlined execution to be successful. You will need periodic reviews, regular status updates, and acceptance cycles.

That means you will need to partner with a vendor who has all setup in place to facilitate this. Other factors:

• Check if they can scale at short notice.
• Find out the number of concurrent projects a team handles and their turnaround time.
• Explore their development process and supporting assets.
• Check the workflow flexibility which is needed to support your Salesforce testing task.
• Assess their risk management and mitigation measures and steps to ensure timely delivery.
• Check out demos and samples developed by the vendor, to assess their competency and ability to fulfill your requirements.
• Assess their quality assurance processes and systems to judge their adherence to quality.

4. Physical vs Emulator/Simulator QA

The Salesforce app is device-responsive but available only via custom means. And that’s where testing on devices (physical) and simulators proves to be of use. You must ensure that the partner excels in physical and emulator and simulator testing. There will come a point (sooner, rather than later) where you will need to test it thoroughly on various devices.

No emulation or simulation can be counted on to precisely duplicate the functioning of real-world electronics. Slight variations in timing, response to changes in temperature or voltage, and unanticipated types of behavior under load can affect software performance. There’s a higher probability that major performance issues or serious bugs will show up only during real-device testing.

5. Know Your Partner’s Team and Solution Expertise

The team of QA engineers, leads, managers, and technical staff to which the vendor assigns the outsourced work should be competent in Salesforce software testing.

You want a team that has done it before and can distill its years of experience and success to complete your project in time while following a series of best practices, accelerators, methodologies, and toolkits. The team also needs to be flexible and willing to work on new tools and technologies. Having these assets will help accelerate your quality efforts and reduce time to market.

6. Salesforce and QA Certification

Quality should be more than just a claim, it should be a commitment. If your partner has Salesforce Certification, you can be confident that the partner not only takes the quality seriously, but they also meet internationally recognized standards. There are several certifications that you can consider in your partner.  

International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB), Certified Software Tester (CSTE), and International Institute of Software Testing (IIST) Certification are a few. Apart from these, if your partner is Salesforce certified, you cannot expect anything better than that.Aforementioned are the key considerations you should pay heed to before handing over your QA services to any of your vendors. After taking all of them into account, out of those who qualify, you can choose an ideal one for your task.

Looking to outsource your Salesforce testing? Check out here now…