Best Practices for Salesforce Regression Testing

If you’re using Salesforce like millions of other businesses do, then you’ve probably heard stories of the risks involved when you push changes to production, especially when it comes to your customers’ data. This article will discuss some best practices for Salesforce regression training to ensure that you can make changes to your production environment quickly and effectively without risking data.

What is regression testing in Salesforce, and why does it matter?

Regression testing in Salesforce ensures that the system as a whole does not break whenever there is an update, configuration, or deployment in Salesforce. It’s essentially a test of your entire system or the most critical areas of Salesforce. Regression testing may be done manually, but it’s time-intensive, so many businesses use test automation solutions to help speed up the process and ensure that the testing is consistent.

Why you should care about regression testing in Salesforce

As we mentioned above, if there is a change made to your org, it could cause problems with your system as a whole. This means that time spent fixing these issues will cost you money and put customer data at risk.

Regression testing ensures that your system as a whole is working properly and prevents issues from occurring after changes are made to Salesforce.

What are some best practices for Salesforce regression?

1. Conduct an audit before making any major changes

One of the most important things you can do with Salesforce regression testing is to do an audit of your org before making any changes. An audit will help you determine which areas of Salesforce are using the most resources, taking up the most space, and where features are rarely used. This information can help you make strategic decisions about what to keep or delete in your org when you make updates.

2. Exercise your user permissions

Did you know that there are over 150 different types of Salesforce users? It’s important to recognize that each type of user has different permissions. For example, some users might be able to see the data in your org, while others can’t access specific fields or even view particular records. The more diverse the user base is on your Salesforce, the more important it is to conduct Salesforce regression training. In addition, when you update your system, there are user permissions that can affect system access. If you have an audit trail of users and their permissions before any updates are made, then this will make reverting to the previous state significantly easier.

3. Ensure that your Salesforce org is accessible from the internet

In some cases, you may have a Salesforce instance that is only accessible by local employees. While this ensures fewer variables during the testing process, it also means that if your system becomes inaccessible due to an update or change in permissions, then all of your hard work has been for nothing. So take the time to set up Salesforce with the right configuration and ensure it’s accessible from all of your locations, including remote employees or off-site users.

4. Rollback changes when necessary

Backups are crucial for any major instance updates made in Salesforce, but you can’t rely on them entirely. For example, imagine you push out some code changes, and Salesforce is working fine, but then you notice an issue with your data. It’s not showing exactly how it should, so you push the same code again to resolve the problem. Unfortunately, this new update doesn’t work properly either, essentially rendering your org useless. So now you’re stuck trying to figure out how to revert back to the last working version of your code.

5. Ensure that you have a test environment and that it’s similar to your production environment

No matter how thorough your regression testing is, if you’re testing in an environment that doesn’t closely resemble your production Salesforce instance, then you’re not going to get accurate results. For example, you might conduct a test in your local Salesforce instance that works flawlessly. However, once you push the same code to your production instance, there are problems because your org is located on the cloud.

6. Test all of your integrations

When you make updates to Salesforce, it also affects any integrations you’ve created. If you use a third-party app to integrate with your Salesforce instance, make sure that it’s properly tested after any code updates are made. You don’t want to run into errors or problems when using integrations working fine before the update was pushed out.

7. Conduct a sandbox upgrade in between major updates

As soon as you update the production code, it’s live, and the only way to undo this change is through a rollback which can take days or even weeks. The best way to prevent this problem is to do a sandbox upgrade first. A sandbox upgrade allows you to run your updates on Salesforce’s servers without affecting the actual production system. So once you’re finished with your regression testing, perform a sandbox upgrade and conduct another test in your local instance before updating the code in your org. While this may be an extra step, it can prevent headaches in the future.