Cloud-based systems have captivated people’s minds and achieved a dominant industry position. But developing a cloud-based solution like the Salesforce instance is a complex task. Salesforce projects are developed using Eclipse, making it effortless to be integrated using a plugin. But the Salesforce development lifecycle is not very linear and simple.
To ensure successful development, Salesforce developers must work on many aspects while reducing the possible stress and risks and maintaining faster deployments and development productivity.
The Salesforce development environment is an integrated setup equipped to create Force.com apps using Visualforce, Apex, and metadata components. Unlike any other software development platform, it is built on Eclipse and can be integrated with applications using any plugin.
The most interesting thing about the Salesforce development lifecycle is that all the data is saved on a local and centralized file system, allowing developers to migrate chances only to the source repository and then to Salesforce.
To achieve successful Salesforce development, many actors have to come along and share multiple responsibilities. These specialists involved in a Salesforce development lifecycle are Product Manager, Release Manager, Salesforce Developer, Quality Engineer, and Salesforce Administrator.
Before you get your expected Salesforce project, it goes through numerous stages in the Salesforce development lifecycle. Here we have explained all these stages involved in the lifecycle.
This is the first phase of the Salesforce development lifecycle, which involves gathering, reviewing, and finalizing the requirements for development, which is further shared with the development team for deeper analysis.
Maintain a separate Git repository for your project that includes a default branch, playing the role of the Master branch. The Master branch will store the production metadata. The release manager creates multiple branches for features of the development project to be handled by different Salesforce developers.
Salesforce developers would work on the production in sandboxes, ensuring that the code doesn’t affect the main Salesforce org. Force.com IDE allows connecting sandboxes and retrieving metadata to the IDE. After doing the needed coding, the first level of unit testing will begin.
After finishing the development, the code will go to the testing team. Like the developers, the QA team maintains sandboxes to migrate the code to be tested. There might be a situation when team members only get to test an individual feature. For such cases, they would use Partial Copy Sandboxes. QA team members can also share their sandboxes if thorough testing is needed for some vital features.
The Salesforce development project then reaches further for user acceptance testing. Apart from developers and testers in this testing, other potential users would perform the final testing to verify if the solution is according to the expectation.
Partial sandboxes would be created by the release manager to be used by product managers for testing.
In the last phase, the focus will be on all performance testing. This kind of testing is carried out on intermediate sandboxes, which include all the solution features, unlike partial sandboxes. Rigorous testing and regression testing are performed, and after passing all the levels of testing, the product goes to release.
The entire Salesforce development lifecycle involves a team working on a Salesforce development project, ensuring a highly functional and fully tested solution.
Get a team that efficiently handles the complete Salesforce development. Talk to us and connect with our Salesforce-certified professionals for your next Salesforce development project.
Salesforce ecosystem has grown rapidly among industries, and its maturity is a continuous process. With Salesforce evolving, the solution can become more complex, making quality assurance more important than ever. This is the reason that Salesforce professionals give ample attention to user acceptance testing. When working on Salesforce customization projects, it is important to ensure that solution is free from errors and ready to be used.
When adopting a new Salesforce solution, the key stakeholders must evaluate it. They should provide timely feedback on the overall user experience and if the solution is exactly what they required. To do so, following the best practices of user acceptance testing is important for Salesforce project success.
For any Salesforce customization project, if UAT is not planned and executed right, it can lead to a huge loss when the solution doesn’t work as expected. So the Salesforce team needs to follow the following best practices to ensure a successful testing process.
It is important that the testing should be carried out by the people who would be the super users of the solution. These users have to learn the use of the system before it is adopted by the complete organization.
The selected testers will be the mentors who’ll train the other potential users. So these testers must be picked carefully. Make sure the testers picked are good with critical thinking and can even train others confidently.
The feedback acquired from UAT testing should be documented, with issues explained in a way so that when it is passed to developers it should be unambiguous.
To save time, the UAT team can use suitable feedback tools that can automate and streamline manual tasks like reporting and tracking issues. Such tools allow centrally providing feedback online so the right people can access it.
Take time to give the UAT testers the right guidance and directions, so they should know to test the system. You can also encourage participants to explore the system at their level and take time to learn and evaluate it according to their viewpoint.
When the testers would know system functionalities, they would be able to explore and understand them better, making it likely to find more issues or bugs.
When it is about user acceptance testing, you should always be prepared for any possibility. As more users evaluate the Salesforce system, it is likely to achieve more test case scenarios. With multiple testers, you should be prepared for a whole bunch of possible issues that need to be fixed before the system goes live. Preparing for such scenarios will save you from last-minute surprises.
Good communication between UAT testers and the Salesforce development team goes a long way. It is important to keep expectations upfront and reiterate them as the testing starts.
Keep regular touchpoints like meetings and sessions to track the progress of testers and find out what they have explored so far. Tester communicating to developers will bring clarity of issues, making it easier to fix them.
Having successful UAT testing means that any possible bugs are timely detected and fixed so you can have the final system without any errors. With a trusted Salesforce development team on board, you don’t have to worry about quality assurance at all.
Get highly tested quality Salesforce solutions crafted by the experts. Talk to us to discuss your Salesforce needs.
Being a Salesforce project manager is all about brainstorming, scheduling, planning, and monitoring Salesforce projects running in an organization. Salesforce project managers should be efficient in communicating both in technical and non-technical terms. They are the ones who need to ensure that projects are completed according to the mentioned specifications within the planned budget and time frame.
When it is about Salesforce implementation, all we hear about is Salesforce consultants, developers, and analysts. But to handle the Salesforce team, it is necessary to have a project manager. A project manager has a lot of responsibilities, whether the project is for Salesforce implementation and development, and no team can be complete without having one.
Managing any project within the Salesforce instance would require a proper set of skills that project managers should have. There’s no denying the fact that being a Salesforce project manager is a tough gig. Being the head honcho of the project, you would be having numerous responsibilities on your shoulders.
A project manager has to wear many hats and should be completely familiar with the Salesforce instance. We have listed some of the major responsibilities of Salesforce Project Managers when it is about handling any project.
Before starting with any project, an ample amount of time needs to be given to discovery and requirement gathering. This is something that the project manager will handle. Salesforce project managers are required to participate in client discovery sessions, working along with a technical team to identify a suitable solution for the client.
From team enablement to sprint planning, all the tasks fall in the bucket of project managers. They need to confirm the technical team that will be skilled enough to handle a Salesforce project. After planning the team, the project manager would prepare different project phases while preparing an agile project management approach for incremental development and implementation.
While the focus of the project manager would be on project success and delivery, the need is to put equal emphasis on risk management. They need to timely identify and mitigate risks by using strategies to minimize any impact on the project.
Project managers should work on preparing schedules for projects and create status reports, and change orders accordingly. They should be able to report the internal management team assigned on the project about the project status, and also escalate issues where needed.
While handling reporting, project managers should also be good at performing forecasting on Salesforce for project resources to achieve project completion.
Salesforce project managers need to stay updated with client requirements, so they could build and maintain effective day-to-day relationships with them. The need is to ensure client satisfaction for which, the team should be able to understand what the client wants. A project manager would also be responsible to provide support to clients throughout the Salesforce project and also managing the post-implementation process.
With so many responsibilities of a project manager, the professional you hire must be certified and have experience with Salesforce implementation with different industry verticals.
Talk to us and find out how our project managers are well-qualified for your upcoming projects and can provide you the right guidance and successful implementation.
Anyone who had used Salesforce would be aware of its benefits to the companies. A business has a lot to handle, whether it is about handling diverse customer data, collaborating with different departments, or improving customer experience. There is a lot that can be handled with long-term Salesforce projects.
Salesforce development projects can help empower sales, marketing campaigns, and customer services, building solid long-term relationships. The exceptional capabilities of Salesforce can help businesses achieve improvement in ROI.
Businesses have started adopting Salesforce to handle development projects and to make them successful for the long term. We have listed here some points that justify the importance of opting for long-term Salesforce projects.
The main advantage of Salesforce relates to information retrieved and handled by it, both in terms of quality and quantity. When you use Salesforce, you can look at every individual contact, task, and opportunity related to a lead, giving a company a lot of information related to its customers.
Here are some reasons why Salesforce projects are important in terms of handling information:
With customer information at their fingertips, representatives can make plans for accounts independently. This provides a hands-on approach needed by the team to connect with clients, allowing them to modify their plans if needed, to achieve better results.
Long-term Salesforce project success is achieved as the platform allows better collaboration of the team members and even different departments. Salesforce includes the Chatter, a feature that lets you talk with individuals or groups about work.
With Chatter, you can add different team members to accounts needing special attention. This kind of collaboration makes it easy for your team to prioritize and schedule their tasks so you can make better decisions to finalize sales.
Salesforce provides you with comprehensive customer information and a wealth of planning resources at your disposal, which provides the benefit of outstanding time management. It provides you will all the needed information that helps to prioritize work for your clients. This ultimately helps to organize tasks for different accounts according to the same criteria.
Handling long-term projects with Salesforce can provide you with built-in calendar tools to visualize your schedule for the day or week in a better way.
Salesforce is a complete package that allows a team to handle all segments of a project, from tracking activities to measuring results. You need someone well-versed with all Salesforce functionalities and use the platforms efficiently to handle projects.
Get in touch with our certified Salesforce implementation partners and know more about how to derive all benefits of Salesforce CRM.
Every company sees Salesforce as a game-changing solution to improve business efficiency and speed up productivity. But that’s only possible if the Salesforce implementation project is a success. Along with setting clear goals and aligning Salesforce with business objectives, there are several tips for Salesforce project success that should be followed to implement the platform.
Numerous factors influence the success of Salesforce. Salesforce implementation services are aware of all these factors and tips for Salesforce project success.
A business can achieve a lot of improvement in its sales processes and productivity with successful Salesforce implementation. Here we have listed some tips for Salesforce project success that will help a business achieve its goals smoothly with Salesforce.
For a successful Salesforce project, several business processes need to be re-designed, and the Lead to Opportunity process is the most important one to focus on. Not making efforts on re-designing can result in confusion, ambiguity, ultimately Salesforce project failure.
To achieve salesforce project success, you should focus on these points to re-design your Lead to Opportunity process.
If users are not able to engage with the system, then no matter what functionalities it includes, the Salesforce project will not be a success. That marks the importance of user adoption to make sure the project is a success.
These are the steps that will help to achieve user and platform adoption and a successful Salesforce project:
Companies invest in Salesforce mainly to get visibility of the sales pipeline and performance.
Yet often, they end up failing to implement dashboard charts and sales reports that help gain maximum visibility of sales processes and results.
It is important to install the right set of dashboards to improve the sales process by getting:
Without the dashboards providing the information, sales managers are flying blind. Visibility of all the processes is what ensures Salesforce project success.
Targets are the main focus for sales representatives. There won’t be a salesperson worth the salt who doesn’t measure performance against the target every month. But quite often, the sales performance and its target are not tracked within Salesforce, which brings its usefulness down.
You should include target tracking directly into your system that will act as one of the most helpful tips for Salesforce project success. Remember that the target tracking mechanism should reflect both historical performances and future potential revenue. In other words, you should be able to compare pipeline and weighted pipeline concerning the target for next month.
Every business has a myriad of data related to leads, contacts, customers, current and past opportunities. Currently, this data may be in your legacy system, but to successfully move to Salesforce, you’ll have to import your data. As you import your data, you must consider cleaning it, removing any unnecessary or duplicate data.
Here we have listed some benefits of data cleaning before importing it to Salesforce.
Organizations implement Salesforce to achieve strategic and compelling benefits for business, improving the way of generating leads and handle data. All these expectations with Salesforce would be achieved only if it is implemented successfully.
To ensure Salesforce success, you need to consider hiring certified Salesforce experts who know their way through the platform. Contact us for any queries related to Salesforce or to know more about our services.
