10+ reasons why testing your Salesforce applications is essential

Worldwide, over 150,000 companies rely on Salesforce for business-critical operations such as sales, marketing, or customer service. Given its critical role in business success, ensuring that Salesforce applications function correctly is not just a best practice — it’s a necessity.

However, Salesforce environments are highly dynamic. Frequent updates, extensive customizations, and numerous third-party integrations mean that changes can introduce unexpected issues. Without a strong quality assurance (QA) strategy, businesses risk data corruption, workflow disruptions, security vulnerabilities, and performance bottlenecks.

Let’s explore a couple of reasons why your Salesforce implementation requires testing, and some best practices for how to optimize or implement a testing strategy.

1. Ensuring business continuity

Salesforce applications are often, if not always, mission critical. Any disruptions — such as broken automations, inaccurate reporting, or system crashes — can directly impact business operations. Rigorous testing helps prevent such issues, ensuring that workflows, dashboards, and integrations continue to function without interruptions. Mind you, we’re not suggesting you always need to test everything. We’re proponents of (if not the creators of) a risk-based testing approach, meaning prioritizing tests that are either closely linked to key business processes or capabilities that were changed by the release — not running the full gamut of tests you may have accumulated over time.

Read more in our white paper on 3 savvy strategies for speeding up Salesforce testing.

2. Preventing data loss and corruption

Salesforce stores vast amounts of customer and operational data, making data integrity a top priority. A single bug in a workflow, Apex trigger, or data migration process can lead to duplicate records, missing information, or even full-scale data corruption. By implementing thorough data validation and integrity testing, organizations can safeguard their information and maintain reliable records.

3. Seamless integration with other systems

Salesforce rarely operates in isolation — it is often integrated with ERP systems, marketing automation tools, customer support platforms, and other third-party applications. These integrations need continuous testing to ensure data consistency and functionality. If an integration breaks, it could result in failed transactions, incomplete customer records, or operational inefficiencies. Integration testing plays a pivotal role in ensuring seamless connectivity and functionality between these different applications. Organizations rely on end-to-end business processes, and you can’t afford to drop the metaphorical ball due to faulty integrations.

4. Maintaining regulatory compliance

Industries such as finance, healthcare, and retail must adhere to strict regulations, including GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX. Ensuring Salesforce compliance means testing security controls, audit logs, data access permissions, and encryption methods. A robust QA strategy helps businesses avoid regulatory fines and ensures that sensitive customer data remains protected as it moves around in Salesforce and through to other applications or systems.

5. Reducing downtime and performance issues

Performance bottlenecks, slow response times, and system crashes frustrate users and reduce productivity. Salesforce applications often process large datasets, complex queries, and high user activity, which can impact system performance. Load testing and performance testing ensure that the platform remains responsive even under peak usage conditions. The promise of Salesforce has always been around speed and simplicity — a good testing strategy ensures your business users get the customer experience they deserve and in a timely fashion.

6. Enabling smooth customizations and updates

Businesses often customize Salesforce to fit their specific needs by adding custom objects, workflows, and Apex code. However, changes to customizations can introduce defects. A focused regression testing strategy — free of bloat or redundancy — ensures that new updates, configurations, or modifications do not break existing functionality, maintaining system stability and user experience.

7. Enhancing user experience (UX)

User adoption and customer experience are both key to Salesforce success. If employees find the system frustrating due to broken workflows, slow performance, or inconsistent interfaces, they are less likely to use it effectively. By conducting usability testing, businesses can ensure that dashboards, reports, and automated processes are intuitive and efficient for end users.

8. Minimizing costs of fixing defects

There is a well-known truth among quality assurance teams and leaders: the earlier a defect is caught, the less costly it is to fix. Bugs found in production can lead to significant financial losses, rework, and damage to customer trust. Implementing proactive (shift-left) testing during the development and deployment phases prevents costly errors from reaching end users.

9. Keeping up with Salesforce’s three major updates per year

Salesforce releases three major updates annually — Spring, Summer, and Winter. While these updates introduce new features and improvements, they can also impact custom applications and integrations. Continuous testing before and after each update ensures that critical functionalities remain intact.

The same principle applies to the updates performed by applications from third-party vendors that you bought through the AppExchange. Over 91% of Salesforce customers have at least one app from the AppExchange. Each vendor has its own timeline for updates and testing these updates requires constant vigilance.

10. Avoiding customization conflicts

Organizations frequently extend Salesforce’s capabilities with custom workflows, Apex code, and third-party applications. However, these customizations may become incompatible with new Salesforce releases. Compatibility testing ensures that all custom elements continue to function correctly with each update.

11. Validating mobile and multi-device compatibility

Salesforce users access the platform from various devices, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Testing ensures that dashboards, forms, and workflows are fully responsive and provide a seamless experience across different screen sizes and operating systems.

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12. Optimizing AI and automation features (Einstein AI, Flows, and Bots)

Like every industry, from cars to toothbrushes (yes, toothbrushes!), Salesforce has implemented AI into its offerings. Customers can utilize AI-driven features such as Einstein Analytics, automated workflows, and chatbots, and even a ‘digital labor platform,’ called Agentforce fueled by agentic AI. QA ensures that these intelligent tools function correctly, provide accurate insights, and do not disrupt business processes due to misconfigurations or incorrect predictions.

13. Supporting a scalable Salesforce ecosystem

As businesses grow, their Salesforce environments become more complex. Increased data volume, additional users, and expanded integrations can introduce unforeseen issues. Ongoing testing across Salesforce technologies, products, industry clouds, and AppExchange apps ensures that Salesforce remains scalable and continues to meet business needs without performance degradation or system failures.

Salesforce applications are vital to business operations, making quality assurance an essential part of managing and maintaining the platform. From ensuring seamless updates to protecting sensitive data, a robust QA strategy minimizes risks, improves performance, and enhances user experience.

Ensure your Salesforce org is ‘always on’ by creating a comprehensive testing strategy

These are just a few of many reasons why implementing a thorough testing process is essential for your Salesforce environment. Testing ultimately will reduce downtime, provide a better experience for your users, your customers, and stakeholders, and ensure your business is getting the most of all that Salesforce has to offer.

If you’re not sure how to either a) get started or b) how to improve your testing methods, we recommend checking out this guide, Minimize Salesforce bugs and maximize ROI: A guide to selecting the right technology for improving Salesforce quality. It walks you through what solutions might work best for your team, depending on where you are in your quality assurance journey.