Salesforce is the world’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Its cloud-based software is designed to help businesses find more prospects, close more deals, and provide customers with outstanding service. Helping teams work better together, Salesforce offers a comprehensive suite of products that unites sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams with a single, shared view of customer information, helping companies grow relationships with customers and employees alike.

Provar and Salesforce: Partners in Quality

As a company, Provar was built to offer value to Salesforce users by designing testing solutions with Salesforce in mind. Its ongoing mission to provide quality for users at any stage of their journey is backed by a strong partnership with Salesforce – Provar’s solutions are so successful that even Salesforce teams use them.

Provar has long partnered with Salesforce on different initiatives, and both teams are committed to exploring new ways to partner and pass the benefits along to customers. Provar has early access to Salesforce pre-releases, allowing the team to test Provar solutions against new Salesforce releases and solve errors before they reach the customer. Provar customers also have early access to test their solutions well ahead of time, alleviating any “rush to test” pressure after updates. Provar works with many different teams within the Salesforce ecosystem and recently brought on its new Chief Technology Officer, Ivan Harris, to spearhead future partnership opportunities.

On the Salesforce side, one department that directly uses Provar’s solutions is Salesforce’s Business Technology team (a faction of its Employee Success Domain team). The Business Technology team introduced Provar’s solutions to its workflow to help support application testing for internal Human Resources applications, which encompasses 80,000+ users. They brought on Provar Automation to address their biggest challenges in making the most of this incredible amount of data.

Challenges: A Lack of Reliability in Existing Tools and Addressing an Increased QA Demand

Ben Kim (Senior Manager, Software Engineering) and Mohit Kumar (Senior Member, Technical Staff) on the Salesforce Business Technology team experienced similar frustrations as other mature QA teams in the space. They had been using Selenium as a test automation solution, and their biggest pain points were Selenium’s lack of reliability coupled with a simultaneous increase in QA demand.

The team’s high-demand QA needs included many of their own challenges, like a need for an increased volume of feature releases, lean testing team vs. QA demands, non-scalable manual testing, the failure of Selenium scripts in release regression testing, and problematic Selenium maintenance requirements in a Salesforce release cycle.

They knew they needed a test automation solution that was reliable, that addressed the increased QA demand, and that provided a faster time to value than they were currently experiencing. They decided to bring Provar Automation into the fold to see if it could address this range of challenges.

The Results: 88% Reduction in Test Maintenance Time, 12x Faster Time to Automation

After doing some research, we found out about the power of Provar. One of the biggest pain points we had when it came to automation, particularly on Selenium, was maintenance. We were spending 30-40% of our time continually redoing our automation test scripts in Selenium. With Provar, we were able to drastically reduce that entire maintenance effort, so it’s been really a big win for us.

– Ben Kim, Senior Manager, Software Engineering at Salesforce

The impacts Salesforce’s Business Technology team saw after incorporating Provar Automation were profound. Within the first six months, including onboarding and learning the tool and automation efforts, the Salesforce team experienced an 88% reduction in test maintenance time per FTE per QA sprint. Originally, they had utilized two dedicated QEs, averaging 80 hours per person, and two sprints of maintenance efforts to update and maintain Selenium test cases. With Provar Automation, the average hours per sprint per person was reduced to just 10 hours.

Additionally, they found an incredible acceleration in time to automation – it increased to twelve times as fast. In the past, it had taken twelve weeks to complete the same number of scripts in Selenium that it took to automate with Provar Automation. This twelve weeks of work only included UI testing, and the one week with Provar included both UI and API testing.

Our scripts were failing, and all our effort building them was wasted. So we introduced Provar, we onboarded, and we were incredibly amazed. We couldn’t believe the reduced time we now spent on scripts. We went from spending 3 months to doing the same effort in one week’s time with one human using Provar.

– Mohit Kumar, Senior Member, Technical Staff at Salesforce

More reported outcomes and benefits included better software at a faster rate, more application insights, end-to-end interoperability, a jump in test engineer satisfaction, more developer confidence, and an increase in team velocity.

Overall, the Salesforce Business Technology team named four key factors as its most profound business outcomes: reliability in automation, an increased velocity to keep up with the high demand for QA, a positive impact on the Scrum team, and the ability to automate much faster thanks to Provar Automation’s capabilities. The numbers speak for themselves. The team went from spending 24 hours per week using a Selenium and manual testing combination to just 8 hours per week using Provar Automation. The ROI is clear, allowing the team to spend more time innovating and providing quality to its customers.

Looking Ahead to the Future

Like the Provar team, Salesforce understands the importance of testing. It is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s a necessity for ensuring the best possible experience for your customers. They are putting more resources behind testing, and continuing to partner with Provar in the future will help them drive such initiatives. Salesforce and Provar look forward to a strong future together thanks to Provar’s longtime expertise and focus on Salesforce test automation and Provar’s built-with-Salesforce-in-mind approach to helping customers improve quality. It’s a partnership designed with quality in mind.

Key Success Metrics

  • Increased 12x productivity and one QE wrote scripts in one week
  • 88% reduction in test maintenance time per FTE per QA sprint
  • 12x faster time to automation
  • Fully automated V2MOM regression suite within 6 months
  • Went from spending 3 months to doing the same effort in one week’s time with one person using Provar
  • 3x faster to execute V2MOM regression suite

To learn more about how Provar’s solutions can meet your team at all stages of the quality journey, or to share your company’s success story, connect with us today.