Lightning Series #1: Redpath Tests Lightning

We’ve been getting a lot of questions from our customers around the new Lightning Experience in Salesforce. One of the biggest questions we get is “should we enable it for our Salesforce org?” As Salesforce consultants, we’ve read the documentation, seen the demos and played around with it individually in our own developer orgs. However, to get a true sense of what enabling Lightning means for users who center their daily life around Salesforce, we knew we had to go deeper and beta test lightning with a select group of our own users internally at Redpath.

We put careful consideration into planning the “why, who, what and how” of our Lightning Experience testing:

Why are we testing? Lightning is the NBT (Next Best Thing) in the Salesforce universe and we are a customer success centered business. In order for us to provide the best service and knowledge to our customers who want to ride the new wave of “cool”, Redpath as a team needs to know what all the Lightning hype is about and it’s critical for us to understand the Lightning beauty (as well as the beast).

Who is going to be involved in the beta? We decided on a select group of our Redpath consultants who had a good understanding of our internal processes and how Redpath is using Salesforce standard and custom functionality in our own org. We also identified user groups within Redpath who would be the “Wave 2” beta testers if the outcome of our testing proved Lightning to be a good fit for our team.

What functionality and processes are we going to test? We developed a list of specific test cases based on Redpath’s internal processes and specific use cases that we knew were critical to the day to day operation of Redpath’s business in Salesforce. We then met with key stakeholders to validate our test cases and gather any additional test cases that we missed.

How are we going to test? We wanted to treat this testing exercise as we would a project for any of our clients so we used our internal project management functionality in Salesforce. Our team was asked that they not toggle back and forth between the Lightning experience and the Classic user interface unless they discovered a functionality gap that absolutely prevented them from performing a critical function (which they had to document as an issue) so that we could get the truest sense of what it would be like to live completely in the Lightning experience. We set a project schedule with key milestones, tracked our test cases as Requirements, tracked who was assigned to each test case as Actions and documented any functionality issues or gaps we found in the course of testing as Issues. We used Chatter to communicate within the team during our testing and had weekly team check-ins to talk about what we were seeing and how we were progressing.

What now?

Through the course of our experience with testing Lightning out in “the real world”, the Redpath team was able to get a deeper understanding of some of the really cool things about Lightning along with some things that aren’t quite ready for “primetime” yet.  We’ll be watching the next releases very closely. The Lightning Experience is definitely a different user experience than Classic and in many ways, we think it will be more intuitive, particularly for new users of Salesforce. That being said, all companies thinking of moving their org into the Lightning Experience will want to be informed about whether Lightning will be a fit for some or all of their users and how to manage the change.

Since we love sharing what we know with our customers, we wanted to share our experience! Over the next couple of months, we’ll be sharing a series of blog posts and webinars specific to Lightning. Stay tuned for the next installment where we’ll give a tour of Lightning Experience!

Update: Check out our latest post on navigating the Lighting user interface: click here!