Here are 3 testing plans that we strongly recommend you develop and execute as part of your Chargent implementation
Quality Assurance Testing Plan
- Take testing very seriously.
- Most failed implementations fail due to lack of planning.
- Test changes / customizations / upgrades in the Salesforce sandbox.
Many Chargent customers choose Chargent due to the application stability and ability to build sophisticated billing and payment processing applications on top of it. We strongly recommend that a full battery of carefully planned and vetted test cases are performed in a full copy Salesforce sandbox before promoting the custom work to production.
Contingency Plan
- Mistakes and issues happen, have a plan to address them before they happen.
- What happens if the system just doesn’t work?
- How do you roll back?
- How do you process payments in that case?
It is reality that during your implementation mistakes will happen.
- Not everything was tested perfectly
- Users begin using the system in ways you didn’t anticipate, or
- Live payment gateways sometimes behave slightly differently than their test versions (though they are not supposed to).
What is not known is where those mistakes will get caught. If they make it to production and get caught during go-live you will be thanking yourself for having an action plan in place.
It is possible that your contingency is as simple as temporarily rolling back to the old way, while the project team hardens the new system. It can be as complex as several weeks of work to rebuild and reattach the old system. Because of this reality, we recommend running the legacy system and the new Chargent based system in parallel for some time. See below for more information on running systems in parallel.
Parallel Systems Plan
- Ensure the new system meets all needs before shutting off the old system.
- By running systems in parallel you have a more easily executed roll back plan.
If you are doing a data migration, or switching from a legacy billing system to Salesforce with Chargent, we strongly recommend that you run the 2 systems in parallel for at least a 30 day cycle. We would like to see customers do 90 days, however we understand that parallel systems are not efficient to maintain.
New payment and billing systems should be run in parallel to the legacy system until the new system is proven to be fully functional. Once the new system has proven itself, then and only then can you safely decommission the legacy system.
