Okay, we have a major release coming next week. So, I would like to know if this a good/best practice:
After the successful deployment using Change sets, some other manual deploying steps(sObject's standard picklist value changes) and activating automation flows, is it okay to create Test record data on the Production org to see if all the features/functionalities are functioning as expected?
Scenario: We had a twelve sprint(24 weeks) worth of development with around 15 user stories on a single Visualforce page(external site) which creates Case record on a successful submission. Thus our QA had some use cases for each story which he used to test when each story is in Ready for Testing. All of them were passed without any issues.
Questions:
- Is it okay to create test data on the Production org after the successful release and later delete those records?
- Is this a good practice to test all the use cases on the Production org from all the development stories?
- Or, we should just deploy and smoke test(just make sure everything deployed successfully, look/feel of the UI) the complete feature and leave it for the end-users to get back to us with their feedback?
Note: We had tested all use cases on the Staging org already. So this deployment is going to be from the Staging to the Production org respectively. Also, I will be considering to Delete the test data after all the successful testing on Prod.
Any best practices/methods/considerations are welcome.
Best Answer
No, QA testing should never be done in a production environment. It is not best practice to do so.
However, if you need to do a small test just to confirm that everything you needed to deploy was properly deployed and assigned, then yes, it is ok to create some "junk data" as long as you delete it right after the tests are finished, and you make sure they are not mixed with production data (that includes integration with external systems and outbound emails).