Salesforce UAT Testing Checklist: What to Validate Before Go-Live

A Salesforce deployment can pass its technical checks and still leave sales, service, operations, and Finance unable to complete the work they rely on. The gap usually appears where configuration, data, permissions, automation, and integrations meet a real business scenario.

This checklist is designed to make that gap visible before go-live. It complements unit, automated, and system testing by proving that the CRM works for the people, records, and exceptions that production will introduce.

1. Define the business journeys before writing the test pack

Start with the outcomes the business needs from Salesforce, not the screens that were configured. A useful scenario follows a customer, account, opportunity, case, contract, or service event through every role and system that changes the result.

• —Lead capture, qualification, routing, conversion, and hand-off to the right sales owner.
• —Opportunity creation, stage progression, approvals, pricing or quote steps, forecast impact, and close.
• —Case creation, assignment, escalation, knowledge or entitlement use, communications, and resolution where Service Cloud is in scope.
• —Account, contact, territory, partner, or household changes that affect ownership, visibility, and downstream systems.
• —Exception journeys such as a duplicate record, failed approval, missing required data, reassigned owner, or integration rejection.

2. Test profiles, permission sets, sharing, and record ownership

Salesforce access is layered. A user can have the correct profile and still be unable to edit a record because a permission set, field-level restriction, sharing rule, territory, queue, or ownership condition produces a different outcome. Each material scenario should run under the exact user role that will perform it.

• —Verify object, field, record, report, dashboard, file, and action access for each business persona.
• —Test ownership changes, territory assignment, queues, delegated approvers, and users who work across teams or business units.
• —Confirm restricted users cannot view or export sensitive information through reports, list views, related records, or API-connected tools.
• —Check that users can complete the full journey without relying on an administrator workaround.

3. Exercise Flow, approvals, and automation in context

Flows, validation rules, approval processes, Apex triggers, legacy Process Builder automation, and managed-package logic can all respond to the same record event. Test the order, outcome, user-facing message, and recovery path when those rules interact.

• —Run happy-path and negative scenarios for record creation, updates, ownership changes, stage changes, and approvals.
• —Use records with combinations of dates, currencies, territories, products, customer types, and prior history that can change automation behaviour.
• —Confirm duplicate notifications, field overwrites, record locks, recursion, and failed actions are prevented or surfaced clearly.
• —Test what a user and an administrator can do when automation fails part way through a process.

4. Prove data, integrations, and reports agree

A CRM journey is not complete when the record looks correct in Salesforce. Validate migrated and newly created data, integration messages, reports, dashboards, and downstream systems against the same business outcome.

• —Test record counts, relationships, ownership, history, attachments, and critical fields using representative migrated data.
• —Trace inbound and outbound integrations through success, rejection, retry, alerting, and reconciliation.
• —Compare management reports and dashboards with detailed records and agreed source data; a visually polished report can still be incomplete or misclassified.
• —Check behaviour on the browsers and devices used by the teams who will work in Lightning every day.

5. Rehearse cutover and define evidence-based sign-off

Run a timed cutover rehearsal covering final migration, permission activation, integration switch-over, first critical transactions, monitoring, and recovery. Record what passed, what failed, what remains open, and who accepts each residual risk.

“Salesforce UAT is complete when the business can prove its critical journeys work with real roles and data — not when the deployment button turns green.”