The QA Financial Forum Chicago 2025 took place this week in the U.S. One of the event’s key speakers was Sara Volden, Quality Assurance Leader at GreatAmerica Financial Services.
Volden is a seasoned professional with 25 years of experience in the finance industry. Over the past 5 years, she specialised in Quality Assurance, bringing a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the field.
In 2022, Volden became the leader of the QA team at GreatAmerica in 2022, which has been critical to the IT transformation program at this leading equipment leasing company.
A major part of the transformation has been the migration of all leasing applications from a legacy management platform to Salesforce, with Volden focusing on the testing requirements involved at the recent QA Financial Forum Chicago.
In addition to detailing the best practice in testing Salesforce, Volden discusses two broader technical challenges: connecting data management in the Cloud to testing requirements and how to realise the potential of low-code automated testing. Following the event in Chicago, QA Financial caught up with Volden.
Can you share some key considerations or best practices your QA team followed when migrating legacy leasing applications to Salesforce?
Initially we thought we could just move the entire process over to SF however, after further consideration and discussion with the business we decided to move the process function by function, making it a gradual transformation vs a massive one-time transformation. We had to consider how we would impact the business, how much training was needed, and the impact to our customers.
How did you manage the complexities of cloud-based data management, and what specific testing challenges emerged during this process?
One advantage was that we were already familiar with Salesforce, having used it for other functions within our organization. From a testing perspective, we faced challenges such as data duplication for accounts and security issues related to user provisioning. We needed to ensure that users could only access the information they were authorized to see. Additionally, we had to maintain data consistency across all our Salesforce environments.
What role has low-code automated testing played in your QA strategy at GreatAmerica, and what lessons have you learned about realizing its full potential?
Low-code automation testing has played a huge role in the progress of automation at GreatAmerica. It has allowed us to create an automation strategy to build out Regression suites that are running every day.
“The QA team should perform functional testing to identify major issues early and ensure performance meets expectations.”
– Sara Volden
Could you describe the main technical hurdles your team faced while transitioning from a legacy system to Salesforce, and how you overcame them?
Our biggest technical hurdle was that we over customized the legacy system making it difficult to transition some things into Salesforce. We solved this by breaking the process into smaller pieces to transition instead of doing a full transition at once.
Given your experience, what advice would you give other companies preparing for large-scale data migrations to Salesforce in terms of test planning and execution?
Engage business stakeholders in the testing process to confirm that the data meets their requirements and expectations. Develop a test plan that outlines all data requirements and expected results. Share this plan with stakeholders to gain their buy-in and maintain open communication.
Initially, the QA team should perform functional testing to identify major issues early and ensure performance meets expectations. Conduct testing iteratively, starting with simpler tests, and gradually increasing complexity to ensure all components function correctly. Involve business stakeholders in the testing phase and maintain a shared document to record results and resolutions for any defects found.
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