Provar is a quality assurance provider with a focus on the Salesforce ecosystem and suite of products. While they have traditionally been known for providing a low-code test automation suite, they have recently expanded into test management and focusing on the whole quality experience beyond testing.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Richard Clark, Chief Product Officer at Provar, to talk about the company and how it is helping both QA engineers and citizen developers with test automation. He goes on to discuss the challenges businesses are facing with mitigating risk in order to be agile and be first to market and the need to shift left and test earlier on in the life cycle. He also shares some of the key announcements coming out of Dreamforce.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Clark introduces us to Provar and tells us what their key areas of focus are. He talks about how he initially started as the system integrator that incubated Provar before joining the company in 2017 as Chief Technology Officer and now Chief Product Officer. He talks about his areas of responsibility in these roles.
• Salesforce has a number of DevOps tools that specifically help customers deploy and rollback changes if their deployment or testing fails. Provar fills the gap with automated testing. Clark explains the importance of having sufficient test covering and making sure you have sufficient automation to verify and validate the deployment, and how Provar is helping with this.
• Clark goes into detail about the importance of testing automation saying, most customers, even large enterprises, are usually on the latest version as Salesforce does three releases per year. However, they need to be able to quickly verify that their changes are working as expected and have not caused regression issues downstream.
• Awareness in test automation is growing and Clark recalls a survey that found that 50% of teams now had dedicated QA members in their teams. He says that two years previous to that, he would have expected it to be around 10%. He explains how there is more awareness of the business risk of getting things like GDPR wrong also now.
• Provar was designed to enable non-automation engineers to do testing but QA engineers will have a need for it also. Clark discusses how it is possible to extend the product through their IDE to enable engineers to write their own custom APIs and tests that integrate into the whole DevOps process. He explains that Provar has been very successful with citizen testers and how it is filling in the gaps with talent shortages.
• Clark tells us that they initially started with Provar Manager, before taking it a step further by looking at other tools in the market and integrating with those products. He explains how this meant they could bring all that information into a Salesforce org where you could see where you should be focusing your effort to move further left.
• Clark feels that there are more risks being taken by businesses to be agile and first to market. He discusses how Provar wants customers to capture what they were doing as well as when they were doing so they can store and analyze the data to mitigate the risk. He goes on to talk about how stakeholders now want to know the evidence and participation in things like user acceptance testing.
• Clark shares the four major announcements from Dreamforce including Salesforce running their cloud on other infrastructure such as AWS and GCP, which has an impact on customers. Clark also discusses the announcement of Salesforce Genie and how they have a visualization layer on top of their customer data platform to enable a real-time view. Additionally, Salesforce announced the general availability of their DevOps Center tool to replace the way changes are deployed. Clark goes on to discuss Salesforce’s focus on Slack and the shift from email to Slack.

Connect with Richard Clark (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Learn more about Provar (Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.