Acumatica is a powerful cloud-based ERP platform that helps small and mid-size businesses manage everything from finances to operations. One of its biggest strengths is its flexibility – you can customize Acumatica to fit your exact needs, whether that’s tweaking workflows, adding integrations, or building entirely new features.

Think of Acumatica as a living organism, constantly adapting to meet the needs of the business. For us, customizing it is like performing surgery on a healthy body – every change must enhance its functionality without introducing new problems.

Challenges in QA for Acumatica Customizations

From what we've observed, customizing Acumatica comes with several challenges for QA:

Communication Breakdowns: Misunderstandings or delays in communication between the development team and the customer can lead to misaligned expectations and incomplete customizations. When customers are slow to respond or provide feedback, it can result in delays, impacting the overall project timeline and, as a result, the quality of the final solution.

Requirement and Information Gaps: Missing details about customer business processes, expectations, technical aspects, or existing third-party integrations can result in misaligned customizations and issues during development and testing.

Interconnected and Complex Processes: Lack of careful planning, technical analysis, and feasibility checks in required modifications can result in unexpected errors or conflicts with standard system processes, especially in complex ERP environments like Acumatica, making it more challenging for QA to ensure the solution's reliability.

Customization Differences, Time or Budget Limitations: Customizations vary based on business logic, and many projects are short-term. This creates a challenge in balancing the need for tailored solutions with tight timelines or budget. Meeting quality expectations requires a team with deep expertise in both the technical aspects of Acumatica and the customer’s specific business needs.

Integration Issues: Third-party integrations can cause instability, especially when there is no access or limited access to external systems, or when there is a lack of understanding of how they operate. This makes it more difficult to create precise test cases and ensure everything functions as intended.

Frequent Updates: Acumatica is an evolving system that updates regularly. If customer’s willing to upgrade the system, customizations must be updated accordingly. Regression testing becomes essential after each update to ensure customizations still work properly before reaching the end user.

Performance Bottlenecks: Customizations can affect system performance for various reasons, such as inefficient loops or heavy dependencies on server capabilities. These issues can lead to slower response times, server timeouts, or increased system load, in the end impacting overall performance.

Best Practices for QA Testing in Acumatica Customizations

In general, ERP testing is a complex process, with many nuances to consider when it comes to modifications. Customizations must be tested with an eagle eye, ensuring they don’t break the system while meeting the customer’s expectations for functionality and logic. We prioritize these key practices, and our experience shows they work.

Invest in Team Training with Resources and Time

One of the most important factors in successful QA is the team’s deep understanding of ERP system processes, capabilities, and their experience in working with the platform. Without this knowledge, the risk of introducing issues or inefficiencies increases significantly.

 Ensure Role Clarity in Customization Projects Development

Quality is truly a team effort, involving collaboration across the key roles. When these roles work together, the result is a high-quality solution that meets both technical and business goals.

• Business Analysts gather requirements, create technical specifications; prepare mockups; overall ensure customizations align with business needs. Don’t cut corners when it comes to hiring skilled BAs! :)
• Developers implement the customizations and refine their work.
• Quality Assurance engineers rigorously test changes, retest improvements, and verify fixes.
• End users provide valuable feedback to confirm the functionality aligns with real-world scenarios.

Focus on Collaboration

In modern software development, especially in Agile teams, collaboration and effective communication is key. Customizations succeed when all roles work together throughout the lifecycle. Remember the surgery analogy? Just as nurses assist surgeons in the operating room, BAs and QAs support developers to prevent delays and excessive work.

Define Clear Requirements and Understand Customer Business Processes

Proper planning and requirement gathering is a critical milestone. Understand customer business processes, existing third-party customizations, and explore how these intersect with new requests. Align these with clear, detailed requirements to ensure successful customizations. This will enable developers to know exactly what to build, while QAs can easily understand the expected results.

Conducting a Quality Risk Analysis

After completing non-functional testing, consider conducting a quality risk analysis. Customization requests usually focus on one or a few modules. In projects with tight timelines, testing broader functionality can be both challenging and often unnecessary. Instead, analyze the customer’s organizational structure, business processes, and modules/sections with localized modifications. Work with developers and BAs to evaluate the frequency of use, complexity, and impact of the

 changes, and prioritize testing high-risk areas.

Mimic Customer Environments for Effective QA

For effective QA, replicate the customer's environment, business processes, and data – end-to-end testing is the preferred method. If the customer provides real-world data, it’s the best way to ensure customizations work as expected in their actual environment.

Mind the Data

Always prioritize customer data security. Ensure that sensitive information is protected and handled responsibly during testing. Be cautious when using real-world data for end-to-end testing.

Ensure Careful Attention to Regression and Confirmation (Retesting) Testing

Always include regression and confirmation testing when making changes in Acumatica. It’s crucial to ensure that regression testing confirms the core functionality affected by the modifications still works as expected, and that any fixes applied afterward work properly without breaking anything previously created.

When you think you've done enough testing – think again! :)

Our team believes that QA testing for Acumatica customizations goes beyond finding bugs. It's about ensuring customizations are reliable, efficient, and enhance the system's ability to meet specific business needs. With a skilled, collaborative team and a focus on best practices,
businesses can ensure that Acumatica customizations simplify and improve their processes without causing new problems.