Why is Test Automating Salesforce is a Game Changer? – Undoubtedly, Salesforce is the most popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. One of the greatest advantages Salesforce customers have is that it can also be used to create custom enterprise apps across marketing, sales, and service. Moreover, it can also be integrated with numerous enterprise apps like Oracle financial management, Workday HCM, etc. To offer new features, improve the performance, security, logic, and usability, Salesforce rolls out three seasonal updates i.e. Spring, Summer and Winter.
Although the benefits of these updates are numerous, customers need to test updates prior to deployment in production. The reason being these updates can impact the existing business workflows, customizations and integrations. Due to the frequency of Salesforce seasonal updates, customers are facing challenges in testing Salesforce applications.
Manually testing Salesforce updates requires a lot of time and effort. Furthermore, there can also be issues like inadequate risk coverage, inaccuracies due to human intervention, and opacity as manual testing processes are totally human dependent.
Hence, in order to increase the speed, efficiency and accuracy, Salesforce test automation should be utilized. In this article, we will learn about Salesforce test automation and understand its benefits.
Table of Contents
What is Salesforce Test Automation ?
Test automation is a process in which the necessary steps like test design, execution, and maintenance are automated. Incorporating automation helps you deploy continuous testing in which defects are detected during the design phase, keeping defect fix cost at minimum while keeping business risks at bay. Salesforce test automation is specifically an automated testing process adjusted to cover the advanced complexity of all the different pieces that make up a Salesforce application.
Although the benefits of automation are numerous, implementing it can be a challenging task due to its complex architecture.
Challenges of Test Automation
Custom Applications:
Salesforce is highly customizable and can be tailored to meet your business goals. In case of custom development, it is recommended to involve business users to create test cases as they are the ones who know business processes best. However, the challenge with this approach is that most available test automation platforms are developed with a programming mindset and require technical users to create test cases. Since business users are non-technical, they find it difficult to create test cases with a script based test automation platform.
Regular platform updates:
Salesforce is popular for its seasonal platform updates. To ensure that these updates do not affect the existing features, it’s important to perform test automation. Apart from this, whenever a business process change occurs, new business logics are implemented, or new integrations are set up, a Salesforce instance needs to be tested. However, what to test during regression testing can be challenging. If regression suites are selected based on personal experience, it might lead to inadequate coverage. If too many cases are executed, it will consume a lot of time and still not ensure adequate coverage.
Dynamic Elements:
Conventional test automation platforms use element locators to automate Salesforce. Since Salesforce features dynamic elements, it requires a lot of effort to identify and locate elements to automate. Even if you’re able to locate elements, it will result in a flaky test script. You need a test automation platform that not only identifies elements but also keeps automation script maintenance effort minimum.
Benefits of Salesforce Test Automation
There are several benefits to instigating automated testing in your Salesforce instances as mentioned below:
Increased test coverage:
You can route hundreds of tests with robotic testing. These will allow you to cover different situations, leaving no stones unturned. Especially with complex softwares like Salesforce which has multiple integrations and workflows. It is difficult to have test coverage with manual testing. As Salesforce comes up with frequent updates, test automation helps in quickly testing the platform in a short period of time.
Increased accuracy:
While executing regression tests, it might become monotonous for business users which might cause overviewing of bugs. Moreover, in case of manual testing, due to heavy dependency on humans, accuracy is always an issue. On the other hand, automation testing for Salesforce enables faster execution of test scripts and delivers accurate results. Improved accuracy can be witnessed since human dependencies are minimized.
Early problem detection:
Test automation helps you incorporate continuous testing. Continuous testing enables early, often and more comprehensive testing. This will help to detect bugs in the earlier stages of the development cycle. If defects are resolved in the earlier stages there is a rare chance of defects maturing till later stages, which becomes difficult to resolve.
Money & time savings:
Manually testing a Salesforce application is a time consuming and costly process. Test automation helps to test the same number of test cases in very less time. And time saved is money saved. Also, Salesforce test automation will allow you to save money by detection problems earlier and avoiding them in invention. Also, you can use the freed-up time for other valuable tasks. Furthermore, you can reclaim automation scripts across multiple test cases, saving you resources.
Conclusions:
As we know that Salesforce is a complex software with updates happening frequently, it becomes difficult to test it quickly, qualitatively and also takes a huge cost and effort for manually testing it. Test automation perfectly addresses these concerns, saving time, cost, and efforts.
