Salesforce is a leading software company and one of organizations’ most popular cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The platform offers numerous integration and customization possibilities. You can use it to design an ideal solution to help you grow your business.
Although Salesforce’s flexibility is one of its key advantages, performing continuous testing, which is critical for ensuring that your Salesforce application is working as expected, can be challenging. With thousands of possible integrations, different development environments, varied workflows, and millions of users, ensuring quality can require time, effort, highly skilled professionals, and a detailed overall strategy.
In this post, you will learn:
- what Salesforce test automation is
- how it can simplify your testing process and minimize your struggles
- the advantages and the challenges of Salesforce test automation
- tools that can help
- and six best practices you should follow.
What Is Salesforce Test Automation?
Automated testing generally involves writing scripts that run against your code and determining if different parts of your application work as expected. Automated tests are created and run with the help of software. They help detect problems before they reach end-users and ultimately allow businesses to achieve a high level of quality.
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.
Expand Your Test Coverage
Salesforce Test Automation is Important Because It Will Help You:
- detect errors in your Salesforce application, including within custom code;
- automate repetitive tasks without having to spend valuable time and human resources;
- limit manual testing to situations where it’s necessary, resulting in less human error and less budget spending; and
- make sure that existing functionality is operating as expected.
With Salesforce test automation, you’ll be able to test your application both during the development stages and after it’s been deployed.
Benefits of Salesforce Test Automation
There are several benefits to implementing automated testing in your Salesforce instances.
Increased test coverage: You can run hundreds of tests with automated testing. These will allow you to cover different scenarios, leaving no stones unturned. With Salesforce’s frequent updates, testing almost the entirety of your application and verifying that it adapts to those updates without problems is essential.
Increased accuracy: Manual testing for hours at a time is a tedious task and can easily lead to mistakes. Automated testing allows you to remove the human factor. This guarantees that all test cases are executed continuously and with high accuracy.
Early problem detection: Test automation will help you detect problems within your Salesforce instance early; before they become more severe and affect your business.
Money and time savings: Manually testing a Salesforce application is a time-consuming and costly process. The majority of the same tests can be automated at a fraction of the cost and time. Salesforce test automation will allow you to save money by detecting problems earlier and avoiding them in production. Also, you can use the freed-up time for other valuable tasks. Furthermore, you can reuse automation scripts across multiple test cases, saving you resources.
Gaining valuable insights: You can also automatically generate reports with automated testing. These provide valuable insights into the performance of your Salesforce application components. Based on the results of your tests, you can adjust your testing strategy and focus your efforts where you identified potential problems or where you consider essential.
Challenges of Test Automation
After looking at the benefits of Salesforce test automation, let’s discuss some of the challenges.
Salesforce is a powerful platform with hundreds of different features you can integrate. This increases complexity and makes Salesforce’s tests very challenging to automate. Below are some of the most significant considerations you need to know about.
Custom applications: Salesforce is highly customizable and can be tailored to meet your needs. Countless combinations are possible, making full test coverage very difficult, especially for complex configurations. Unless you have appropriate tools, a big part of your application might be left untested.
Regular platform updates: Salesforce updates its platform several times a year. While this is great since it makes the product better, it challenges automated testing. Updates can affect your tests, so it’s essential to be aware and repair them if any errors occur.
Shadow DOM: Salesforce uses the shadow DOM component, allowing you to place objects behind it. Although it’s useful for many reasons, including cross-browser compatibility, it makes it challenging to locate an element, which is an important aspect of user interface automation testing.
Dynamic elements: Salesforce uses many dynamic elements that change when a test script runs, making it difficult to locate and test. Maintaining Salesforce tests is much easier with a good locator strategy.
iFrames: A new tab in Salesforce is considered a new frame. Elements inside inline frames, or iFrames, are challenging to locate and recognize, making automated testing challenging.
Types of Test Automation
Salesforce test automation takes many forms. Here are some of the most basic types.
- Unit testing: Unit testing is an automated testing technique where small parts of the applications are isolated and examined to determine if they operate as planned.
- Integration testing: Continuous integration (CI), the practice of automatically integrating code changes from multiple developers regularly into a central repository, is an important aspect of software development. From a testing standpoint, with CI, before and after you make changes and integrate them into your source code, you run automated tests that verify they didn’t introduce any problems.
- User acceptance testing: User acceptance testing (UAT) enables end-users to test the application to decide if it’s ready to launch live into production. With UAT, you can confirm before deployment whether your Salesforce instance covers your functional business requirements or not.
6 Best Practices for Test Automation
Following best practices for your Salesforce automation testing efforts is an important aspect of getting the most out of the tool. Below are some recommendations to keep in mind.
- Start testing as soon as possible. Detecting issues early, before they grow out of hand, is one of the best things you can do. Testing from the initial stages of development will mitigate future risks and minimize costs.
- Create real-world scenarios. Your tests should simulate real-world scenarios as closely as possible. This way, you’ll increase the accuracy of your testing results.
- Have a clear test strategy. A thorough testing strategy with proper documentation, clear testing procedures, and roles will help you mitigate problems.
- Invest in the right team. Having professionals with skills and deep knowledge of Salesforce automation testing is worth the investment.
- Give your test cases meaningful names. When the number of test cases increases, having descriptive names will help you find the ones you need quickly and without frustration.
- Select the most efficient testing tool. Using the best automation testing tool is crucial. There are many options on the market, so you should perform an in-depth comparison to decide which tool will increase your Salesforce testing capabilities.
Which Automation Tool Is Best for Salesforce Testing?
People also ask which automation tool is best for Salesforce testing. As mentioned earlier, Salesforce is a rather complex platform with many unique characteristics. An automated tool to test Salesforce effectively and in-depth requires flexibility and powerful capabilities.
Can Selenium Be Used for Salesforce Testing?
Selenium is a popular tool for running automated tests across different platforms and web browsers, and it supports many programming languages. Although you can use Selenium for Salesforce testing, it’s not the most efficient option. You need advanced coding skills to write tests, and it doesn’t work very well with shadow DOM, making it unreliable in many cases.
How Can Testim Improve Salesforce Test Automation?
Testim is the optimal solution to automate Salesforce testing. Testim is, in fact, an automated testing platform that even Salesforce uses for its testing purposes.
Testim, an AI-based test automation solution, allows you to handle situations where other automated testing solutions may struggle to do so efficiently. With Testim, you can easily write tests and effectively manage shadow DOM components and custom objects.
Testim offers smart locators that will help you test dynamic pages. Locators allow you to switch to active tabs without having to remap them every time an object changes. This adjustability offers test stability and reduces the need for maintenance.
Conclusion
Salesforce is the de facto leader of the customer relationship management world. Thousands of businesses rely on Salesforce to run their daily operations. Therefore, testing Salesforce efficiently has become an absolute necessity. It will save you time and money, and ultimately, it will help you enhance the quality of your business. Automated testing is a powerful weapon in your arsenal that’ll allow you to identify vulnerabilities before they threaten your daily operations.
Testim can ease this process and allow your business to grow.
What to read next
Test Automation and Salesforce MFA – don’t worry, we’ve got you covered!
Building Quality Salesforce Apps: Automated Testing Meets Business Engineering
