Why Automate Salesforce Testing?

Recently, Salesforce was named a “Leader in the CRM Magic Quadrant” for the 13th consecutive year by Gartner. Salesforce presently holds 20% of the global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market share and a base of more than 150,000 customers, making it the number one cloud CRM offering. This top-notch platform is preferred by users to manage their sales and marketing operations, and serve customers better with a dedicated help desk. It offers impressive customization options to users to fit their business requirements.

Despite all the efforts to standardize deployments with thousands of possible integrations, no two organizations have the same Salesforce configuration. And with organizations moving to lightening and building their enterprise apps with Salesforce DX, further complexities have been introduced. Test automation enables organizations to easily validate and ensure the quality of their Salesforce enhancements and customizations.

Top Challenges of Salesforce testing

Salesforce testing is a crucial part of Salesforce administration and development. Irrespective of the minor changes made to a page layout, all enhancements and customizations should be rigorously tested in a sandboxed environment against its original requirements. Efficient CRM testing helps organizations identify potential errors, flaws, or areas of improvement. However, Salesforce testing can be a major challenge for organizations due to the following reasons:

• Classic to Lightning upgrades or migrations introduces various changes in the underlying code, functionality, and behaviors. Test scripts written might not be compatible with other versions.
• Salesforce’s new app development framework, aka Lightning, introduces new layouts, navigation, filters, dashboards, list views, integrations, and workflows. This massively expands the number of use cases that need to be tested.
• Even after upgrading to Lightning, users can still toggle back again to Classic. This means that organizations need to test use cases that traverse both interfaces.
• Salesforce Lightning utilizes Shadow DOM and other complex web components, which are difficult to test with a code-based or open source tool.
• Apps from cloud marketplaces, such as Salesforce’s AppExchange, introduce different codebases, requiring end-to-end testing to successfully integrate with CI/CD pipeline.
• Salesforce lacks a source repository and structured release process, so third-party DevOps tools are required to build apps to connect internal workflows. These tools and workflows need end-to-end testing.
• Regular system maintenance updates add new advancements in security, availability, and performance but may also introduce bugs, requiring new scripts every time upgrades occur.

Why Salesforce Test Automation is Imperative?

Test automation enables organizations to overcome their daunting CRM testing challenges and ensure the optimum quality of their Salesforce instance. Test automation in the Salesforce scenario is majorly used to monitor applications and verify that processes are consistently performed as intended within Salesforce and between Salesforce and other systems and applications. Test automation also allows the admins and developers to ensure the vitality of their Salesforce instance after a major update is made to the system. On a small scale, such system checks can be conducted manually. But for organizations with a complex and large environment, manual testing isn’t feasible. Other discernable benefits of implementing test automation for Salesforce include:

• Test automation enables organizations to save up to 90% of the Salesforce testing time and efforts involved.
• With the increased speed, test automation also delivers up to 80% more risk coverage ensuring that various risks can be identified and mitigated early.
• Apart from better risk identification, test automation also drives a competitive advantage for organizations by enabling quicker and better releases.
• Test automation shrinks the testing time and efforts to deliver up to 40% cost savings while mitigating human errors.

In the nutshell, test automation delivers reduced risk, reduced costs, better quality, and competitive advantage.

Challenges with Salesforce Test Automation

While test automation allows organizations to meet their needs for speed and quality, it also presents many challenges. While the Salesforce interface is easily customizable, the underlying software is complex. This presents various challenges for organizations that wish to implement test automation. Below are some of the common challenges of Salesforce test automation:

• Frequent system updates: Salesforce endeavors to keep its platform evergreen, enhance user experience, and fix all the underlying issues with regular updates. However, such updates can impact the performance of customizations, enhancements, and even standard uses of the platform.
• Utilization of Shadow DOMs: Salesforce utilizes Shadow DOMs to isolate components in the platform, making it difficult to identify various elements during test automation.
• Use of complex DOM structure: Salesforce’s DOM structure comes with a complex tree structure. This means that test automation tools require more time to access components and work accurately.
• Element identifiers remain hidden: Any test automation tool requires to locate the element details to identify visual elements in an application. However, Salesforce inherently hides these details for development purposes, creating roadblocks for test automation.
• Problems with dynamic elements: When UI elements keep changing with every test script run, it can cause serious challenges for test automation. Thereby, maintenance of Salesforce tests becomes a time-consuming task without an element locator strategy.
• Difficulties with Iframes: In Salesforce terminology every new tab is a new frame. These frames can be difficult to identify as the test automation tool needs to identify these elements under the frame. Consequently, tests can be difficult to automate with a script-based tool such as Selenium and testers will need to add a script logic to make the test successful.

The next inevitable question is of course how best to overcome these automation challenges. The trick is to select a robust and proven Salesforce or CRM test automation solution that enables teams to ensure the quality and performance of their Salesforce instance. No-code test automation solutions for their simplicity of use, rapid setup time, and low maintenance have emerged as favorite options for Salesforce test automation.

Get Beyond Your Salesforce Test Automation Hurdles with BeatBlip

BeatBlip is an AI-powered, no-code, continuous test automation solution. It enables end-to-end automated testing of Salesforce customizations and enhancements, including both UI and APIs. Whether Salesforce is used to manage leads & territories, track opportunities & orders, or maintain customer information; BeatBlip automates the regression testing of custom functionality for smooth platform upgrades. It covers all Salesforce products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Community Cloud. Through its codeless and auto-script generation approach, BeatBlip makes Salesforce testing highly efficient and effective.

Request for a free BeatBlip trial today to watch BeatBlip in action.