Salesforce is a major software player in the field of customer relationship management (CRM) and customer service software. This article discusses the specific challenges of automated testing for Salesforce applications and provides best practices for implementing test automation in this domain.
Author: Fareha Nousheen, OpKey, https://www.opkey.com/
Enterprises prefer Salesforce across various industries as it supports a wide range of customer relationship management activities. The configurations, integrations, and workflows of the Salesforce CRM create a very challenging testing and quality assurance (QA) atmosphere for testers that require considerable expertise in high-frequency regression cycles, computing environment changes and growth, etc.
Salesforce Test Automation
Salesforce is a CRM that can be easily integrated with other enterprise applications. Salesforce being a cloud-based application, it becomes important to check for functional testing and validating for the customized Salesforce functionality. Automation testing for the functionalities of the enterprises’ complex yet unique business processes brings many benefits and supports enterprises’ strategy.
Best practices for Salesforce Automation Testing
Set up QA team help – It is essential to set up a team of experts experienced to handle the test cases for Salesforce automation testing.
Begin testing early in the SDLC – To begin testing early in the software development life-cycle (SDLC) is very important and software testers should be involved early. This will help to identify the issues at the initial stages and to reduce future risks and costs. It will also help the QA team to improve the test coverage and perform an increasing number of tests as the QA team gets exposed to the application early during SDLC.
Selecting a testing tool – As per requirement, it is crucial to select the right testing tool to manage critical and standard scenarios. The market is flooded with a plethora of test automation tools. The selection process should evaluate tools to provide the required capabilities to test the app functionality.
Proper Naming for Test Methods – From the initial stages naming the test methods is an important step. Saving the test method should include three parts i.e. the name of the method, information about the test path, and the condition on which the method is being performed. It helps to know which test method it is without even opening it.
Benefits of creating test automation for Salesforce
Improved test coverage – To tackle cloud-based applications and its periodic releases, enterprises should be ready with sufficient test coverage. It should include the execution of hundreds of test cases, exercise user scenarios, validate edge cases, and more.
Increases Speed and Efficiency – Manual testing of Salesforce functionality takes time and uses up organizations’ most expensive resources thereby increasing costs as it requires a lot of human effort. Manual testing makes the delivery cycle slow and limits the testing quality. Automation testing can test 100’s of scenarios in a few hours leading to reduced costs, speed, and efficiency.
Error-free test cases – A manual approach to testing is prone to errors due to repetition. It increases the time taken and makes it a boring task for testers performing the task. Automated testing eases the process by removing human errors and improves the accuracy of tests.
Automatic report generation – The report generated is created on the success and failures of each test. Based on the report, only required tests can be re-run automatically while looking at the risk and dependencies.
Tools for Test Automation for Salesforce
Sales Edge – This tool makes customer sign-ins easier and ensures to provide several features that include a request for proposal (RFP), availability as a web-based tool across platforms, an increase in the RFP response time, sales presentation automation, pitch books, etc.
OpKey – OpKey can help you modernize your SDLC test automation with its unique continuous testing platform. The OpKey tool with its incremental impact analysis of 15,000+ pre-built test cases and CIIT™ methodology for implementing continuous testing is a one-stop platform for all the Agile and continuous testing needs for your enterprise.
Force.com – This tool is a Platform as a Service(PaaS) designed for simplifying the deployment and development of websites and cloud-based applications. This tool is popular for social and mobile app.
To Sum Up
Adopting Test Automation in Salesforce will allow testers to focus on other crucial tasks than investing time on error-prone manual testing. OpKey’s advanced features allows Salesforce Test Automation maintenance cost and effort to be cut down by up to 80%. It is also useful in saving hundreds of dollars for enterprises and enables them to use these savings to invest in other business purposes.
About the Author
Fareha Nousheen is a quality driven technical writer with extensive experience in a variety of fields, skilled in integrating the various aspects of preparing technical documentation. She has proven ability in eliciting information, developing content strategy, and documenting software. She possesses superb communication skills and provides excellent attention to detail. She is an excellent cross-functional communicator and highly analytical, yet a people’s person.
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Great article.