Salesforce is a highly popular cloud-based service, and it’s expected to continue growing in the coming years. As the world’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Salesforce brings you closer to your customers and helps you understand them better. In addition, it can help you gain more customers and increase your revenue. The ever-increasing use of the platform makes testing your custom Salesforce environment imperative, as testing will help ensure its proper implementation with the rest of your business ecosystem. The software is highly customizable, and you can select which of its features suit your needs. This makes it harder to test efficiently because testing teams have to go through the custom code of their specific Salesforce instance.
In this post, you’ll find out about the benefits of testing Salesforce. In addition, you’ll see types and tools used for testing. Finally, you’ll understand the common challenges with testing and ways to deal with them.
Benefits of Automation in Salesforce Testing
Test automation is the most effective way to ensure that Salesforce functions and integrates properly with your ecosystem. More specifically, some of the benefits are
- Early issue identification: With test automation, you can identify problems early in Salesforce implementations. This allows you to solve issues before they escalate and ensures your business applications remain functional.
- Better test coverage: Test automation will allow you to increase your test coverage by running hundreds of test cases. As a result, you’ll be able to handle and adjust to changes with ease and ensure reliable application performance.
- Improved testing overall: Automated testing increases the overall level of your testing capabilities. Compared to manual testing, which can be time-consuming and error-prone, automated testing allows you to speed up the process and minimize errors with automation.
- Optimal resource distribution: With test automation, you can reduce the amount of time and effort needed to run tests regularly. It allows you to run repetitive tasks faster with minimal errors. It will help you distribute your resources evenly, minimize business costs, and increase productivity.
- Detailed reports: Test automation produces advanced reports that provide a clear view of your Salesforce application state. Based on these reports, it’s easier to identify risks and resolve them on time. Stakeholders gain information that will help them decide on future business strategies.
Expand Your Test Coverage
Automated Testing Types Used for Salesforce Testing
Salesforce testing can be divided into two broad categories. The first category, which is explored first, consists of testing types that aim to examine if the software integrates smoothly with the existing system. This includes testing every new application feature, identifying issues, and verifying that they function as expected without affecting other features or the current architecture in general.
Unit Testing
With unit testing, you can test even the smallest pieces of Salesforce functionality. You can examine if the most minor parts of your application are working correctly. Unit testing helps you spot bugs early when they are easier to resolve. It’s a great way to determine if new features integrate correctly with your existing system.
Integration Testing
As mentioned above, Salesforce is highly versatile and allows you to integrate with many other applications to offer a seamless experience. Continuous monitoring and thorough performance evaluation are critical to ensure that the integration works correctly and meets the necessary functional and reliability requirements.
User Interface (UI) Testing
In UI testing, you must take into account both how an application works and how it looks. It can be defined as “the process of verifying that an app’s UI not only behaves as intended but also empowers users to make the most out of it.”
Testers point out visual changes that might affect how end-users experience the application. In many cases, a user interface meets functional requirements, but visible defects are still present. Besides the negative aesthetical impact, these defects can also prevent users from using your application as they face a bad experience. UI testing becomes increasingly essential for modern applications that need to deliver the best user experience on many different devices with different specifications.
Traditional Automation Tools for Salesforce Testing
Many automation testing tools can help your Salesforce testing efforts.
Selenium is a widely used tool that supports many programming languages. It allows you to automate testing processes across several operating systems and web browsers. Although it’s a well-known tool, it’s not easy to use. It requires coding skills that many businesses don’t have, and additionally, you might need third-party plugins to enhance its functionality.
WebdriverIO is another automation testing tool suited for Salesforce. It’s JavaScript-based and supports web and mobile frameworks. It has features that are not available with Selenium, like shadow DOM identification, and it’s simpler to write test scripts and cases. However, similar to Selenium, it requires programming skills that make it hard for non-technical businesses to use.
Challenges of Salesforce Testing
Salesforce applications are, in many cases, hard to test with traditional automation testing tools. Below are a few Salesforce characteristics that make it challenging to implement automation testing.
- Dynamic attributes: It’s frustrating to test UI elements that are constantly changing. Without a robust locator strategy, you’ll have to spend a lot of time maintaining Salesforce tests.
- Contextual pages: Salesforce is a powerful but rather complex application. It has a front-end interface that is based on dynamic frames. These frames are difficult to manage because automated testing tools don’t have direct access to the content, and they can’t quickly identify attributes within the frame. To achieve this, advanced scripting skills are required.
- Hidden properties: Salesforce uses Shadow DOMs to build components. As a result, it’s hard for automation tools to find elements because Shadow DOMs hide component properties commonly used to identify elements.
- Highly customizable: The flexibility of Salesforce makes it difficult for traditional tools to handle. Users can adjust Salesforce to their custom needs, and with so many possibilities, thorough and efficient testing is very hard.
- Integrations: Salesforce integrates with many third-party applications. Being able to test if it’s receiving and rendering the information correctly is a challenge.
- Role-based: Experience with Salesforce varies depending on the role of the user. It requires more testing to capture all the different user flows.
Why Use Testim for Salesforce Testing?
With Testim’s AI-powered test automation solution for Salesforce, you can successfully manage situations that are difficult to handle with traditional automated testing tools.
Testim allows you to write clean tests fast. It can natively handle Salesforce components that are hidden behind Shadow DOMs, and it simplifies the management of custom objects. With AI-powered smart locators, you can quickly test dynamic pages. Testim automatically switches to active tabs without having to remap locators when an object changes. Locators are adjustable; they maintain test stability and minimize maintenance efforts.
Testim is an excellent solution for Salesforce automated testing, and even Salesforce itself uses Testim to test applications and integrations.
Conclusion
Salesforce’s popularity is increasing, and many organizations depend on it. Efficient Salesforce testing is an essential part of successful business operations, as it will save you valuable resources and increase test coverage and overall quality. With automated testing, you’ll be able to detect threats on time and resolve them before they get out of hand, causing more significant problems. A reliable Salesforce automated testing solution like Testim will simplify this process and make sure that you can grow as a business.
Learn more about how Salesforce tests Salesforce and see how Testim can help.
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