Salesforce is the leading CRM solution that is used by millions of enterprises across the globe. One of the most promising feature of Salesforce is continuous innovation. Salesforce helps enterprises to unlock innovation with its three free upgrades a year. What does it mean? It means that Salesforce customers get hundreds of innovative features and functionalities thrice a year to streamline their business processes. These upgrades are automatic and every customer will run the same version of Salesforce. Undoubtedly, innovation three times a year has its own benefits, however, if you’re managing Salesforce, then it can be a cause of great concern for you.
New updates thrice a year means that you need to “test” your system with every update to understand its impact on current business processes and procedures. Enterprises need to perform regression testing to find out whether or not updates have introduced bugs or code-changes have negatively impact system performance or user experience. If adequate testing is not performed after every update, it could adversely impact operational efficiency when you need to add records or perhaps share a report in Salesforce.
Though many enterprises still rely on manual testing, but for Salesforce testing, manual approach cannot be considered as viable because it lack speed and agility. Salesforce is a massive application and even a standard implementation is a full of complexity. In most of the cases, enterprises have customized their Salesforce environment and have integrated it with many third-party apps. Though extended ecosystem is a more sustainable solution for enterprises, it gives headache to Salesforce testers.
Some of the issues that may arise with manual testing
Time-consuming – Since Salesforce is a big application, it will take days, if not weeks to thoroughly test it.
Inadequate Coverage – Though, you may employ the most experienced testers, it is really a daunting task to test every nook and cranny in the time available.
Inaccuracy – With customization, integrations, and so many moving parts, it is not viable to adequately check every possible regression using manual testing.
Since manual testing is not a viable approach as enterprises struggle to keep pace with frequency and depth of Salesforce updates. Enterprises should embrace high velocity automated testing if they want to avoid business disruption after Salesforce updates.
Though many open-source as well as paid test automation tools available in the market but before selecting any of the available tools, users need to analyse the technical aspects of Salesforce.
Things that should be kept in mind while selecting test automation tool for Salesforce
Navigation through frames – The front-end of Salesforce is built with dynamic frames. These iframes are difficult to automate since elements are covered under the frame.
Heavy DOM structure – The architecture of Salesforce is complex and heavy. It means that test automation tools need more time to the tree structure of Salesforce.
Dynamic Elements – Salesforce features dynamic elements. Due to dynamic elements, a slight change to the app like new screens, buttons, or user flows can lead to test script failures, making maintenance of tests a major concern.
The proposed test automation should be like
Enterprises should look for zero-code continuous test automation tool that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to address the challenges of dynamic elements. Leveraging AI/ML, test automation tools automatically identify the changes made to an element locator (ID), or a screen/flow and autonomously fix the test scripts to deliver stable results. Use of test automation reduces the test execution time and helps enterprises to keep pace with Salesforce frequent updates.