“Digital transformation isn’t one app [solution], it’s a must-have. Organizations and governments around the world have a digital transformation imperative like never before, and many of them are accelerating their plans for a digital-first work-from-anywhere environment.” - Marc Benioff, founder, and CEO of Salesforce

Salesforce is a complex customer relationship management (CRM) software and is highly customizable. Furthermore, it can be integrated with a wide range of applications in different ways such as web services, outbound messaging, web portals, social media, data loader, etc. To ensure that customizations, enhancements, and seasonal updates haven’t impacted your existing business processes or compromised other elements of your Salesforce ecosystems, you need to test it thoroughly. 

Whether you’re a system architect or a business user or a system admin, you need to test your enhancements against the original requirements to ensure that system is operating as it is intended to do.

Problems With Manual-only Salesforce Testing

• The manual testing approach for Salesforce requires weeks if not months. In a scenario, when Salesforce is rolling out hundreds of features with seasonal updates who has that much time to test manually and that too thrice a year.
• One of the biggest drawbacks of manual testing is inadequate coverage. In manual testing, testers can’t test every nook and cranny in the time available. Rather, they test on the basis of their experience which often covers only 40% or even fewer risks.
• Manual testing approaches are often hit with inaccuracies. Salesforce is a complex application that can be customized and integrated seamlessly. Having so many moving parts, it is really difficult to adequately check for every possible regression that may creep back as the code base grows.
• Salesforce applications support different types of roles. So, manually writing test cases for different roles, features and settings not only can be tedious but also time-consuming.
• Salesforce has a dynamic environment. So, ids are generated at the runtime, and field locator based on ids requires constant maintenance due to changes in the code. So, maintaining scripts can be very challenging in a scenario when updates are rolled out thrice a year.

The complexity of Salesforce testing cannot be ignored since most organizations customize their Salesforce environment using third-party apps or add-ons. Apart from this, role-specific permissions make Salesforce an incredibly difficult application to test manually.

So if Not Manual Testing, Then What?

The answer to this question is Salesforce Test Automation. In order to keep pace with the Salesforce release cycle and to protect business from disruption, enterprises need to test automate Salesforce. Since test automation delivers quick feedback ti developers while enabling them to instantly rectify bugs or glitches, it helps in faster time-to-market. Apart from this, Salesforce test automation infuses consistency in releases by ensuring that regression cycles are consistent, robust and there will be no variation.

Test Automation Framework for Salesforce

Although Salesforce test automation has numerous benefits, enterprises need to be careful because many test automation platforms are really good only at cycling through screens. They don’t actually do real regression testing. 

While selecting a test automation framework for Salesforce, you need to keep given below points in mind:

Zero Code Test Automation – Choose a Salesforce-specific test automation platform that understands metadata context and offers an intuitive no-code interface for non-coders to automate testing.

Pre-built Test Assets – Having pre-built test libraries for Sales, Marketing, Service Cloud, and CPQ functions can cut down initial setup time by 70%.

Autonomous Test Framework – Self-configuring helps in setting up your existing configurations painlessly and self-healing capabilities can help in cutting down maintenance efforts. Due to dynamic elements, scripts get broken in Salesforce. Having autonomous healing capabilities help in reducing maintenance efforts.

Change Impact Analysis – Adopt a test automation framework that can automatically analyze the impact associated with the change and autonomously incorporate those changes in test automation.

Risk-based Coverage – Salesforce Test Automation framework should analyze change impact and deliver visibility into the risks that can be introduced by the changes, enabling QA teams to refactor test cases even before development while allowing admin to plan release better.