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Salesforce is the world’s most popular CRM system, used by more than 150K customers globally. One major reason for Salesforce’s popularity is its commitment to continuous innovation, with 3 major releases a year, plus the occasional patch.
Though customers benefit greatly from the new features and functionalities added to Salesforce with each release, testing becomes a major burden, as each it’s critical to make sure that Salesforce’s new features function as required, and that nothing in your Salesforce Org, including integrations with other applications, gets broken with a new internal release.
Salesforce Application Testing is the biggest bottleneck for organizations that are trying to make the most of their Salesforce applications. Continuous testing of Salesforce through open-source tools like Selenium is supposed to remove backlogs and increase testing speed, but because these tools weren’t built specifically for Salesforce, they often lead to a bigger test burden than manual testing.
Salesforce test automation through open-source tools isn’t viable for the following reasons:
Dynamic Objects & Frames: Salesforce is a highly dynamic application that features embedded frames and objects. Salesforce application testing with code-based test tools like Selenium, Puppeteer, and Cypress is challenging because these tools don’t support dynamic tables and frames. Because dynamic tables and frames aren’t natively supported, technical teams must spend countless hours creating complex scripts that can support them.
See: Why is it difficult to automate Salesforce application testing with Selenium?
Time-Consuming Script Maintenance: Due to dynamic elements and tables in Salesforce pages, ID changes frequently break existing test scripts. When Salesforce updates are rolled out, or user interfaces change even slightly from the introduction of new screens or buttons, test automation scripts get broken. Broken scripts are time consuming, and thus costly, to fix.
Steep Learning Curve: There is no doubt that Salesforce is a user-friendly platform. However, most Salesforce automation platforms aren’t nearly as user-friendly. Many of the most popular Salesforce test automation platforms require programming to create test cases. Since most business users aren’t programmers, it’s nearly impossible for them to contribute to Salesforce test automation. And if they want to contribute, it typically takes them months to get them up to speed.
What to Look for in a Salesforce Application Testing Solution
From a technical perspective, code-based test automation isn’t optimal because it lengthens test case creation time and results in a heavy maintenance burden. This is problematic because test automation is supposed to make test script creation and maintenance easier for your organization.
You should look for a Salesforce application testing tool that simplifies testing, rather than putting a heavy burden on QA teams and business users. We recommend the tool you choose has the following features:
Low learning curve: Choose a no-code Salesforce test automation platform that requires minimum training to get started. Ideally, this tool will be No-Code, and enables non-technical users to build and scale automation through drag-and-drop, as well as record-and-playback, features.
Self-healing test scripts: Choose a Salesforce application testing tool that minimizes your test maintenance burden. When automation scripts break due to a change in an object property –Name, ID, Xpath, or CSS–self-healing test automation technologies can fix broken test cases without any human intervention, saving your enterprise hundreds of hours of test maintenance.
Smart Object Recognition: Choose a test automation tool that leverages machine learning and advanced optical character recognition (OCR) techniques to naturally identify objects. AI-based object recognition and object interaction allow a single script to run on both Lightning and Classic versions of Salesforce.
Salesforce testing is complex enough. Your solution for Salesforce automation shouldn’t be.
