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With its commitment to constant innovation, Salesforce rolls out three seasonal releases a year. Salesforce releases come packed with hundreds of new features, enabling end-users to do their jobs more efficiently. Prior to deployment in production, Salesforce recommends that regression testing is executed to verify that changes due to the release do not negatively impact existing functionality. Salesforce testing is executed to ensure the previous functionality is working as expected, and that new changes have not introduced any defects.
Each Salesforce release is rolled out in your sandbox 3-4 months prior to deployment so that you can regression test existing functionality and test new features prior to the update being pushed to production. You can refer to the Salesforce release notes to get complete details on new features. Regression testing for Salesforce typically involves Salesforce admins and functional users, but because of Salesforce’s complexity, this testing can be quite cumbersome and time-consuming.
In this blog, we’ll cover the major challenges that functional users face while executing regression testing for Salesforce releases. We’ll also present Opkey as a no-code test automation platform that’s built to address these challenges.
Read: Test Automation for Salesforce: How to Evaluate a Tool
Challenges for functional users during Salesforce release testing
Test case creation: For functional validation, business users need to be involved since they're the ones who know their day-to-day business processes best. To ensure that the Salesforce applications are actually delivering what they request without issue or delay, business users and functional consultants need to create test cases around real-world scenarios. Since they're not programmers, operating a script-based automation platform will be a challenge for them.
Test script maintenance: Most test automation platforms use object recognition techniques to create automation. However, this object recognition doesn’t work for Salesforce: Salesforce uses dynamic elements–there are no fixed ID, Name, XPath, or CSS, making automated scripts flaky, and easy to break. Three Salesforce releases per year becomes a large burden for functional users, as it’s very time consuming to fix broken scripts with each release.
Managing test scripts: A robust test suite consists of hundreds–if not thousands–of different test cases that must be run on different occasions. These include sanity tests, smoke tests, regression tests, and sprint closures, just to name just a few. With multiple releases each year, the size of the test suites keep growing, making it more difficult to manage manually.
Determining the regression suite size: Salesforce releases require an immense amount of regression testing. In a fast-paced development environment, it’s not always possible to run an entire regression suite of test cases. Determining the minimum number of test cases to ensure a stable seasonal release is difficult to do. As a result, most organizations either test too much–wasting time and money–or test too little, which exposes them to business process risk.
To learn more about the benefits of automated testing, download our Ebook, How to save money with test automation.
Opkey: A test automation platform created for functional users
Designed to cater the unique needs of functional users, Opkey is a no-code test automation platform that empowers users to seamlessly keep pace with Salesforce releases. Here’s how:
Zero-code automation: Opkey comes with Salesforce-specific record and playback engines that allows business users to intuitively create test cases on a fly. Opkey can be operated without any technical knowledge and can easily handle Salesforce’s dynamic objects and controls, since it communicates directly with Salesforce APIs.
Self-healing test scripts: Since Opkey is a meta-data driven platform, whenever there are changes to test scripts due to a change in an object property, it automatically identifies those changes and fixes them without human intervention. This greatly alleviates the burden of test maintenance.
Self-configuring test scripts: Opkey comes packed with built-in AI, and directly consumes meta-data to autonomously detect your existing configurations. This reduces initial test automation setup time by up to 70%. Said another way, Opkey automatically detects API endpoints for your salesforce org, ensuring 70% faster test creation.
Smart regressions: Opkey considers a greater number of parameters than are humanly possible to determine the size of the regression test suites to ensure optimal risk coverage. Opkey identifies the code level changes, as well as the impacted functionality, to better identify the test cases that are touching the functional area that could have been impacted by the change under test, and uses this information to optimize regression suite selection.
Seamless test management: Opkey natively integrates with test management tools like Jira, Jenkins, Bamboo, ALM, and more. This ensures your Salesforce releases are complete in a time-efficient manner.
End-to-end testing: Opkey offers support for dozens of applications in the Salesforce app exchange, including Copado, Gearset, and others, along with web, mobile, APIs, Desktop, Citrix, Mainframes, and other legacy applications. You can seamlessly use Opkey for end-to-end testing across Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, CPQ, and other modules. This ensures that when your Salesforce org updates, no integrations break.
Conclusion
You’re likely aware that the Salesforce Winter ‘23 release is coming soon, and functional users are starting to worry about which business processes they must prioritize testing on.
Opkey eliminates the guesswork of which tests to run, and enables functional Salesforce users to quickly create code-free, automated tests, that will ensure the Winter ‘23 release is a smooth one.
