Due to its variety of SaaS offerings, capability to integrate with range of applications and commitment for continuous innovation, Salesforce has become the most preferred CRM solution for global companies. As its commitment for continuous innovation, Salesforce rolls out three major releases every year i.e. Spring, Summer, & Winter. These releases come with latest and greatest products features.

Events such as data refresh, new functionality or modification of business rules, new integration or new Releases from Salesforce have the potential to impact the quality of your Salesforce deployments. Since validating Salesforce manually is a daunting task, many Salesforce customers often overlook quality assurance that eventually put your business on risk.

If you continue to test your Salesforce instance manually then you might face following challenges

• Since Salesforce is a complex application, the testing costs and execution time will be very high due to requirement of huge number of application testers.
• Manually, you wouldn’t be able to keep track of all the bugs that require to be fixed to ensure business continuity.
• With manual testing, you will struggle to achieve the required levels of testing speed and accuracy that is must in this era of agile.
• High turnaround time for test execution, inadequate coverage, and improper testing across security roles are some other challenges related to manual testing.
• Since Salesforce ecosystem consists of several moving parts, even the most thorough manual testing program wouldn’t be able to check every possible regression.

Salesforce customers who are struggling to keep pace with frequency of releases need to embrace test automation. By introducing Salesforce Test Automation in your setup, you get the flexibility to run more tests in a very short span on time. Other perks of test automation include enhanced test coverage, faster feedback, and accelerated results. Test automation will give quality and software performance a major push that will eventually improve business values of your company.

However, Salesforce Test Automation is not simple as it appears…

Dynamic Elements – The UI of Salesforce applications consist of dynamic elements that don’t have fixed ID, name, class or CSS attributes. These elements change their locators whenever a test script runs. So, finding a locator of the element is not usually straightforward. In nutshell, dynamic elements influence the stability of the test and changes such as new screens, buttons, user flows or user inputs may lead to test failures, flaky/brittle tests, or build failures.

IFrames – Also known as inline frames, these HTML documents are embedded in another HTML page. Since iframes are embedded in other HTML pages, the content gets loaded independently of the page. It is daunting to deal with nested frames since a usual 30-50 step test case would take hours of coding in finding the right attributes and creating the script accordingly.

Shadow DOMs – Automating DOM can be challenging as hidden DOM trees are associated with elements in a standard DOM. It means that you’ll find it difficult to find elements for creating a “point and click” type of script. Moreover, developers also add custom HTML tags which are difficult to identify using standard test automation tools like Selenium.

A Move towards Codeless Salesforce Test Automation

To ensure that all Salesforce applications are performing exactly as designed, you need to replace your manual QA and legacy script-based tools with intelligent test automation tools. With this, you can dramatically bring down the risk related to software updates. You can find many cloud based Test Automation tools for Salesforce which comes with inbuilt Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning capabilities. Leveraging AI/ML, automation tools automatically identifies the change made to an element locator (ID), or a screen/flow. Self-healing capabilities automatically fix the test scripts to make test stable.

Leveraging baseline, new age automation tools scan new code to identify test coverage gaps and security issues, enabling test teams to deliver wider test coverage based on risk assessment. In fact, Salesforce test automation will offer you assured benefits like it will cut test execution time from days or weeks to hours, deliver improved test coverage and make you ready to embrace digital transformation at an accelerated pace.

Concluding Remark

Salesforce customers who are struggling to keep pace with faster update cycle need to embrace test automation. However, finding a right test automation tool is a bit tricky since Salesforce is a complex application that supports extensive customization and integration. Tools with technology support for AI, ML, & process mining can help you achieve the required pace and results needed for continuous innovation.