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Salesforce Testing Automation is an important aspect of all Salesforce projects and deployments.
Customer is king for any business, whether it is an individual-run enterprise or a multi-million dollar company. After all, value addition for the Customer is crucial for the continued success of an organization in the long run. Hence, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have become a vital component for any organization. CRM systems facilitate acquiring, tracking, managing, and retaining Customers: the lifeline of a business.
Salesforce is a cloud-based service as a software (SaaS) company that provides the world’s top CRM platform for businesses across the globe. The platform has been designed to help retain existing customers, generate leads for prospects, and additionally, make business processes more streamlined.
There is a comprehensive suite of apps that the Salesforce platform provides to a company that helps all the teams – from sales, marketing, customer service, to commerce and IT to connect and collaborate on the customer-centric data. This has the potential to drive business growth through the creation of value to the customer.
The CRM system developed by Salesforce has been a leading choice for small, medium, and large enterprises alike. The flexibility and ease of use, constant upgrades and improvements, the wealth of customer information made available, and accessibility of data (since it is a cloud-based platform) are some of the few reasons that Salesforce has become the most used CRM platform across the globe.
An interesting component of Salesforce is how the platform empowers businesses with the power to create customized apps as per business needs and requirements. Salesforce App Cloud is a collection of development tools that developers can employ to create new applications for the business using the Salesforce platform itself. This collection of tools includes AppExchange, Force.com, Lightning, Heroku Enterprise among others. The App Cloud has been created by Salesforce to provide an extension to its existing array of apps in CRM, Sales, and Marketing, etc.
Instead of investing in buying and maintaining software and setting up the infrastructure, by making use of the Salesforce platform, companies can ensure that the developers can target all their efforts on building customized apps on the cloud that solve pertinent business problems.
The increasing speeds with which organizations need to keep up with changing environments means that testing undertaken by these organizations needs to be highly efficient. In the case of the Salesforce platform and applications, there are no standard configurations found across businesses since customized functionalities are developed and deployed as per business needs. It, thus, appears that there is a need for constant monitoring and validation of Salesforce deployments in the organization by their Quality Assurance teams.
Salesforce is a dynamic and complex platform where changes, updates, and improvements are quite frequent. With this ever-changing scope of testing, manual tests can become too cumbersome and extremely ineffective. This is why testing automation for Salesforce can prove to be extremely beneficial for organizations.
Factors that make Salesforce test automation a lucrative proposition for businesses:
Testing automation is beneficial to validate and monitor the processes within the Salesforce applications as well as its interactions with other third-party apps.
Several companies have been making a move from Salesforce Classic to Lightning. This could mean increased difficulty in manual testing as many complexities creep into the process. Salesforce testing automation can, in such cases, improve testing speeds, accuracy, and coverage.
Manual testing tends to be linear and non-adaptive. Automated testing, being adaptive in nature, can be deployed across dynamic environments and browsers, a central element in the way Salesforce functions.
Extensive testing coverage becomes crucial since a lack thereof could lead to loss in terms of customer base, sales, and ultimately, profits. Automated testing has a clear edge over manual testing as far as coverage is concerned.
Faster and more accurate results can be seen with the use of automated testing for Salesforce.
As is true for all testing that a company undertakes, the cost of human errors in manual testing in Salesforce tends to be enormous and it can have a significant negative impact on business outcomes.
Automated testing of Salesforce ensures that applications are tested and fixed for bugs in a timely fashion. As we can see, the multiple factors noted above make a strong case for the testing automation of Salesforce. As essential as it is, this can be a challenging task for the Quality Assurance teams.
Salesforce is a dynamic platform with features that can contribute greatly to a business’ growth. Even though its interface is fairly simple and easy to use, automation testing of the software underlying Salesforce may prove to be less straightforward.
Salesforce test automation may be met with the following challenges
The Salesforce applications that are available for use are getting larger in number and increasingly complex. Updates are being introduced regularly to fix bugs and improve performance. These constant changes can affect the existing processes. This poses a challenge for the testing automation of Salesforce.
Salesforce is continuously adding new navigation, layouts, workflows, and integrations to enrich user experience. These enhancements increase the number of end-to-end tests to be conducted on a regular basis. The test automation tool being used should be able to handle this.
An added complexity in automation is the use of shadow DOMs in Salesforce. Shadow DOMs hide a component’s attributes from other components. Automated UI tests that are open source and/or code-based prove to be ineffective in such a case when access to the components is crucial for testing.
The DOM structure within Salesforce tends to be heavy, which means that the automated tests that need to access these complex tree structures would require more time and effort to do so.
The Salesforce application makes use of dynamic frames that have the ability to function independently in a given HTML document. Tabs are iframes- each new tab is a new frame. Script based testing automation tools might become tough due to this.
While companies are switching from the Salesforce classic to Salesforce lighting for the enhanced UI it offers, and the test automation tool should be able to back this change without much hassle, it is equally important the tool supports the toggling between Classic and Lightning.
Undertaking automated tests for the default functionality of Salesforce applications with its standard objects and integrations may not be as tedious a task. The true challenge is to test the customizations and non-standard integrations and configurations. These are also the areas that tend to have the most significant impact on productivity and profitability.
Regression testing is essential to ensure that the existing features of the Salesforce applications are not malfunctioning in the presence of newer additions and upgrades. Regression testing is best undertaken through the automation route to save resources and time.
In spite of the obvious benefits of doing so, there are some major factors that could make the Salesforce testing automation process a bit cumbersome for businesses to undertake.
BQ platform has been built from the ground up to seamlessly handle the complexities that non-trivial apps like Salesforce have. From working with Shadow DOM to non-intrusive switching between Windows or Frames, and the ability to automate pretty much anything that Salesforce can thow at it – all in an intuitive no-code approach.
Salesforce has been designed to help businesses in multiple areas including sales, service, marketing, analytics, and others.
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