Salesforce rolls out hundreds of innovative features to its customers in form of three seasonal releases i.e. Spring, Summer, and Winter. However, these seasonal releases are no less than a nightmare for Application/ IT Managers. Since Salesforce is highly customizable, there is a possibility that your development team has created custom objects to make them fit into your business requirements or integrate them with many applications. Seasonal updates can negatively impact critical customizations or integrations. As an application manager, you need to understand whether or not new features/ functionalities are going to impact current business processes. Testing is the only way to ensure business continuity.
Testing Salesforce is not a walk in the park due to the complexity involved with it. If you opt for manual testing, then it is not considered a viable solution in this fast pace world due to the depth and frequency of updates. Moreover, your QA teams will always struggle to keep pace with Salesforce’s continuous updates. Salesforce test automation is of great help as improves speed and quality. However, automated testing also brings its own challenges. In this blog, we’ll discuss those challenges and recommend what you should look for in Salesforce automation testing tool.
Why do some automation tools struggle with Salesforce testing?
The complex nature of Salesforce makes it difficult to test with traditional tools. Given below are some of the reasons highlighting why Salesforce is difficult to automate from a technical perspective:
- Dynamic Pages: The web pages and object properties of Salesforce’s Classic and Lightning have dynamic nature. It means that tabs are iFrames and content is loaded independently. To automate, elements need to be identified. However, it is difficult to do it as script-based tools can’t access the content/ objects directly.
- Styled Components: The class names and indexes in Salesforce are changed frequently with random tags. For Salesforce test automation, it is necessary to detect the fixed part of the locator. However, Salesforce components don’t have fixed ID, name, class, or CSS attributes.
- Shadow DOM: The objects in Salesforce are hidden behind a Shadow DOM, making it difficult for test automation tools to identify these elements.
- Highly customizable: Salesforce is a highly customizable application in which views, layouts, and reports can be customized as per unique business requirements. Since combinations are endless, it makes it difficult to test and cover every possible scenario.
- Integrations: Salesforce can be integrated seamlessly with third-party apps. Updates can impact existing integrations. However, many Salesforce testing tools don’t have the capability to test and cover integrated apps.
- Frequent System Updates: Since Salesforce rolls out seasonal updates thrice a year, test scripts that rely on CSS selectors like class names, indexes, IDs fail. A lot of test script maintenance is required in such a situation.
What to look for in the Salesforce testing tool?
- No Code Testing Tool: Always opt for a “No Code” Salesforce testing tool that understands metadata context and allows non-technical users to automate Salesforce processes with the graphical interface rather using coding.
- Change Impact Assessment: Select a Salesforce test automation tool that automatically analyses the impact of new features and functionalities on your existing ecosystem and autonomously incorporates those changes in test automation.
- Self-Configuring: Always opt for a testing tool that autonomously extracts and sets up your existing configurations to reduce initial setup time.
- Self-healing: Choose the test automation framework that automatically heals the test scripts as per updates and helps in automation script maintenance effortlessly.
- End-to-end testing: Select the platform that not only test automate Salesforce but also the entire ecosystem of integrated apps to offer your adequate test coverage.
