What is Test Automation in Salesforce, and why automate Salesforce testing in the first place? One of Salesforce’s greatest strengths is its ability to deliver change quickly through continuous innovation and frequent releases.
Organizations using Salesforce benefit from rapid development cycles and continuous improvement. However, while development has become faster, manual testing often becomes the bottleneck that slows releases and increases risk.
With three major Salesforce releases every year, relying solely on manual testing makes it difficult to keep pace with ongoing changes. This is why more enterprise teams are choosing automation to improve efficiency, reduce repetitive work, and deliver higher-quality releases.
“For Continuous Delivery and Agile to succeed, we need to bring manual testing from 60-80% of the testing effort down to 5-20%.”
To understand why automate Salesforce testing, it’s important to first understand the manual testing challenges organizations face and how automation addresses them and how automation addresses them.
Four Reasons Manual Testing Falls Short
1. Manual testing takes time
It is a big one for agile, where time is of the essence. If you rely on manual testing alone, this can seriously slow your delivery cycle.
2. Manual testing is expensive
If you’re setting two testers on regression testing for a week, that’s 40 hours of human effort. Automation can cut this out completely.
“The Monotonous Tester,” Cartoon Tester
3. Manual testing is not fun
Regression testing is repetitive and formulaic by definition. Can you imagine running the same 150 tests for every new deployment? Hint: it’s boring.
It’s also a waste of talent: testers enjoy exploratory, creative testing, and this is where they bring the most value. With automation, you can free up your testers to do more exploratory work, which is more fun and valuable to your team.
4. Manual testing is open to mistakes
Testers are humans, not robots. Only robots excel at repetitive activities. When bored, we become less consistent and more likely to make mistakes or cut corners. Automated testing is performance-consistent, so it’s a safer bet for repetitive tests.
Ultimately, organizations automate Salesforce testing to reduce time, lower costs, eliminate repetitive work, and improve testing consistency. These are the primary reasons enterprise Salesforce customers continue adopting automation as part of their release strategy.
It’s simple: all test automation does is reduce manual testing effort by taking care of those tests that need to be run regularly.
Once you set up your automation, those repetitive tests will run themselves. You need to press play when you want them – or set them up to run nightly and check the results in your inbox in the morning. Bingo! It frees your non-robot testers to conduct creative, exploratory testing that brings more value.
So, we’ve seen how valuable test automation can be. But why is this trend only just emerging? If automated testing was so easy to achieve, why isn’t everyone doing it?
Previously, the options for Salesforce test automation weren’t ideal. Traditional automation often required developers to build and maintain tests using code-based frameworks like Selenium, making implementation and long-term maintenance more challenging.
The developer would start by ‘teaching’ that framework all the relevant Salesforce concepts, like page layouts and validation rules. Then, they would write, design, and execute their tests through code.
Any slight change to the system under test, such as a field shifting on a page layout, would require a corresponding code update; otherwise, tests might break. Consequently, the more changes you make to Salesforce, the more updates you will need to implement in the code.
“Automation,” xkcd 1319
Building and maintaining coded automation introduces additional complexity and ongoing maintenance. For organizations looking to automate Salesforce testing, this approach often conflicts with Salesforce’s declarative philosophy and rapid release model.
Why choose a platform that has so many declarative options and supports a rapid delivery cycle and then invest in a large codebase that needs a lot of maintenance to support the testing of that platform?
So, test automation hasn’t been widely adopted until now, and that’s down to the sheer lack of good tools. Until recently, there weren’t robust tools that could provide test automation, code-free, to the point-and-click Salesforce audience. Admin-friendly tools didn’t exist. Fortunately, this is changing as the market catches up to demand.
But this isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. It would help if you chose the best tool for your organization.
To make this choice well, let me offer some advice.
Below, you’ll find my test automation checklist. This list is designed to help you identify a robust Salesforce test automation tool. In doing so, you will achieve the four main benefits of automation: reducing time and cost, alleviating tester boredom, and increasing testing consistency.
The Automation Tool Checklist
If you’ve decided to automate Salesforce testing, look for a solution that includes the following capabilities:
1. It’s code-free
As I said above, investing in a lot of code to automate your testing does not make sense for a platform like Salesforce that provides so much declarative power. Your tool should have a point-and-click interface and be admin-friendly.
2. It’s flexible
Your tool should seamlessly test across various environments and browsers without altering the test case. Poor-quality tools often hardcode elements like Field IDs that vary between environments, leading to fragile tests and high maintenance. Avoid this.
3. It’s brilliant
Your tool should be able to handle minor cosmetic changes without tests breaking (e.g., moving fields on a page layout or Visualforce page). Human testers wouldn’t get confused by this, and your automation shouldn’t either.
4. It knows Salesforce
Your tool should be able to test advanced elements like Visualforce pages and the Service Cloud console. Even if you don’t use these elements, product maturity is a good test. Many tools struggle with embedded tables and tabs.
5. It supports integration
Your tool should be able to connect to other systems, such as databases or your email system. It will help you to do accurate end-to-end testing of your processes instead of looking at Salesforce in isolation.
6. It generates reports automatically
Your tool should be able to generate reports on the successes and failures of your tests. It should also have options for running tests automatically, e.g., on a nightly basis, so that you can receive a report in your emails in the morning and scan it through. (This is usually done through a continuous integration system, e.g., Bamboo.)
7. It’s Lightning ready
Even if you’re not using Lightning, your tool should allow you to run tests in both interfaces. It will let you make the switch later on without dependencies.
During my five years as a Salesforce consultant, I evaluated numerous automation solutions. Only one consistently met every requirement on this checklist: Provar.
With these capabilities, Provar has seen rapid adoption among enterprise-level Salesforce customers and ISV partners, for whom regression testing is a time-consuming, costly, but essential delivery stage.
But you don’t have to take my word for this. Let me give a final piece of advice.
1. Take my checklist and make your additions.
2. Contact us for a demo or a free trial.
3. Compare! Please research, find other test automation tools, and see how they match up. Don’t forget to use your checklist.
If you’re evaluating why automate Salesforce testing or exploring automation for the first time, I hope this guide helps you make a more informed decision. If you’d like to learn more, our FAQs are a great place to start.
It was initially posted on Salesforce Ben’s blog on June 12, 2016.
