People, Process, and Technology: How to Build for Innovation with Robin Gupta

Provar provides continuous learning opportunities, making testing Salesforce easy for nearly a decade. A key part of Provar’s future is our focus on continuing to scale innovation in our solutions and leaders. In our latest community conversation, Tara Walton, Technical Community Specialist, interviews Robin Gupta, new Associate Vice President of Innovation at Provar.  

Before coming to Provar, Robin Gupta spent his career building teams and solutions at AthenaHealth, Ace Turtle Services, Happiest Minds, and Accenture. He is active in the open source community as the creator of TestZeus, a UI test automation open-source solution for Salesforce, has been a member of the Selenium Conference, and is an active member of multiple Salesforce user groups.

Learn key strategies to innovate your teams and testing practices while getting inspired to build your own open source solutions in our interview with Robin below. 

Tara Walton:

Welcome to Provar, Robin Gupta. We are so very excited to have you on board. We’ve got a bunch of questions and topics of discussion submitted to us and I would love to go over some of them with you.

This first topic about innovation is probably my favorite question because I follow Kelsey Hightower, the principal engineer at Google Cloud, on Twitter. Kelsey states that “Innovation is the act of doing something new, something never been seen before. It’s not what most organizations are struggling with. And most organizations have trouble getting anything done.”

As a creator yourself, what can teams do to better their execution and scale innovation farther?

Robin Gupta:

That’s a tough question, but it has a simple answer. The answer lies in planning. What you asked was interestingly divided into two parts: one, how do we get things done? And two, how do we actually innovate and invent new stuff? That is one of the key problems huge successful operations have struggled with…we’ve had the Kodak and the Nokia of the world, which were doing great delivering features, getting stuff done, but not inventing or reinventing the wave. But to actually attack that, one has to plan for it.

It all lies with planning and prioritization. Delivery is important and people have issues getting stuff delivered. They need to push it a little bit, plan a little better, add the right people for the right job, and then focus on innovation.

Tara Walton:

And we couldn’t agree more when thinking about how organization and planning play a key to successful innovation delivery. You also created TestZeus. What inspired you to create an open-source framework?

Robin Gupta:

So once upon a time, I used to think, “I’m good at Selenium,” but when I was introduced to Salesforce years ago, we automated a bunch of test cases. Interestingly, it was the Winter ’20 or ’21 release. Whatever we automated, all those test cases broke, because Salesforce pushes out releases twice a year and then they have minor patch updates here and there as well. I didn’t know that and whatever we had built didn’t run.

Then I started going deeper into the platforms. I realized that Salesforce has these brilliant APIs, which we use, consume, and have a smarter framework for, a little bit smarter than just vanilla, basic implementation. So that inspired me to conceptualize the whole idea, implement it, see how it worked. If it helped us, why won’t it help the testing community? And that’s how that whole thing got implemented. And I thought nothing could be better than open-sourcing the code. So that’s when I made TestZeus.

Tara Walton:

What was the hardest part? Was it the breaking all the time that really drove you to try to tackle that problem?

Robin Gupta:

Correct…every time Salesforce does a release, you’ve got to run that test, not just one to fix them, but also obviously to certify the platform, to certify the CRM or whatever piece, which we are implementing. That was definitely one of the key drivers.

Tara Walton:

That’s how Provar got started, too! It was that frustration of everything breaking and there had to be a better way. Right?

Robin Gupta:

Yeah. Correct.

Tara Walton:

I love that. And you mentioned using the API. I think a lot of us that work in automation focus so much on the front end. What brought you to think about the API side of things?

Robin Gupta:

That’s a very interesting question. When I scroll through LinkedIn or some of these social networks, there are these posts around Selenium implementation, XPath, and UI automation. But people, a lot of times, miss the bigger picture. Any system, whether it’s Salesforce, Oracle, Workday, or even homegrown platforms, people should look at as an entire architecture. People generally look at them as a website, which has some HTML and we should go to do clicks.

I even used to follow that design pattern, but then I realized that we can only engineer the test automation framework if we look at the whole engineering architecture. And that’s what drove me to the APIs. I thought…let me just pop the hood and see what’s happening with the APIs. Can we use them? And we can.

Tara Walton:

Once I finally found APIs, it was like playing with a new toy…Do you feel the same way?

Robin Gupta:

And you will never go back to using UI automation.

Tara Walton:

It’s true. Once you find the other side of it, it’s just this complete picture and all of a sudden it clicks together. Is that how you felt?

Robin Gupta:

Exactly. The dark side, if you will. 

Tara Walton:

I love that. In your opinion, how does continuous testing play a vital role in true DevOps culture?

Robin Gupta:

I had a very close head of DevOps in one of the previous organizations and he had this quote: “Continuous delivery without testing is just continuous delivery of bugs.” So CI/CD has to have this third leg, CT, continuous testing. 

If we are not testing what we are doing, maybe daily deployments or twice-a-day deployments every month, we are just deploying bugs. 

And you never know when they’ll come back and bite us. Interestingly on Salesforce, it is not just us, the development team, who delivers features. Salesforce does as well, and there’s a lot of the magic behind the curtains. So CI/CD has got to have that CT element to it. And critical testing is paramount in such a hostile environment.

Tara Walton:

Continuous delivery without testing is continuously delivering bugs. I think that’s really gold.

Robin Gupta:

Correct.

Tara Walton:

I know it’s really hard to get continuous testing to be part of the grand scheme. What advice would you give to innovators looking to create solutions to bring that level of value and quality to their teams?

Robin Gupta:

Okay. Let’s attack that at the big picture level. Innovation could be one element, but we can break into these three parts, or in a triangle. So people process in technology, and a lot of times people just look at innovation as, I’ll find some goldmine of this tech stack, which will just improve everything. It doesn’t work like that. And also when people undermine the importance of people and processes in that triangle, which I mentioned. So it’s the PPT: People. Process. Technology.

And innovation can happen overnight. It could be one golden sparkle of a thought, but if we have to actually list the whole process, we should look at the bigger picture and look at the patterns that we’ve been following. Innovation can only happen when we break some of those patterns. If we keep on focusing on the feature, we have great features, but not innovative features. So looking at the backlog is good, but just taking a step back, looking at the bigger picture along the lines of people, process, technology, seeing the trends and patterns, and then trying to make maybe one-inch moves in small increments can actually push the whole thing forward by a lot.

Tara Walton: 

Love that. I could imagine it would be easy to be overwhelmed when you’re trying to come up with something new and something never seen before. So what would you tell somebody who wants to be creative and innovative, but gets overwhelmed?

Robin Gupta:

I used to get overwhelmed a lot and once you start thinking of something, and you’re passionately thinking about it, your brain will start shooting ideas like, can we do this? Can we do that? I literally used to sometimes stop my car and take notes on my mobile. The easier way is, whenever you are working, carry a notepad and a pen. You can be old school, or you could use OneNote, Evernote, whatever fancy note taking app you have. Just jot the things down.

That’s phase one, and phase two is don’t act on any of them. Just sleep on them and the next morning, review that list. Your brain will automatically distill a lot of that. And you’ll see at the top one or two things which you can follow. The idea is not to spread yourself too thin on ten ideas and 50 cups of coffee later, you are like, “Oh, why did I do this?” Right?

Tara Walton:

Exactly, but how do you balance your innovation and your personal life, just day to day work, actual work tasks? Because I know, usually when you sit down and create something new, like TestZeus as a passion project, it’s outside of your 9:00 to 5:00 daily job. So how did you balance everything?

Robin Gupta:

Yeah. So this is something, again, one of my mentors earlier in my career told me. “Robin Gupta, when you’ll grow older in life, you’ll be juggling balls. And as you grow older, you’ll get more balls to juggle. So you’ll have family, you’ll have a job.You’ll have some passion projects. You want to have coffee with friends, so on, so forth, but again, the key is prioritization and organization.”

I like to divide my work into chunks. I also block some time with myself on Fridays at 1:00 to 2:00 PM, ISD or something like that. No meetings, no nothing. Just me and my notebook, again, prioritizing what needs to be done on the next Monday or the next week. Friday evenings are generally booked for family, unless I’m mentoring others or meeting someone very, very important outside of family. And then in addition to that, if I really get some ideas, like TestZeus, or if I’m contributing to open-source, or a conference, Saturday nights and Sunday nights are reserved for that. So make a big cup of coffee, open the laptop, and get coding.

Tara Walton:

Coffee creates code, right?…I had a professor way back in college that said, “If you want good code, make good coffee.” So I know as a QA and recovering automation developer, when I was looking for tools and I never got so brave as to try to create my own, but obviously when you’re trying to pick up a new tool, pricing can be the difference between using the tool that would be best for the job, and the tool that you can access and actually convince your boss to pay for. So do you have any advice to make the best out of a situation like that?

Robin Gupta:

Yeah, definitely. So over the years in my roles, I have worked with automation and process automation like RPA, low code, no code as well to some extent. And what I realized is that a lot of times people, specifically in EMEA and Asia Pacific, Southeast Asia, and other regions, are very price-sensitive. They tend to look at the short term answer. Can we do it for free? Can we build it on our own? Can we use this low cost option? Not the pricey one, but they tend to miss out in the long run. There are repercussions.

Maybe what is low cost is actually not low code and it’s as good as coding it on your own, or maybe it could have maintenance issues. So there are many tools out there which promise Salesforce automation, but interestingly, they don’t optimize it for Salesforce releases. And people just look at the price angle or the cost and say, “Oh, we don’t need this. We will just build it on our own.” And one year later realized that they should have caught the train to buy that tool.

Tara Walton:

Now you’ve lost a year of work and revenue…

Robin Gupta:

Correct. You’re just adding people to maintain your own code base. So long story short, when you are doing a buy versus build analysis, cost should be one, but not the defining, angle. There should be other pieces. Like what’s the forecast for the amount of resources we lead or the forecast for the amount of maintenance that will do? How low code, how low is it actually on the low code spectrum…so costing should be one, but not the defining one.

Tara Walton:

That’s good advice. I know it’s something that I’ve definitely struggled with through my career. And there’s been more than once where I have written API frameworks, but never quite the same caliber as TestZeus. So I’m the person that’s like, “Nope, that’s overwhelming.”

Robin Gupta:

Getting started is easy, but running with that car is actually difficult.

Tara Walton:

That’s really good advice. I love the idea of keeping that big picture in mind and breaking it into little baby steps and a lot of planning…I think that’s usually the rush step and it sounds like that’s where the focus should be.

Robin Gupta:

Measure once and cut twice, something like that, or measure twice, but cut once.

Tara Walton:

That’s the one. Thank you for all of your advice. I’m actually kind of excited to go back and start work on some of my side passion projects again, because I lost a little gumption on working on them, but I think I’m ready to sit down and do some more planning.

I really enjoyed our community conversation about innovation. I hope we get to do this again soon, but thank you for taking time out for a take two with me.

Robin Gupta:

Sure. Thank you so much.

Are you a leader and looking for more ideas to innovate your Salesforce test automation with Provar, as well as continue to improve your software testing? Continue the conversation with Robin and Tara in our new Community forum.