At Provar, we pride ourselves on making sure our solutions are closely aligned with Salesforce development. We keep up-to-date with the multiple changes and updates delivered by Salesforce in their tri-annual releases to ensure that environments function without interruption. By doing this we protect our customers from excessive test maintenance that would otherwise be necessary when using an automation framework such as Selenium.

In today’s post, we will take a look at a specific example from the latest Salesforce release and illustrate why Provar’s updates — consistent and in line with Salesforce — are so valuable for our users.  Keep reading to learn more!

New Update: Advanced Search Window 

The Advanced Search Window, a major update that arrived in Spring ’25, will replace all traditional Lookup windows with a unified Advanced Search Screen.

This update impacts all Standard and Custom Objects, as object-specific lookups are replaced with the common Advanced Search Screen. The only exceptions are Tasks and Campaigns, where users will continue to see the old Lookup screens.

Impact on Automation

With this change, users of any other test automation tool will typically need to adjust and update scripts to handle the updated lookup functionality. This will impact tests created in other commercial tools, but the biggest impact will be felt by those using a test automation framework such as Selenium.  

For someone with mid-range experience using Selenium it would typically take around 20 minutes to update each test script (open the window, find the locator, update the script, debug the script) and an additional 5 minutes to test the update. 

In this example we will assume a pack of 200 Salesforce test scripts, with traditional lookup windows used in 180 of them. Based on the estimates above, updating the scripts to handle the new Advanced Search screen and testing each one manually would take 4500 minutes, or 75 hours. That’s over 9 working days being spent on maintenance for a single change in this one Salesforce release. Multiply this by the number of updates included in the release and you can easily see how test maintenance can spiral out of control and become a real bottleneck to progress. 

On the other hand, Provar users don’t have these maintenance headaches. We have ensured compatibility with the Advanced Search Window in the latest release, allowing existing lookup scripts to work seamlessly without requiring any additional changes or refactoring of test scripts. 

Rather than spending 9 days fixing their test scripts, Provar users can extend their test coverage, analyze their test results in real time, and drive quality and collaboration with other teams. 

Interested in learning more about how Provar can help you automate your testing at speed and scale? Reach out to our team today!