This is the second blog in our two-part series on the basics of Salesforce testing. In this blog, we’re talking about testing—more specifically, manual and automated testing in Salesforce. The first blog in the series, Testing for Salesforce: What It Means and Why it’s Important, is available on the Provar blog.
Reliable testing is essential for maintaining the quality of a Salesforce ecosystem. This directly impacts an organization’s success. However, traditional manual testing is time-consuming, error-prone, and labor-intensive. Finding the right automated testing solution to meet your organization’s unique needs can be challenging.
In this blog, we’re focusing on the fundamentals and reviewing manual testing and automated testing. We’ll cover the definitions and differences between manual and automated Salesforce testing and break down the benefits of automated testing.
What is Manual Testing?
Maintenance of Salesforce and its associated applications has historically been initiated through manual testing. The flexibility of manual testing enables testers to leverage their intuition and knowledge, which are unmistakably human inclinations, to identify potential issues. But as an organization’s Salesforce ecosystem grows more prominent and complex, manual testing becomes increasingly cumbersome, complicated, error-prone, and unrealistic. And with Salesforce’s regular updates and integrations, it’s easy for already overburdened teams to fall behind on testing.
What is Automated Testing?
In today’s rapidly changing marketplace, testing is essential to ensure that Salesforce works as intended. Organizations are increasingly using specialized software tools to automate their Salesforce testing. These tools help design and run test cases, execute them, and generate reports. They also provide actionable insights for managing the entire ecosystem. Automated testing solutions allow organizations to run tests more efficiently, effectively, and accurately, reducing the need for large teams of human testers.
While manual testing has its upsides (namely, cost for a smaller organization), automated testing solutions offer organizations benefits that can significantly impact their success. Ultimately, while the cost of manual testing can be lower up front, as an organization scales, those costs add up in the form of time spent and quality maintenance.
Some of the benefits of automated testing for Salesforce include:
Enhanced Efficiency
Teams can execute automated tests quickly, accurately, and repeatedly, which reduces the time and effort needed. Tasks that once took hours or days now take only a fraction of the time. This allows teams to focus on more critical and strategic Salesforce tasks.
Increased Test Coverage
Even the best developers and QA experts are human, and manual testing is prone to human error and limitations. Automated testing solutions can easily handle enormous amounts of data, thoroughly testing all features, functionality, and additional applications and ensuring comprehensive test coverage. Better coverage allows teams to identify issues earlier in the testing cycle, reducing the risk of bugs and breaks for end users.
Improved Quality and Reliability
For many organizations, reliable end-to-end testing is crucial to keeping customer confidence. Automated testing ensures consistency in test execution, eliminating issues with human interpretation, error, or execution. Test scripts are predefined and repeatable and provide accurate, real-time results. Automated testing offers reliability that is especially important for complex customer journeys and intricate implementations.
Optimized Cost
While Salesforce test automation solutions often have a significant initial investment, the long-term benefits of automated testing far outweigh the price tag. Automated tests can be reused and are easily maintained, reducing the need for additional testing resources or on-the-ground teams. Additionally, automated testing allows organizations to identify and address issues earlier in the testing cycle, reducing rework and avoiding expensive inefficiency.
Conclusion
While no approach to testing for Salesforce is perfect, automated testing offers unique advantages to organizations relying on it for everyday operations. Organizations can enhance efficiency, increase test coverage, improve quality and reliability, and optimize cost by leveraging automated testing tools.
Since 2014, Provar has been a leader in Salesforce testing innovation. Our robust suite of solutions helps teams organize, automate, and scale their testing efforts in Salesforce and beyond and meets our users at every stage of their quality journey.
Interested in learning more about Provar’s robust suite of Salesforce testing solutions? Connect with us today!
