Which one is Better | Manual or Automated Salesforce Testing?
Tags: salesforce, automated, testing, tool
Published: 2022-12-22 12:12:18

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Although Salesforce is a very popular tool that offers its users a variety of benefits like seasonal updates, limitless customization options, multiple integrations, etc., there is a high likelihood that these features will have an impact on current business processes.

You must thoroughly test it to make sure that customizations, enhancements, and seasonal updates haven’t adversely affected your current business processes or jeopardized other components of your Salesforce ecosystems.

To make sure the system is functioning as it is intended to, regardless of whether you are the system architect, a business user, or a system administrator, you must test your enhancements against the original requirements.

Challenges With Salesforce Testing Done Only by Hand
Short Testing Window: It is difficult for QA professionals to perform manual testing for Salesforce because of the seasonal updates, which occur three times a year. Testing Salesforce manually takes weeks or even months. Since each seasonal update introduces hundreds of features, manual testing is a time and energy waste.

Insufficient Test Coverage: Insufficient test coverage is one of the biggest problems with manual testing. In manual testing, time constraints prevent testers from testing every crevice.

They also end up guessing based on their prior experience as to what to test and what not to test, which frequently only covers 40% or even fewer risks because there are no analytical reports indicating which business processes should be tested first.

Errors: Salesforce is a complicated application that can be endlessly customized and integrated. With so many moving parts, it’s very challenging to thoroughly check for every potential regression that might appear as the code base expands. A manual testing approach will result in insufficient test coverage and errors.

Different Roles: Salesforce applications support a variety of role types. Therefore, manually creating test cases for various roles, features, and settings can be time-consuming as well as tedious.

Dynamic Components: The environment at Salesforce is dynamic. As a result, field locators based on ids need to be constantly maintained due to changes in the code since ids are generated at runtime. Therefore, script maintenance can be very difficult in a situation where updates are released three times a year.

What Then, if not Manual Testing?
Zero Code Test Automation: Choose a Salesforce-specific test automation platform that comprehends the context of metadata and provides a simple no-code interface for non-coders to automate testing.

Pre-Built Test Assets: The time required for initial setup can be reduced by 70% when test libraries for Sales, Marketing, Service Cloud, and CPQ functions are already built.

Autonomous Test Framework: Automation Test Framework’s self-configuring and self-healing features make it easier to set up your current configurations and can reduce the need for maintenance. In Salesforce, scripts become broken because of dynamic elements. Autonomous healing abilities reduce the need for maintenance.

Change Impact Analysis: Use a framework for test automation that can automatically assess the impact of a change and incorporate that change into test automation.

Risk-Based Coverage: The Salesforce Test Automation framework should assess how changes will affect users and provide insight into potential risks. This will allow QA teams to refactor test cases even before development, and it will also help administrators better plan releases.

We need a comprehensive test automation solution like Opkey with contemporary features like no-code automation, pre-built test libraries, and change impact analysis to help us smoothly navigate the Salesforce testing challenges in order to ensure that customizations and seasonal Salesforce updates do not affect existing business processes.