Salesforce is a cloud computing Software
as a Service (SaaS) provider. Out of all its cloud platforms and applications,
it is best known for its Customer Relationship Management service. This CRM is
composed of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Force.com, Chatter and
Work.com. Salesforce plays a significant role in the business processes of many
leading companies. It is highly extensible, configurable, and is most of the
time integrated with many other applications.
With frequent updates in cloud apps, companies using them face constant
risks. With Salesforce apps, an organization has very little control over the
timing of software changes and where those changes occur. Salesforce Testing
allows organizations to validate that the critical business processes are
executed with the highest quality. The best thing about Salesforce is its
ability to deliver faster. However, it is recommended to not rush with the
testing process.
In order to understand the importance of salesforce application testing,
it is important to first understand the problems of manual testing and how
automation can address them.
- Manual Testing is time consuming
- Manual Testing is expensive
- Manual Testing is not interesting
- Manual Testing is prone to
mistakes
It is very important that a significantly fast testing strategy should
be adopted in order to successfully deliver lasting quality. This calls for a
more skilled set of technical team. However, the other axioms of testing should
also be kept in mind. Every quarter new enhancements, features and abilities to the platform is
being deployed by Salesforce. Whenever new features are released, it is
required to run regression tests. Here automation proves to be more beneficial
over manual testing in order to assess the impact of the release.
Most of the companies use the
QTP(Quick Test Professional) test automation tool for running regression
scripts and functional tests in order to save time. The hybrid framework is the
best for the test automation of SalesForce Applications. It can be the
combination of modular, keyword or data driven frameworks. QTP does not require
any additional plugins for automating Salesforce application testing
The main benefits of Salesforce TestAutomation can be listed as follows:
- Leverages the expertise of key
business users
- Optimizes the software release
process
- Faster execution and reduced
business risk with a greater test coverage
- Early detection of defects with
higher test accuracy
- Standardization and formalizing
of organizational processes
- Reuse and optimization of test
cases and test processes
- End to end testing with advanced
testing team and efficiency
- Decreased production defects ,
speed to market with increasing customer confidence
- Isolation of problem components
in early phases of the development cycle
- Continuous execution of test
automation processes
Conclusion
Being a widely accepted software application and platform, consistent
quality is the most important factor in each of its release. Automated testing
proves to be the most active way of testing, as it takes over the monotonous
and repetitive test cases and covers all the levels of the test pyramid. The
open source Selenium and QTP are widely used testing tools leveraged by Salesforce
to automate their innumerable test cases.
