Undoubtedly, Salesforce is the globally recognized CRM (customer relationship management) software that delivers continuous innovation with its three seasonal releases -spring, summer, and winter. As its commitment towards its customers, Salesforce offers hundreds of innovative features that help enterprises to seamlessly connect with its customers. However, enterprises that have embraced Salesforce, often struggle to keep pace with its rapid release cycles. Although manual testing approach is still prevalent, however it cannot be considered as trustworthy due to inaccuracy, errors due to human intervention, and inability to identify risks. In this article, we’ll discuss the drawbacks of manual testing, why automation is essential for Salesforce testing, challenges in implementing test automation and how to tackle these challenges.

Let’s discuss the drawbacks of manual Salesforce testing.

• It is cumbersome, time-consuming, & can slow-down your delivery cycle.
• Inadequate test coverage and inaccuracies due to manual intervention.
• Since it requires more time, it also costs you more.
• Defects can slip into production and can disrupt business continuity.

Salesforce test automation is considered as the most appropriate solution to address these challenges. Introduction of test automation not only eliminates the drawbacks of manual testing but also add value to your enterprise by maximizing Salesforce ROI for your company.

Benefits of Salesforce test automation

Accelerated speed and improved efficiency: Since manual efforts are reduced, automation speeds up the testing process and also increases the testing efficiency as testers don’t have to do testing based on guesses. Rather they need to test according to the highlighted risks.

Improved test coverage: Unlike manual testing approach in which test cases are created and executed on the basis of guesses and tester’s experience, test automation follows a more reliable risk-based testing approach in which tests are executed based on the highlighted risks. Prior to deployment in production, every release is technically and functionally analysed for the impact and risks.

Reduced Business Risks: Since test automation involves use of artificial intelligence and other innovative technologies to deliver adequate coverage, it also reduces the business risks. The releases are deployed in production only after proper testing and change impact assessment, making businesses disruption free.

There is no iota of doubt that Salesforce test automation delivers several benefits for your business. However, there are challenges in its implementation. Salesforce updates bring constant changes and improvements. Your Salesforce test automation platforms need to absorb these updates to avoid any problem.

• The dynamic elements (with no fixed attributes like ID, name, CSS, Xpath, etc) in Salesforce are hard to automate.
• Salesforce uses Shadow DOM technology to deliver compatibility across all browsers, however, many automation tools do not support it natively.
• It is not mandatory that same test scripts work in “Classic” as well as “Lightning” version of Salesforce.
• Due to dynamic elements, there are chances that test scripts get broken and test stability gets affected during the releases.

To address these challenges, you need a Salesforce test automation platform that not only supports both “Classic” and “Lightning” versions but also fix test scripts automatically. The test automation framework shouldn’t get affected with dynamic elements and can also provide change impact assessment and risk-based test recommendations.