Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM applications globally, used by thousands of organizations across all industries and segments. It enables organizations to manage their customer and revenue-focused business processes, functions, and data in a central location, thereby improving planning, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance.

Why Test Salesforce?

Salesforce manages mission-critical business processes and is often highly configured and highly integrated with other mission-critical enterprise applications. Testing Salesforce ensures that any new enhancement or release will not break existing workflows.

Salesforce usually releases a major new version of its SaaS application platform three times per year. Most customers are provided with a very short release window where they can validate that their configurations and integrations are fully supported in the new release. Automating testing of key workflows can help customers to validate release readiness and/or find and fix issues faster.

Best Practices for Salesforce Testing

When developing a Salesforce testing strategy, it’s important to bifurcate the strategy during the implementation phase and the strategy during the ongoing maintenance and support phase.

Implementation Phase:

During the implementation phase, it’s important to collaborate closely with the teams that are designing the functional requirements for Salesforce. A good approach to testing may be to adopt Behavior-Driven Development which helps testers focus on application modules that matter & know exactly how they work in a methodical fashion.

Once you have developed an understanding of the business process that will be implemented, design your test cases based on the requirements to ensure that business processes are functioning as designed. When designing test cases you can optimize test coverage by taking the following into consideration:

Salesforce roles and security model
End-to-end integration process testing
End-to-end testing to incorporate web and mobile use cases

Execute your full regression suite prior to production go-live to ensure a great experience for your users.

Ongoing Maintenance and Support Phase:

After you go live, it’s important to continue to build out your Salesforce Test Suite based on how the system has been adopted by users as well as to support new enhancements and feature roll-outs. Additionally, to optimize test coverage you should also:

Integrate and automate the execution of your regression test suites as a part of the CI/CD process anytime there is a Salesforce change.
Consistently monitor test results for defects and/or broken test cases. Update test cases as required.
Understand Salesforce’s release schedule and plan ahead to comprehensively execute your regression suite during their release preview window.

Challenges Related to Salesforce Testing

Technical challenges:

Web components are not easily identifiable due to multiple iframes.
Objects have dynamic IDs that consistently change which makes them difficult to capture.
Some of the Salesforce apps rely heavily on tables, which makes it difficult to automate.
Expertise in framework setup and tools is difficult to find.
Migration from the classic Salesforce version to the Salesforce Lightning platform raises challenges around portability and compatibility.

Business challenges:

Functional experience in Salesforce is critical and oftentimes functional experts are not technology experts.
Large teams using the solution means low downtime and increased pressure on customers.

Benefits of Using Katalon for Salesforce Test Automation

Accelerate Delivery with Quality

Test automation with Katalon allows Salesforce customers to test more scenarios in each sprint to ensure test coverage and quality.
Enables in-sprint test automation.

API and Integration Testing

Katalon helps Salesforce customers ensure that their test suite includes API tests of quote providers and other third-party vendors.

Low-Code and Full-Code Test Automation

Codeless script creation enables non-technical QA team members to build automated Salesforce test scripts.
A more advanced Groovy script editor allows advanced users to edit test scripts and scale testing framework.

Simplify Testing Salesforce Customizations

A single Katalon test suite can cover complex Salesforce user flows, ensuring coverage and quality for every release.
Ensure coverage across web, mobile, and APIs.

Katalon and Deloitte’s Salesforce Testing Accelerator

To help Salesforce customers quickly adopt Katalon for Salesforce test automation, Katalon has collaborated with Deloitte to develop a Salesforce Test Automation Accelerator. The accelerator offers customers access to a pre-built set of test script libraries for many of the most common Salesforce business processes, reducing Salesforce test automation adoption times by more than 50% and significantly reducing the effort to maintain Salesforce automated tests.

Leveraging this pre-packaged test script offering for automating Salesforce, users can scale their automation for multiple common and frequent Salesforce processes with minimal time and effort. Some of the modules covered include:

Lead process
Case management
Integrations from external applications
CPQ and quote management
Order management
Salesforce Lightning web component
Salesforce community
Salesforce data import wizard
Salesforce reports and dashboards

The Salesforce accelerator from Katalon and Deloitte is available to customers upon request.

Below are some stats that illustrate how Katalon automated testing performs on tests against Salesforce in comparison to manual and open source ways of doing things:

Accelerate project mobilization by up to 27% using the script repository and best practice framework versus starting from scratch
18% decrease in sourcing test automation engineers (less technical expertise required vs. open source)
33-42% more cost-effective rate cards for test automation engineers on Katalon vs. open source skills (i.e., Selenium)
Up to 50% improvement on design/authoring efforts for test automation with Katalon and Deloitte resources vs. legacy test technologies
Between 25-40% decrease in test script maintenance time vs. typical open source technologies
Overall improved testing coverage and support aligned to Salesforce’s quarterly maintenance and upgrade schedules

Screenshots of Katalon's Automated Processes of Salesforce

Salesforce Screenshot 1

Salesforce Katalon Screenshot 2

Salesforce Katalon Screenshot 4

Salesforce Testing with Katalon is a solution that enables organizations to automate their testing process for Salesforce applications. It helps organizations streamline their testing efforts, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their testing process, and ensure high-quality results. Katalon integrates with Salesforce to provide a comprehensive testing solution that covers end-to-end testing for Salesforce testers.

Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook to stay up to date on future announcements. And as always, we encourage you to join our Katalon Community and Katalon Academy site to continue to learn and share from our global community of quality experts.