Salesforce is a game-changer in the business world, revolutionizing how organizations manage customer relationships and drive growth. As businesses increasingly adopt Salesforce as their go-to CRM platform, the need for robust Salesforce testing to fully unlock its capabilities also rises. However, Salesforce testing is quite complex, especially in terms of data management.
In this article, we will guide you through the process of Salesforce testing, common challenges, best practices, and recommend several Salesforce testing solutions to help you achieve great results.
Established since 1999, Salesforce is one of the earliest and most well-known cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platforms that helps businesses manage their customer interactions, sales processes, marketing campaigns, and so much more. What makes Salesforce stand out is its comprehensive range of services that accommodates different CRM requirements on a unified platform, benefiting both the companies and customers. With one single solution, businesses are equipped with every feature they need to level up their sales and marketing activity.
Salesforce also prioritizes data security and offers granular permissions to protect sensitive information without hindering access for authorized users. All of these brought Salesforce to become the global CRM leader, with about 150,000 companies across different industries using Salesforce tools to streamline all business functions into a single source of truth, including major companies such as Spotify, Amazon Web Services, and the U.S. Bank.
Salesforce testing is the process of evaluating the functionality, quality, and performance of Salesforce applications or customizations. It involves testing Salesforce workflows, triggers, validation rules, custom objects, reports, and integrations, to ensure they all work as intended and meet the business requirements.
Salesforce is a highly versatile and comprehensive platform, enabling businesses to easily customize it for their specific requirements. It provides a wide variety of tools, resources, as well as a vast ecosystem of third-party integrations on the AppExchange marketplace to help businesses tailor the platform to their needs. In such a complex system, conflicts can easily arise. For example:
With thorough testing, the QA team can pinpoint areas of conflict and resolve quickly before release, mitigating negative impact of bugs to the bottom line. In addition to the benefits of checking the customizations, Salesforce testing brings the same benefits as conducting general software testing, including:
When performing Salesforce testing, just like any other type of testing, there are 2 major approaches:
Read More: Katalon vs Selenium: A Complete Guide
Manual testing in Salesforce is great when:
Although useful, manual testing still consumes considerable time and effort. Human errors are more likely to occur during manual testing, and therefore scaling businesses usually adopt automated Salesforce testing to improve efficiency. Once automated testing scripts are prepared, fewer personnel are needed to monitor the system, enabling more frequent test execution. Automated Salesforce testing is great when:
There are 3 major levels of Salesforce testing from the lowest-level to highest-level: unit testing, integration testing, and UI testing.
Read More: Unit Testing vs Functional Testing: A Comparison
Salesforce follows a seasonal update schedule that occurs 3 times a year (Spring, Summer, Winter) to introduce new features or bug fixes to the Salesforce platform. For example, recently they announced the Lightning Experience, a modern and user-friendly interface offering an enhanced user interface, improved performance, and a range of productivity features. Salesforce has been encouraging users to transition from the Classic Experience to Lightning.
For testers, this frequency of updates requires them to constantly adapt and execute automated tests to validate that the existing functionality of the application continues to work as expected.
Overcoming data complexity and data volume challenges
Consider a real-life example of a company that uses Salesforce for managing customer data. The company has thousands of customer records, each with various connected objects like contacts, opportunities, and activities. Testing scenarios that involve data-dependent functionalities is quite complex due to the sheer volume of the data.
Salesforce is highly customizable, providing multiple options for creating a page. Testing these different variations is crucial since they impact the performance of your application to end users. A very comprehensive testing tool is required to handle the abrupt customizations done by the customers.
Dynamic elements such as pop-ups, dynamic menus, or conditional visibility of fields can pose significant challenges in testing Salesforce applications because they don’t have fixed identifiers or locators, making it difficult to locate and interact with them during testing. Traditional testing approaches that rely on static locators may fail when the element's attributes or properties change.
Dynamic elements also lead to timeout issues in testing. For instance, when a tester performs an action that should make a dynamic element appear, like clicking a button to open a pop-up window, the test script should pause and confirm that the system responds and the dynamic element is visible before continuing with other actions or checks. This wait period fluctuates depending on many external factors, so testers must establish proper timeout settings to address this.
a. Verify that all buttons, links, and menus are functioning correctly.
b. Validate the alignment and visibility of UI elements across different browsers and devices.
c. Test the responsiveness of the UI by resizing the browser window or accessing the application on mobile devices.
a. Create a new record and verify that it is saved correctly in the database.
b. Perform a search operation and validate that the expected results are displayed.
c. Test the functionality of various data entry fields, such as text fields, dropdowns, and checkboxes.
a. Test the integration between Salesforce and external systems, such as an ERP or marketing automation platform, by verifying data synchronization and exchange.
b. Validate the data flow between different Salesforce modules, such as leads being converted to contacts.
c. Test the integration of Salesforce with third-party APIs for data retrieval or external system updates.
a. Verify that user authentication are working as expected.
b. Test the handling of sensitive data, such as ensuring encryption for confidential information.
c. Perform vulnerability testing to address any security loopholes
a. Test the functionality of workflow rules and validate that the desired automated actions are triggered.
b. Verify that automated actions are executed correctly.
c. Test the functionality of process builders by simulating different scenarios.
a. Install and test the Salesforce mobile app on different devices and operating systems.
b. Validate the synchronization of data between the mobile app and the Salesforce web application.
c. Test the performance and responsiveness of the mobile app under different network conditions.