Salesforce Testing Tools: A Comprehensive Guide

As its commitment towards continuous improvement and innovation, Salesforce delivers hundreds of new features and functionalities thrice a year. To ensure that configurations, customizations, and critical integrations are functional and Salesforce apps are supporting your critical business processes after updates are rolled out, you need to do testing. As Salesforce is a complex application and manually testing it can be time consuming, it is recommended to use test automation tools. If you’re looking for a Salesforce test automation tool, you must be wondering which tool you should opt for as too many tools are available in the market. In this article, we’ll discuss two most popular tools i.e. Selenium and Opkey. We’ll also discuss between the two which one will be better for you. Before highlighting the pros and cons of Salesforce testing tools, let’s discuss why it is difficult to test and automate Salesforce. 

1. Complex Application

 It is challenging to test Visualforce, Salesforce, or Service Cloud Console as custom user interfaces can be created for mobile or web apps. Furthermore, it can be integrated with third-party DevOps solutions to support internal workflows. To ensure complete coverage, you need a test automation platform that offers end-to-end testing. 

2. Frequent Updates

 Salesforce rolls out three seasonal updates a year. These seasonal updates offer significant improvements in security, availability, and performance. However, there’s a possibility that they can introduce bugs or break existing configurations, customizations or critical integrations. Thus, necessitating testing each time the updates are rolled out. Automating Salesforce for update testing is challenging as it is a highly dynamic application. As dynamic elements which do not have a fixed ID, name, class or CSS attributes, slight change in the UI can make test scripts flaky. Thus, it requires huge effort to maintain test automation scripts. 

3. Classic / Lightning

 Some of the enterprises have migrated from Classic to Lightning. Since Lightning is Salesforce’s new development framework, it adds up layouts, navigation, views, integrations, and workflows to the platform. So, more test cases need to be added to ensure adequate coverage. Furthermore, object properties are fluid, tabs are iFrames, and indexes and Class names are dynamic. It means that they change frequently with random tags, making it difficult to control thescreen elements. Since you’re aware of the challenges that come across while incorporating Salesforce test automation, let’s discuss the available tools. Selenium pros 

1. Selenium is an obvious choice for QA teams owing to the fact that it is available as open source.
2. Selenium automation suite includes Selenium IDE that offers record-and-play functionality and Selenium Grid that allows you to perform parallel testing.
3. Selenium is a natural choice of engineering teams due to its support for multiple technologies including C#, Java, and Python.

 Selenium cons 

1. Selenium uses elements’ properties like ID, Name Class, CSS, Xpath, etc to identify control on the screen and perform actions on it. Salesforce is a highly dynamic application. Selenium cannot access the content directly so it will require a lot of effort in identifying the right attributes and to create the script accordingly. Due to nested or hidden frames, it will become more tedious.
2. Selenium is a code-based test automation platform. To ensure adequate coverage, you need test creation from functional consultants, business analysts, and stakeholders. Since these people are not programmers, they cannot participate in testing if Selenium is used.
3. Due to dynamic elements in Salesforce, it is difficult to maintain test scripts created with Selenium. Three updates a year can offer a great maintenance burden on the QA teams.
4. With Selenium, you don’t get any troubleshooting or reporting capabilities. It means that failed tests are difficult to resolve.

 Opkey pros 

1. Opkey is a zero code Salesforce testing platform that is easy to set up and implement.
2. Since Opkey is zero code, business users can easily participate in testing and create test scripts without requiring any programming skills.
3. Opkey comes with self-healing capabilities that alleviate the maintenance burden of testing by autonomously incorporating changes in the impacted test cases. This saves dozens of hours of maintenance work.
4. Opkey supports multiple technology stack – 14+ ERPs and 60+ enterprise packaged applications to offer end-to-end testing.

 Opkey cons

1. It is a commercial test automation platform that comes with a certain amount of fee.

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