Salesforce Testing: Empowering your whole team with smart testing

Are you one of the 20% of businesses who use Salesforce as your CRM? Do you rely on Salesforce for your back office functions? If so, you probably already know the challenges of creating and maintaining Salesforce applications. Here, we explain how Functionize can simplify your life by making Salesforce testing straightforward for your whole team.

Challenges with Salesforce testing

Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool. It is also really well maintained, with regular new releases every few months. You’re probably used to the idea that Salesforce needs specialist developers to create new functions. But did you know, it also needs specialist testing if you’re going to ensure it works properly? Moreover, testing Salesforce is far from simple. Here are three common challenges you might face.

1. Most Salesforce apps rely on dozens of integrations
2. Salesforce apps are often complex and data-driven
3. Salesforce apps need to be tested by the right people

So, let’s look at each of these in turn.

Salesforce integrations

One of the most powerful features of Salesforce is the wide range of integrations that are available. These are designed to help Salesforce cleanly integrate with your existing toolstack and allow you to create rich end-to-end (e2e) applications. The problem is, that creates challenges for testing.

Typically, you want to automate as much of your testing as possible. That way, you can easily verify that your applications are working as expected. However, automating end-to-end application testing is a hard problem. That’s because traditional test automation approaches struggle when the application runs across multiple systems. You end up having to create really awkward test scripts that constantly try to navigate their way through the application. Any slight change in how one of the underlying integrations works and the whole test breaks.

Data-intensive applications

Salesforce applications are, almost by definition, data intensive. That is to say, they are typically designed to help you handle large volumes of customer and user data in your back office. Usually, they are quite complex too. The data directly impacts how the app performs. For instance, a new user is treated differently to one that has been in the system for ages. That poses a problem for test automation. You end up needing to turn to an approach called data-driven testing. That in turn means trying to link your tests with a rich set of test data. For instance, you might want 1,000 test customers, all with different combinations of status, location, and age. This is doable in many test frameworks, but it tends to be complex.

Wrong people doing the testing

Salesforce applications are generally internal. That is, they are being created for use by your own team. Generally, that means they are not tested as thoroughly as customer-facing applications. Moreover, they are often much more complex than apps for customers. That’s because they are trying to streamline complex internal processes.

In the ideal world, the people doing the testing should understand exactly what the app is doing and why. If you’re testing an integration between Salesforce and a marketing automation tool, you want someone from Marketing to be involved. External-facing apps that are built by Engineering tend to have a large product team behind them providing detailed user stories, user journeys, etc. These product teams likely hire QA professionals who have some experience testing similar applications who can exert their business knowledge. But the luxury of having dedicated testers is often a distant dream for internal applications that are managed by IT. The result is, the people testing the Salesforce apps are neither experts in the required functionality, nor are they experts in testing. In either case, that’s not ideal!

How Functionize helps

Here at Functionize, we aim to help everyone become experts in test automation. Moreover, we use AI to help our tests outperform traditional test automation frameworks.  This makes Functionize the ideal choice for Salesforce testing.

Reusable functionality: Our platform makes it really easy to test feature-rich applications. You can reuse test steps across multiple tests, create rich verifications, and save test variables for use in later tests. This is especially helpful for role-based testing, which is so important for Salesforce. We also offer the ability to create complex orchestrations, stringing together multiple tests across multiple browsers and platforms. 

Rich test data: The platform makes it really easy to manage your test data, offering imports from multiple data sources. But it also has a rich set of functions for creating random test data on the fly. For instance, you can create a new user with a unique email and password. You can even test 2-factor authentication with SMS verifications. Verify your data integrity to make sure data is consistent between different Salesforce components, like dashboards and reports. 

Proper e2e testing: Functionize tests are extensible to fit countless functional scenarios. Whether you wish to verify file exports, like PDF, Word, Excel, and CSV. Or, make API calls to verify data from a database. You can even reuse code snippets for more complex tests. This allows Salesforce developers to work alongside business specialists and combine their areas of expertise to build e2e tests for Salesforce flows that reflect real-world use cases 

Robust tests that don’t break: The Functionize platform is built on top of a complex set of machine learning models. These learn how your application is working and analyze the actual intent behind each test you create. This has several benefits, including making tests far more robust. 

Simpler test creation: The icing on the cake is that our intuitive intelligent test recorder makes it super-easy for anyone to create automated tests. Simply login, choose to create an Architect test and then start recording the test just by interacting with your application. You can access all the advanced features, like test data management, visual testing, and custom verifications without needing to know any code. Truly a no-code test solution for Salesforce!

What does this mean for you?

The upshot of all this is that anyone in your extended business team can become their own test expert. This means your Salesforce apps are being tested by the people that know how they work. Thus, the testing is more reliable. The tests are fully automated, so you can continually check that all is working as expected. This also frees up your test team to focus on customer-facing applications. All this without the need to install or maintain any infrastructure or software. That’s because, just like Salesforce, we are a cloud-first company. If you want to learn more about how we can help transform your Salesforce testing, book a demo now.