Articles
9/27/2024
10 minutes

AI Driven Testing for Salesforce

Written by
David Brooks
Table of contents

AI-driven testing can cut testing time by 50% and catch 30% more defects. That’s right — while your team’s chasing bugs the old-fashioned way, AI is quietly cleaning up the mess faster than you can say “manual testing.”

With Salesforce updates rolling in like clockwork, you can’t afford to rely on slow, error-prone methods. Enter AI: your new testing BFF. It automates the boring stuff, catches problems early and makes you look like a rockstar in the process.

Ready to make testing faster, smarter and a whole lot easier? Let’s dive into how AI-powered Salesforce testing can help you do just that.

Benefits of Automated Salesforce Testing

Automated testing isn’t just about speed — it’s about getting instant feedback without waiting weeks to uncover bugs that ruin your day (or week).

With Salesforce automated testing tools, you can deliver a detailed report to your developers in minutes, not days. That’s one of the key business benefits of DevOps: it helps you shift left in the development process, so bugs are found and fixed earlier, cutting down costs and headaches along the way.

Now, automated testing isn’t always cheaper from the get-go, especially when you’re testing something for the first time. Developing and maintaining automated tests can be an investment. But over time? It pays off big. The ROI depends on how often those tests get reused and how many times they’ll need updates.

Reducing Regression Risks with AI-Driven Testing

And let’s talk about regression testing in Salesforce. With enterprise software being more interconnected than your social life, it’s way too easy to break something without realizing it. Automated regression testing spots breakages in features that were working just fine before, making sure your app doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own complexity.

And if you’re wondering whether automating testing is really worth the time? You’re not alone. In fact, in this report, 35% of companies find manual testing the most time-consuming part of their testing cycle, with 30% eager to shift to automated testing as fast as possible. 

What Tests Should You Automate in Salesforce?

Not everything needs automation, but certain tests definitely should be. Let’s break it down:

1. Functional Testing for Business Workflows

Functional testing is where you test the core business processes and workflows like lead creation, assignment or case management. Some of this can be handled through Unit Tests in the code (yes, you want to automate those). But a lot of functional tests happen through the UI, making sure it works for the humans who actually use the feature. Tools like Copado Robotic Testing can help you knock out UI-based testing fast and accurately.

2. Regression Testing to Catch Breakages

Now, don’t just focus on the shiny new features. Be sure to run regression testing on previously built functionalities to make sure they haven’t fallen apart with recent changes. These tests should live in a library, ready to be triggered by your DevOps orchestration tools like Copado CI/CD for Salesforce.

3. Integration Testing for APIs

And since most enterprise apps rely on APIs, integration testing should be part of your game plan to ensure they’re still playing nice with each other.

4. Security Testing and Compliance Checks

But it’s not all about functionality. Security testing and compliance are critical, too. Just because your apps live in Salesforce doesn’t mean you get to skip testing. Profiles, Permission Sets and Sharing Rules are your layers of defense. You’ve got to ensure roles are limited to what they’re supposed to access. For instance, you don’t want individual contributors adjusting compensation, do you? Negative testing—testing what shouldn’t happen—helps ensure that security rules are enforced.

While it makes sense to do a manual test for something brand new, constantly logging in with multiple users for older features? Tedious. That's where automation saves you time. Security and compliance testing? Automate it, so you don’t risk breaching your company’s compliance rules.

AI-Powered Testing

AI is no longer just a helpful assistant — it's a game-changer for Salesforce testing. From test generation to data creation, AI enhances every phase of testing, freeing up your team for higher-value work. In fact, this study shows that 66% of companies report faster detection of defects, and 65% see reduced test cycle times with AI-driven testing solutions.

Intent-Based Test Generation

The first way AI can help is Intent Based test generation. This basically means that AI can write the test for you based on the intention of the feature. Which is just a fancy way of saying that the AI will write a test from the description found in the User Story. His may sound like magic, but the Copado TestAgent does a great job as long as the User Story contains a complete and well thought out description of the requirements. Which shouldn’t be a problem if you ask the Copado PlanAgent to help you do that as well.

Ready to see it in action? Explore the Copado AI Platform and meet all of our AI Agents.

Automating Manual Tests with AI-Powered Tools

The second way AI can help is to watch you do manual tests and automate them, saving even more time. This is particularly useful for exploratory testing or during User Acceptance Testing (UAT) sessions. In these scenarios, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) walk through real-world use cases, and AI takes those steps and turns them into automation scripts. This is where Copado Robotic Testing and Copado Explorer step in to help.

So, why convert manual tests if AI can generate them from a User Story? Because SMEs know the feature inside and out, often testing it in ways that go beyond what’s in the User Story. By observing SMEs, AI captures these nuanced test cases and automates them for future use. This is how Copado remains AI-powered but people-focused — a perfect balance of tech and human insight.

When your end-users get involved, their unique ways of using the product can uncover bugs even the dev team missed. By converting these manual UAT tests into automated ones, you ensure you capture every potential issue in the system.

Strengthening Systems with Negative Testing

The third way that AI can help is with Negative Tests. People tend to use the system as it was intended, but it is also important to verify that it can handle the wrong data and sequence of clicks gracefully.

Let’s be real: no one enjoys manually inputting different variations of wrong data into a system just to see if it breaks. That’s where AI shines. It helps ensure your system can handle unexpected inputs without falling apart. Professional testers are great at this, but with AI, it becomes much easier and quicker to test all those edge cases.

Using AI to Create Dynamic Test Data for Salesforce

The fourth way AI can help you create Test Data and update a test to use variables instead of fixed inputs. Let’s dig into each of these a little deeper.

The Copado TestAgent can take a manual test, observe the data you entered and then use variables instead of fixed inputs to test a wider range of scenarios. It’s like swapping out puzzle pieces to see which combinations fit best.

A key Salesforce deployment best practice is to run tests with multiple combinations of inputs, not just the same data every time. With Copado Robotic Testing, this is easily done using variables in the script. While learning the syntax isn’t difficult, if you’re not a coder, it might feel a bit daunting or just not worth your time.

Thankfully, you can ask the TestAgent to handle it for you. Once the structure is set up, you'll need a range of data to populate those variables. Sure, you could use a random generator, but there’s a more fine-tuned approach that works even better.

Enter Copado AI.

Not only can it generate data in bulk (think names, addresses and more for specific countries), but it ensures compliance with data privacy laws like PII regulations. So, you won’t be tempted to use production data and risk getting into trouble.

No more headaches over data privacy! AI can create realistic, representative test data to use in your testing environments. Need a set of fake addresses? Easy. Want to test a form with thousands of variations of customer names? Done. You can even ask Copado AI for more complex data sets if your system requires it. Just tell it what you need, and watch the magic happen.

Lastly, if you already have tests written in Selenium or other tools, AI can convert those scripts to work with other automation frameworks like Copado Robotic Testing. So, if you're tired of fixing broken Selenium scripts, AI can swoop in and save the day.

How to Get Started with AI-Driven Testing in Salesforce

If you're like most Salesforce customers, testing hasn’t been a strong habit in your team. Typically, teams manually test new features just to confirm they work before releasing them. You don’t need to be burned twice to realize how risky that is. But most teams lack the resources to fully automate their tests.

Implementing AI for Exploratory Testing and UAT

As we’ve seen, AI can give your testing practice the jump start it needs. Start by using Copado Explorer for manual testing and let the Copado TestAgent handle script and data generation. You can implement Explorer for both Exploratory Testing and UAT.

Begin with your new features — you're going to run a manual test anyway, right? Capture those manual tests when fixing bugs in existing features. Over time, you'll build a robust library of tests that can serve as a solid regression test suite.

Once you’ve established this process, consider developing smoke tests for your most critical business processes. With time, this will become second nature, and soon your team will be releasing clean, reliable code effortlessly.

Conclusion

You can’t move fast unless you catch defects quickly. Even if you think you lack the resources to test properly, following the recommendations in this post will help you build an automated test suite with the resources you already have. And wouldn’t you sleep better knowing every feature in the next release has been thoroughly tested?

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About The Author

SVP Evangelism

I am serial entrepreneur who has worked at 6 startups with 3 successful exits over the past 34 years in the valley. I joined Salesforce.com just after their IPO in 2005 to build AppExchange and ride the rocket ship for the next 8 1/2 years. I ran a third of the Force.com teams during my tenure. I joined Jobscience to turn around the product team and within 2 years revived the product line to a successful acquisition by our chief competitor.I joined Copado in August of 2018. Amazing company with a great product and team. We are redefining DevOps for the Salesforce Platform.

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