.svg){kind=small}
.svg)
%20Data%20to%20Me_BLOG_1080x600.avif)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)
Salesforce Testing
Language
.svg)
.svg)
Effective testing is about more than just finding and squashing bugs—it ensures business continuity, enhances user satisfaction, and greatly strengthens the reliability of your software. Without it, minor issues can cause major disruptions further down the line. As we explored in Chapter 7, testing isn’t just a process. It also requires a quality mindset.
To implement this mindset throughout the development pipeline, you must adopt a holistic approach. Testing is not only a shared responsibility, but an opportunity for engineers from all areas of expertise to bring their wisdom to bear on the project. Test managers should therefore not only ensure that quality is the name of the game during testing; they should also actively advocate for it as a part of wider team culture.
Adopting a structured approach is essential to doing this. Your goal should be to establish a shared language of quality, one which encourages knowledge sharing, collaboration, and best practices. Rather than imposing change, involve your team in shaping it.
One way of achieving this is through an interactive Quality Workshop.
Steps towards building a Quality-First Culture
Ultimately, you need to reach a stage where testing becomes continuous prior to deployment. So, by setting a strong cultural foundation for quality, your team can achieve this and eventually create exceptional software—without unnecessary obstacles.
Before you begin putting together your testing strategy, you have to think about your team. A typical Salesforce testing team is a carefully orchestrated group of professionals, each bringing unique skills:
Your team is essential to delivering quality testing—so make sure you regularly revisit your findings from the Quality Workshop as you formulate your test strategy with the rest of the team.
With all this in mind, let’s explore effective testing strategies—and how you can best integrate them into your workflow.
A test strategy outlines the general approach, principles, and major objectives of the testing process at a top level. It provides a framework and defines the testing approach for either the entire organization or project.
Every test strategy is unique, but there are a few common methodological questions which every strategy needs to answer.
However, as we’ll see, the levels of complexity you’ll face differ greatly based on your project or your choice of CRM.
Imagine a large financial services company implementing a complex Salesforce solution that touches every aspect of their customer relationship management. The stakes are high: a single overlooked bug could mean millions in potential revenue loss or compliance risks. This is why a strategic, comprehensive testing approach is absolutely critical.
Testing is a critical element of any DevOps implementation - but especially on Salesforce. While the majority of applications typically require rigorous programmatic testing and version control, Salesforce’s combination of declarative (low-code) and programmatic (Apex, Lightning, etc) development can complicate your testing strategy. In practice, what this means is that your testing must not only cover all written code, but Salesforce-specific workflows, validation rules, process builders and more.
Additionally, there are a number of peculiarities within Salesforce which can challenge attempts to make your testing strategy scalable. For example, Salesforce’s strict governor limits on CPU time and query rows means that your testing strategy must be much more performance-conscious; Salesforce’s multi-tenancy data sharing means security testing is much more granular; plus frequent UI updates calls for resilient UI automation capable of adapting to updates.
In other words, the quality of life tools and ease of development that Salesforce offers comes with a price, and that’s the need to adopt a hybrid approach to testing.
A well-structured testing flow ensures that your Salesforce application is validated at every stage of development. It’s important to understand how these tests are organized and executed at various stages of the development lifecycle. This brings us to testing levels. Testing levels define where and when different types of tests occur, ensuring that issues are caught early and business processes are validated thoroughly.
A successful testing strategy is not just about finding and fixing bugs—it's about achieving tangible outcomes that drive the overall success of your project. By measuring the right success metrics, you can assess how well your strategy is working and ensure that it delivers value at every stage of development. These outcomes not only improve the quality of the software but also enhance the user experience, reduce risks, and accelerate the pace of innovation.
A well-rounded Salesforce testing strategy leads to:
These metrics will help you track progress, identify areas for improvement, and ensure that your testing efforts contribute to the overall success of your project.
Unit Testing (Code-Level): Focus on testing individual Apex classes, triggers, and methods. Ensure code is ready for testing with proper test data.
Integration Testing (System Harmony): Verify how different components (both within Salesforce and external systems) work together.
System Testing (Application Validation): Validate the entire Salesforce application from start to finish in a production-like environment.
End-to-End Testing (Business Process Validation): Verify complete business workflows that span multiple systems to ensure seamless operation across all components.
Test cases are the foundation of any testing process. These outline the specific actions, inputs, and expected results needed in order to validate your Salesforce application.
Aim to author test cases with details such as actions, inputs, and expected outcomes. Each test case should focus on different features, such as UX functionality, the harmony of integrations, performance, and more.
Key Focus Areas for Test Cases:
Use Apex test classes to validate triggers, controllers, and batch jobs. These are crucial for maintaining code coverage and meeting Salesforce deployment requirements.
Automate user interface (UI) tests using open source tools or enterprise solutions such as Copado Robotic Testing to reduce manual effort for repetitive tasks.
For scenarios requiring human judgment or exploratory testing, document steps in tools like Copado CICD, Jira, TestRail, or even Excel.
Automated and manual testing are both critical to building successful Salesforce applications. If you’re working on large, complex Salesforce implementations, then automation is absolutely key to scalability, with automated testing tools playing a vital role in maintaining functionality and ensuring consistency.
Third-party tools can prove hugely helpful in reducing repetitive manual test work for your team and achieving regular deployments. These can free up your team to spend more time on manually testing parts of the application which require human judgement and discretion, such as UX or more complex workflows.
To maximize testing efficiency, it’s important to decide which tests to automate and which to perform manually. Let’s break it down:
Best Practice: Start with manual testing for new features and processes, then automate stable test cases for ongoing validation using AI-powered tools.
The classic approach we used in QA consulting to optimize the impact and resource consumption of testing followed a structured process. Here's how it worked in detail:
Step-by-Step Breakdown:
1. Initial Smoke Test
Whenever there is a new release candidate, the first step is to:
Timeframe: This typically takes about 20-60 minutes.
2. Parallel Testing Paths
Once the smoke test passes, we proceed with two parallel testing activities:
2a. Automated Regression Test
Timeframe: This process usually takes about 60-240 minutes.
2b. Exploratory Testing
Timeframe: This activity is generally completed in less time than the automated regression tests.
3. In-Depth Manual Testing and Regression Suite Augmentation
If both the exploratory testing and automated regression testing do not reveal any major issues, we move to the next steps:
3a. Plan-Based Manual Regression Tests
Timeframe: This step usually takes about 1-2 days.
3b. Augmenting the Regression Suites
Timeframe: This typically takes the rest of the sprint or less.
Strategy Goals
The entire strategy is designed with three primary goals in mind:
Time and Effort Summary
By following this structured approach, we ensured that each phase of testing was efficiently managed, providing a balance between automated and manual testing to maximize resource utilization and impact.
Reporting test results effectively ensures that everyone—from developers to stakeholders—has visibility into the testing progress and outcome. This will be key to creating a positive feedback loop throughout your entire DevOps process.
As software becomes increasingly complex and user demands grow, advanced testing considerations are crucial for ensuring your application performs well under various conditions. These tests go beyond basic functionality, focusing on areas like system performance, security, and continuous testing to ensure that your application is both robust and compliant. By addressing these advanced aspects, you help ensure the application’s stability, security, and ongoing reliability.
By including these areas, you ensure not only that your software is functional but also scalable, secure, and ready for the demands of real-world use.
As technology evolves, so too must your testing strategy. Emerging trends like AI-assisted testing are transforming how we identify and resolve issues, making testing more efficient and insightful.
The growing focus on user experience (UX) testing ensures that your application not only works well but also delights your users. Sophisticated automation tools are enabling faster, more comprehensive testing, allowing you to catch issues early and reduce manual effort.
Additionally, with an increasing emphasis on security and compliance, it's essential to incorporate these considerations into your strategy to protect both your users and your business.
Embracing these trends will keep your testing approach ahead of the curve, ensuring that you deliver high-quality, secure, and user-friendly applications.
Once you’ve developed your test strategy, it’s time to start putting it into action using your test plan.
A well-documented test plan ensures that no stone is left unturned in your Salesforce testing process. By leveraging AI, this plan can be automatically generated using the outline provided, ensuring clear expectations, aligning the team, and offering a systematic approach to validating critical business processes. AI can help streamline test planning, accelerating the process and ensuring all key areas are addressed.
In practice, a test plan is a detailed, granular document describing the specific test cases, schedules, resources, and activities for a particular project or release. It focuses on the execution of the testing process, specifying how the strategy will be implemented. For someone new to testing, a test plan helps approach testing in a step-by-step manner. It ensures focus on key functionalities and helps avoid wasting time on areas out of scope.
1. Introduction
2. Test Items
3. Test Strategy
4. Test Environment
5. Test Schedule
6. Test Resources
7. Test Deliverables
8. Test Execution
9. Defect Management
10. Risks and Mitigation
11. Approval and Sign-off
Let’s say your Salesforce team has rolled out changes to the Lead Conversion process. Your goal is to validate that the entire flow works as expected when a Lead is converted into an Account, Contact, and Opportunity.
Using the Test Plan structure:
Purpose and Scope: Validate that the Lead Conversion process correctly creates related records without errors.
Features to be Tested:
Testing Approach:
Measurement Framework: To track and prove the success of your testing efforts, use the following metrics:
Test Execution:
Defect Management: Any bugs found, such as missing fields or broken triggers, will be logged in Jira or another defect tracking tool and assigned to developers for resolution.
For someone just starting, testing a simple process like Lead Conversion is a great way to practice writing and executing a test plan. Once mastered, you can confidently tackle more complex workflows, integrations, and customizations in Salesforce.
We've established that a solid test strategy is crucial for delivering high-quality software. Quality isn’t just the responsibility of testers—it's a mindset that everyone, from developers to product teams, must embrace from the start. By aligning early and integrating testing throughout the development cycle, you ensure that quality is baked into every phase of the project, not added as an afterthought.
Practical Advice for Testing Teams:
Now, as we shift focus to test orchestration with CI/CD, we’ll explore how continuous integration and automated testing can streamline your process and catch issues early, ensuring quality is maintained at every step. After all, in today’s fast-paced development world, a pipeline without tests is like a racecar without brakes—speed is great, but you’ll want to make sure you don’t crash!
Level up your Salesforce DevOps skills with our resource library.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)