Implementing Salesforce Testing Best Practices For The Most Robust Deployment

Even with Salesforce at the core, modern businesses build distinct infrastructures to fit their business goals. This means translating those business goals into technical requirements and then testing them thoroughly to ensure successful deployments. In the following article, Copado will cover the most common challenges test managers and quality assurance teams face. Then, we’ll share a few of our Salesforce testing best practices to solve each one.

Problem: Infrastructure Complexity

Although much of the software development life cycle (SDLC) stays the same regardless of industry, every company needs tailored tools to fit their specific business needs. Salesforce does an excellent job of making integrations as seamless as possible, to the point where enterprise-level businesses have come to depend on them for key workflows. Nonetheless, speed bumps in a highly customizable, multi-platform system are inevitable. As a business grows and changes, so does its network of applications. Without proper support, maintaining test environments and repetitive processes like regression testing will likely begin to weigh on your testing team. Defects will begin to creep into deployments and may even make it into the production environment.

Solution: Extend Testing Coverage

The most obvious solution to this setback is continuous end-to-end testing. Much of the software industry has widely adopted CI/CD pipelines and collaboration-focused methodologies like DevOps and Agile. While this is an ideal foundation, it’s just that—a foundation. For comprehensive coverage, testers must be able to perform cross-platform parallel testing. 

Broaden your scope with analytics. 

Advanced analytics are a critical component of any testing tool for a few reasons. First, reporting can be time-consuming for your testing team. A robust testing framework with advanced analytic capabilities will reduce manual reporting responsibilities and eliminate human errors. In addition to collecting data about test cases, analytics can help you identify bottlenecks and dependencies in your SDLC.

Problem: Scalability

No matter which industry your company belongs to, business growth is likely a top priority. Accordingly, your system must be flexible enough to scale up as your company grows. Often, organizations implement load testing to measure their system’s performance under stress. In this context, stress is defined by high levels of traffic, simultaneous transactions, data volume, or other user requests. However, there are a few additional measures your company can take to ensure the reliability and adaptability of your system.

Solution: Scalability Testing

Scalability testing is similar to load testing but it has a few important differences:

• It measures your system’s ability to scale up and down. 
• Takes memory and CPU into account.
• Tests gradual fluctuations instead of sudden variations to find the degradation threshold. 

Of the three Salesforce testing best practices, scalability testing is the most important one for companies building their own applications on the platform to adopt. 

Cloud-Based Salesforce Testing Infrastructure

Cloud testing infrastructure is not only hyper-scalable, but it also facilitates easy application integrations. A robust, cloud-native test development platform alleviates three responsibilities entirely:

1. The need to set up your own test environments and hardware.
2. The need to maintain (or, in the case of certain providers, pay for the maintenance of) test environments and hardware. 
3. The need to ramp up testing efforts with additional hardware or services ahead of major releases.

Cloud-based testing solutions allow growing businesses to change their setup as their needs change without worrying about allocating resources.

Problem: Dynamic Elements

Anyone looking into Salesforce testing best practices will find that its dynamic elements are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for most organizations. Firstly, it’s essential to ensure your testing team understands its focus is on customizations and configurations, not inbuilt Salesforce features.

Aligning your testing schedule with Salesforce releases can be highly beneficial. Unfortunately, many testing solutions are completely independent of (and therefore, oblivious to) Salesforce’s update and release schedule. This incompatibility increases the importance of identifying and eliminating dependencies so that changes to the infrastructure won’t impact existing code. 

Solution: AI-powered Salesforce Test Automation 

Any Salesforce testing best practices list will mention automation, but not all Salesforce test automation tools are equally effective. For example, testing tools like Selenium have struggled to test with the involvement of variable elements like CSS attributes, especially after the release of Salesforce Lightning. Your test automation tool must have strong AI capabilities to keep up with the fast pace of change Salesforce is known for.

In the case of Copado Robotic Testing, companies will gain the ability to automate workflows, manage integrations, and reuse established test cases. Low-code capabilities make the testing process accessible to team members with any level of technical expertise. This high-level Salesforce compatibility streamlines workflows and introduces transparency to an otherwise siloed testing process.

Copado is #1 in DevOps and testing tools for Salesforce because we help companies achieve more comprehensive test coverage through AI-powered automation. Copado Robotic Testing provides the coverage and adaptability you need for more robust Salesforce deployments.