Testing Salesforce Applications
Testing of Salesforce begins with recognising the specimen of the test objective i.e., which component of Salesforce are you testing? When the testing is limited to Apex code/logic, then unit testing would suffice your needs. When the testing spans over Visualforce/LWC/APIs, then you need to focus on testing the front-end elements and their interaction with backend services resulting in component testing or end-to-end integration testing. Let’s dive into the architecture below!
Salesforce Architecture
Salesforce’s architecture consists of key components such as:
- Apex: Salesforce’s programming language for writing custom logic.
- Visualforce: Salesforce’s framework for building custom user interfaces.
- Lightning Web Components (LWC): Modern JavaScript-based components for building the customised user interface pages and functions.
- Salesforce data APIs: REST, SOAP, and Bulk APIs for integrations.
What are Salesforce Integrations?
Salesforce is a robust product, and cannot simply be “plugged and played” – every organisation’s needs and circumstances are unique. To cater to the convenience of bringing all connected Salesforce applications of the organisation under one umbrella, integrations are necessary.
Therefore, Salesforce seldom works as a standalone application due to the innate necessity of communicating with other systems for the data to flow back and forth. This process typically occurs over various protocols such as REST, SOAP, and GraphQL, with APIs serving as the medium.
This is why Salesforce introduced customisations, resulting in the growth of complexity of their product, and ultimately, in testing the Salesforce application.
Why Test Automation in Salesforce?
Test automation provides the convenience of reducing the manual and menial effort in order to ensure the non-breakage of existing functionality due to the incoming features and integrations. The general advantages of test automation like faster execution, reusability, consistency, cost-effectiveness, reporting and scalability do factor in. There are additional benefits for automation in Salesforce, such as:
- End-to-end testing across multiple integrations: It is most likely that Salesforce is working in integration with few or more other platforms. Automating the internal and external APIs in this regard would be of great value to testing.
- Ease of automation: As Salesforce provides certain uniformity in the UI components, it is easier to build a framework around it.
- Efficiency and speed: Manual testing can be time-consuming, especially in large Salesforce applications. Automation speeds up the testing process, allowing engineers to test more scenarios in less time.
What are the Challenges associated with Salesforce test automation, and how can they be mitigated?
- Frequent Releases - As Salesforce releases can happen quite often, it is plausible that the dynamics of the UI change and is prone to maintenance (like any other application). But, with Salesforce, a release’s impact may span across multiple/all objects. With the right kind of framework, this can be mitigated easily.
- UI Synchronisation: Salesforce applications generally have dynamic data loaders which in turn makes the UI load and reload multiple times due to which the need for additional intelligence (DOM watcher and Network watchers) in waiting arises. This however can be addressed elegantly with modern day automation tools like Playwright, Cypress, Copado, etc.
- Locator Strategy: With Salesforce being a well-thought-out platform catering to the needs of multiple businesses across domains, the majority of the objects (such as Leads, Contacts, Opportunities) are available out of the box and seldom do the developers invest time on adding test attributes to the DOM elements.
- Third-Party Integrations: Many Salesforce applications integrate with external systems like marketing tools, payment gateways, or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Testing these integrations can be complex and requires simulating real-world conditions.
Best Practices
- Choose the Right Automation Tools: There are many tools available for automating Salesforce testing, each designed for different purposes.
Here are some common options:
- Selenium: It can be used to test the Salesforce UI, but it requires careful setup to handle Salesforce’s dynamic UI elements effectively.
- Provar: A Salesforce-specific test automation tool that integrates with the Salesforce platform and allows testers to create, execute, and maintain automated tests without writing code. However, it is not open-source.
- Copado: It has been built specifically with Salesforce in mind, so it understands Salesforce metadata and processes. It allows for testing Salesforce configurations, Apex code, and other Salesforce-specific elements. However, it is not open-source.
- Playwright: Salesforce applications often have dynamic pages, heavy JavaScript interactions, and custom components. Playwright can handle complex user actions with ease. Using Playwright’s network interception capabilities, the API testing needs can also be achieved. Playwright works well with CI tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, and GitHub Actions.
- Set Up Test Environment and Configurations: Before jumping on to testing, one has to consider creating a playground for testing and some configurations to prepare the playground according to the test objectives.
- Sandboxes: In order to isolate testing from the live production, it is necessary to create identical environments from production. In the Salesforce world, these environments are called “Sandboxes”. You can use different types of Sandboxes, like Developer, Developer Pro, or Full Sandboxes, depending on your needs.
- User Profiles and Permission Sets: User Profiles are groups of users with tailored access. Permission Sets allow administrators to bundle the availability of functionalities so that they can be assigned to users on a needs-basis.
- Test Data Management: Ensure that you have a process in place to manage test data. This includes preparing sample data sets and resetting them after each test to ensure consistency across tests. You can use Salesforce’s Data Loader tool to export, update, and import data.
- Focus on Test Coverage: Salesforce requires at least 75% code coverage for Apex classes before deployment to production.
- Unit Tests for Apex: Write unit tests to verify that your Apex classes and triggers work correctly. Salesforce’s built-in tools provide code coverage metrics that help you understand how much of your code is being tested.
- Automation of UI and API Tests: While unit tests are crucial, automated UI and API end-to-end tests are equally important to simulate real-world user interactions. Test scenarios like creating records, updating them, and validating UI elements and components.
- Handle Dynamic Locators and UI Elements: Salesforce often updates its UI, and its dynamic nature can make UI test automation more challenging. So, some things which can be considered while automating are:
- Use your tool’s native functions/strategies for identifying reliable locators.
- Use XPath and CSS Selectors carefully. When automating UI tests, prefer using reliable XPath or CSS selectors to locate elements. Avoid using elements that might change frequently (like CSS classes) and instead target stable attributes like IDs.
- Leverage Page Object Model (POM) pattern or Page Factory to structure the UI logic for test cases. This helps in managing changes to the UI without having to rewrite functions/actions.
Conclusion
While Salesforce applications share similarities with other types of software, their robust and highly customisable nature often makes them more challenging to test effectively. As a result, test automation becomes key to ensuring the stability and performance of Salesforce applications. It is also very crucial to stay up to date with modern day test automation tools, as while manual testing is essential, the trend shows that test automation is the most efficient way of gathering results from interconnected Salesforce integrations and applications.