The customization and integration capabilities of Salesforce make it well-suited to meet dynamic enterprise needs. While these help to improve processes and functionalities, deploying them without adequate and extensive testing can lead to UI errors and slow delivery cycles.
This article will shed light on the main challenges of Salesforce integration test automation, as well as some helpful best practices for performing omnichannel and integration automation. Capabilities that Salesforce integration testing needs from a test automation platform.
Challenges With Salesforce Integration Test Automation
Salesforce testing identifies all defects that can impact product performance, and allows organizations to fix them ahead of time. This is essential because, along with configuring a solution in Salesforce, it becomes equally essential to ensure that it works across all integrations and setups.
While automation testing of integrations in Salesforce is imperative because of the vast ecosystem of products connected to Salesforce, it can be challenging. Here are some of the main challenges to look out for when it comes to Salesforce integrations and test automation.
The Data Challenge
One of the most common and complex challenges of Salesforce integration is navigating the ‘data challenge’. Data migration – ensuring data quality and proper data mapping – becomes imperative to the success of Salesforce implementations.
Navigating the data rate limits is also important, as Salesforce APIs have set specific limits on the volume of data that can be received per day in one call. Proper import and export from Salesforce is necessary to ensure that data is consistent and accurate. For this, proper integration and testing of REST APIs is crucial.
Test automation for Salesforce integrations needs to ensure data quality and identify and prevent data mismatch and loss. The test automation strategy must also capably simulate real-time data, as real systems throw up issues that are not otherwise encountered while testing. This demands sampling of real data, replication of real-time environment, and identification of the volume of data during the migration activity.
Integration testing of the REST APIs is also complex, as adherence to protocols and standards is imperative. Calling various HTTP methods like GET/PUT/POST/DELETE on a given API URL and verifying all edge-case scenarios against boundary values with test automation can be challenging. This is because most test automation tools do not allow changing HTTP headers freely. In addition, they do not allow the easy modification of HTTP parameters or the examination of HTTP response codes.
Navigating Conflicting Codebases
Salesforce’s infinite customization and integration capacities give developers immense flexibility to bring their own skills and reasoning to the table. Multiple developers often work on different modules as well, which can lead to conflicting codebases. A mismatch of different technology stacks and conflicting codebases further add to the test automation complexity of Salesforce integrations.
Automation testing of Salesforce integrations with these conflicting codebases can become challenging as different codebases and dynamic object IDs increase the chances of failed tests. As such, the test automation tool must intelligently identify and highlight these anomalies across technology stacks.
Dynamic Tables
Salesforce offers a table-heavy design to make sure that large volumes of data can be easily arranged in a digestible format. These applications have different database-driven tables with dynamic rows – rows that are generated dynamically and can be adjusted by several tabs.
Selecting active tabs and performing actions such as ticking a checkbox using test automation tools can become challenging and lead to complications with integration testing. In turn, ensuring that driver.switch_to.window and send_key commands operate as desired can become complex.
Executing Against Dynamic Content
Salesforce applications contain dynamic items that do not have a fixed ID, name, class, or CSS properties. Managing dynamic content, avoiding duplicate records, and ensuring that data is accurate during integrations can be challenging since the locator of the event cannot be hard coded.
The complexity only increases as Salesforce releases three updates a year, and often regular updates can end up breaking the automated testing scripts as all the elements load dynamically. The element locations cannot be hardcoded and conventional approaches to detect the fixed components of the locator are not simple – even the slightest UI changes can cause tests to break since most test automation tools identify elements using fixed IDs.
Synchronization challenges with element loading present further complexity to navigate during automated integration testing of Salesforce applications. The effort to identify which part of the DOM (Document Object Model) has changed also becomes complex for test automation since it increases test maintenance needs considerably.
Navigating Through Frames
Salesforce has frontend, inbuilt dynamic frames that allow applications to load the content independently on current HTML documents. However, accessing these frames during the testing process can become challenging, as most test automation tools cannot load the content independently. While this can be managed using driver.switchTo().frame(“frame-attribute”), actions that need to be performed outside the frame require explicit instructions on the automation tool.
The entire process becomes effort-intensive, as finding the right attributes and scripts is tedious, especially when dealing with nested (or) hidden frames during integration.
Shadow DOM
Salesforce employs Shadow DOMs to encapsulate the internal document object model (DOM) structure of a web component. The objective was to protect components from code manipulation and also provide reusable components for developers to share across teams. These components, however, aren’t recognizable for traditional test automation tools as they mostly employ selectors (like the ID or Xpath) to identify objects.
Testing Shadow DOMs during integrations becomes complicated because of the heavy DOM structure. Testing these demands custom coding and a constant updating of automated tests for automated test platforms – all to test the tool functions correctly.
Best Practices for Performing Omnichannel and Integration Automation
Manually testing all Salesforce integrations is time-consuming and effort intensive. Plus, the chances of human error also cannot be eliminated in this mix. As Salesforce becomes more of an ecosystem than a platform that consists of multiple applications, SaaS products, and internal business processes and applications, automation testing of Salesforce integrations becomes critical for performance.
Here are some of the best practices for performing omnichannel and integration automation:
- Create a comprehensive Salesforce testing framework to address all integration challenges. This includes identifying the patterns for each integration, along with addressing data, process, and virtual integration demands.
- Take inventory of the technology stack in use and identify all the applications that interact with the Salesforce platform. This includes the applications from the AppExchange as well as the custom-developed applications.
- Ensure end-to-end testing to drive total coverage while confirming test coverage is not impacted when code lines are added or deleted.
- Drive code portability when the test code is in the original class while ensuring that no tests are missed during migration from sandbox to production
- Shift testing left and ensuring that testers can test concurrently and iteratively – employing test automation to evaluate the code.
- Ensure comprehensive documentation of all possible test case scenarios and possible exceptions
- Create a continuous REST API testing cycle employing a comprehensive test automation platform that measures test coverage during REST API testing and generates inputs that cover large parts of the tested software. It also must provide detailed error reports and code-coverage visibility.
Capabilities That Salesforce Integration Testing Needs From a Test Automation Platform
The complexity of Salesforce configurations and their integration demands comprehensive testing. This can be a big challenge since most organizations do not have the time, nor the experienced QA workforce, to ensure end-to-end omnichannel user testing across all touchpoints.
The solution to accelerate and amplify integration testing of Salesforce applications is to make testing accessible to more people. As such, a test automation platform for Salesforce demands:
- An AI-powered, cloud-optimized, no-code environment for Salesforce-specific dynamic technology. This allows business users and people with no coding experience to create tests through accessible interfaces.
- Seamless support for the Salesforce, enterprise apps, and technology stacks.
- Self-healing automation to reduce test automation maintenance.
- Algorithmic and automated test design and test case generation with Salesforce data models.
- Automated web and API testing, as well as all aspects of the quality lifecycle, from test design to test planning and execution.
- Integration with the existing tools ecosystem such as Jira, TFS, Jenkins, Bamboo, etc.
- Easy setup and complete alignment with the CI/CD pipeline of Salesforce implementations.
- Capacity to ensure complete business process validation by enabling automation of other ERP applications integrated with Salesforce.
- Integrated Salesforce and custom web application test automation for end-to-end validation.
- Cloud-based execution with cross-browser and OS for complete validations.
- Integration with ALM tools for requirements and defect integrations.
- Intelligent abstraction for Salesforce workflows, enabling in-sprint automation.
Summary
Extensively testing integrations in the Salesforce ecosystem is essential to validate the several functionalities and configurations according to the business needs. An AI-powered codeless test automation platform like ACCELQ can help enterprises achieve end-to-end automation testing of Salesforce integrations.
In addition, it can accelerate testing velocity without compromising test quality – all while keeping test maintenance demands well under control. Learn more on how to get started on your Codeless Salesforce Test Automation journey here.