What is Robotic Testing for Salesforce?

In the manufacturing world, woodworkers leverage powerful table saws to shear through solid wood like butter. To protect fingers and provide peace of mind, a company called SawStop patented a robotic braking system that stops the blade before it makes contact with skin.

How does the technology work? Humans conduct electricity, wood doesn’t. SawStop table saws are intelligent enough to tell the difference.

In the DevOps world, Robotic Testing can be a powerful way to prevent digital damage and provide peace of mind to admins and developers. But every company is different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to testing. The testing marketplace is full of options — from the open-source marketplace to on-premise products to enterprise-grade SaaS. Let’s explore the landscape and uncover the Holy Grail: Robotic Test Automation for Salesforce.

Manual Testing

Good News: We’ve all seen heroic humans bear down and beat the machine. The DevOps ecosystem is full of incredible QA professionals. If only you could clone them…

Bad News: In many cases, there’s just not enough time to execute end-to-end testing with the people you have. Sprints are delayed. Test coverage is insufficient. And there’s lots of developer downtime. Without automation, teams often resort to a chaotic system of spreadsheets and scraps of paper. It’s only a matter of time until bugs creep into the code and the customer experience falls off a cliff.

Open-Source Marketplace

Good News: You can leverage powerful test automation tools for free.

Bad News: Only technical experts can write and maintain test scripts. Testing frameworks are fragile and require significant effort and expense to support. Maintenance needs are high due to x-paths changing on packaged apps like Salesforce. Overall, open-source tools are much more costly than out-of-the-box solutions — and they lack the same firepower.

On-Premise Vendors

Good News: Anything you buy is going to be easier to adapt and maintain than open-source tools — and on-prem solutions are full of capabilities that teams can activate right out of the box.

Bad News: Tests are slow and the total cost of ownership is high. Hardware alone can cost more than $50,000 — from the CPU to server-grade RAM — and that’s just the starting point. On-prem solutions are often standalone products that require technical expertise and don’t play well with other systems. As a result, testers get siloed and agile development starts to look an awful lot like waterfall.

Cloud-Based Vendors

Good News: With low-code solutions like Copado Robotic Testing, your entire team is empowered to write and execute tests as software travels through the development process. When anyone can clone robots to carry out testing, you finally unlock the ability to release with both speed and quality. This means faster testing, better coverage, fewer defects and more frequent deployments.

Bad News: If anyone can write tests, you need management visibility to ensure quality. That’s why Copado Robotic Testing features built-in Version Control to help you track who wrote each test, when they wrote it, and what code they used. Once you set up a low-code testing pipeline, it’s a pretty cut-and-dried process to drive faster releases with higher quality.

5 Ingredients of a Robust Modern Testing Architecture

You can’t uproot everything overnight — but the right technology implementation can speed up your processes. As you lay down your company’s testing framework, be sure to pay special attention to these five mission-critical requirements.

1. It needs to be cloud-native: Why? Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), higher accessibility, and easier deployment. Having a cloud-based solution doesn’t require any infrastructure costs or maintenance.
2. Native integration with a CI/CD solution: Siloed testing and disconnected data don’t cut it anymore. To keep things agile, your testing solution needs to dovetail with your DevOps process and sync metadata. This will help you deliver your changes at a higher velocity.
3. Multiple devices and environments, one test script: No one wants to write the same script five times. And jumping between multiple platforms to test different devices isn’t ideal either. A single-script solution takes the tedium out of test automation and clears the path to end-to-end CI/CD.
4. AI-powered self-healing: When you have an issue with a test, your platform should be smart enough to diagnose the problem and recommend a solution. With Copado Robotic Testing, our army of robots go one step further — they proactively repair broken test scripts to give you peace of mind.
5. User story-centric: Everything needs to be executed out of a user story. It’s the only way to guarantee blazing-fast quality-driven pipelines. The 1-2 punch of Quality Gates and Acceptance Criteria gives your team a standardized definition of “done” — which means the user story is ready to move on to the next stage.

Testing ROI: Say Goodbye to Show-Stopping Defects

Testing software is like going to the doctor for a checkup: it’s a great way to pinpoint any issues before they become serious. But even with millions of dollars at stake, many teams continue to gloss over testing and cross their fingers on release day. According to the 2022 State of Salesforce Testing Report, 92% of companies experience production issues each year due to inadequate testing. Today’s IT teams know they need to improve testing. But to get leadership on board, they often must build a convincing business case.

How do you measure the testing ROI? How much will you save by automating tests? Testing creates business value through two main paths: risk reduction and shorter time-to-value.

Risk Reduction

A properly tested system causes fewer production problems. To calculate the risk reduction of testing, you must measure the value of each minute of downtime, calculate the average loss of a faulty transaction and estimate the cost and frequency of customer churn.

Time-to-Value

How long does it take to spin up a successful test automation solution? Automation enhances testing productivity and curtails time-to-value by accelerating test runs and eradicating rework and idle time. Humans simply need to set up the test — robots will take care of the rest.

Summary

Today’s digital leaders leverage test automation to set off a chain reaction of successful business outcomes — from better employee experiences to greater cross-functional collaboration to higher customer retention. Low-code testing breaks down silos, unites technical and non-technical admins, and empowers teams to keep up with the global pace of innovation.

Thanks to SawStop, woodworkers can cut beams of wood with speed, precision and peace of mind. And thanks to robotic testing for Salesforce, admins and developers can quickly release software without crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. These anointed cloud teams use test automation to disrupt their industries and unleash a whole new level of ROI.

Want to learn more about how Copado Robotic Testing works? Keep Learning about this snapshot of innovation with low-code robotic testing for Salesforce.