Choosing between manual testing and Salesforce test automation depends on your business needs. Manual testing excels at exploring new features and user experience, while automation is ideal for repetitive tasks and regression testing. Combining both approaches often provides the best results. By following Salesforce testing best practices, businesses can ensure quality and scalability for their Salesforce applications, whether built through Salesforce development services or custom solutions. Continue reading to learn more.

Salesforce is a leading CRM platform that forms an integral part of businesses of all sizes in managing customer relationships, smoothing operations, and increasing sales. For companies using Salesforce, it is important to ensure the quality and functionality of their Salesforce applications. That is where Salesforce testing best practices come into play. Testing is an important phase in Salesforce development to keep applications high-quality, bug-free, and up to business needs.

The greater the complexity of the Salesforce customization services, the more a business faces the challenge of deciding whether to automate or manually test Salesforce. Each of the approaches has its strengths and weaknesses, and the right choice will depend on various factors such as the scope of the project, the team’s expertise, and business needs.

In this article, we’ll dive into the best practices of Salesforce testing, the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches to testing, and help you determine which is right for your business.

Salesforce Testing: A Critical Component for Success

Salesforce’s customization allows companies to mold it to a company’s special processes, but this flexibility also bodes ill for the test. Having an effective testing strategy guarantees that new features, customizations, and integrations will work as expected without messing up the existing environment.

Testing enables one to catch bugs, validate business rules, and make the applications secure and scalable. It will apply both while performing the feature built out of the box from Salesforce and when extending services by building custom solutions for Salesforce.

Case for Automation vs. Manual Testing in Salesforce

When it comes to the testing of Salesforce applications, much debate has been raised on automation versus manual testing. Each of these methods has its merits; most successful Salesforce implementations have combined both to achieve optimum results. Let’s break down the benefits and challenges of each.

Manual Testing for Salesforce Applications

Manual testing is basically the process of executing test cases by a human tester without the help of automation testing tools. It is often preferred in scenarios when Salesforce customization services have made the system complex or if new features need a fresh round of validation.

Manual Testing Benefits:

  • Testing Exploration: Manual testing provides an avenue for testers to apply judgment and intuition in the exploration of different features that could have been blind sights using the automated scripts. Usability Testing: Human testers can do usability testing and interface design, hence giving insight into how the end-users will interact with the system.
  • Agile and Adaptive: Manual testing salesforce features, in dynamic environments where the application is changing continuously, can quickly adapt to new functionalities and customizations without requiring time-consuming script modifications. Challenges of Manual Testing: Time-Consuming: Manual testing can be slow to perform, especially for big or complex applications. For any new feature or change, there needs to be a corresponding execution of a manual test case.
  • Higher Risk of Human Error: Due to dependence on human intervention, there is a higher possibility of missing bugs or conducting tests incorrectly.
  • Limited Reusability: Manual tests, once executed, can usually not be reused. Performing them again requires additional manual execution, increasing costs over time.

Manual testing might still be the most applicable way for businesses offering Salesforce development services with high-touch customizations or having limited resources. But as the Salesforce environment becomes more complex, obvious limitations to manual testing start to emerge.

Salesforce Test Automation

Salesforce test automation involves using specialized tools to automate the execution of tests. It’s a more efficient way to handle repetitive and time-consuming tests, particularly for regression testing, ensuring that previous functionalities aren’t affected when new features are added.

Benefits of Test Automation:

  • Faster Execution: Automated tests can run much faster than manual tests, especially when dealing with large sets of test cases. This results in quicker feedback loops for developers.
  • Reusability: Automated test scripts can be reused multiple times with minimal effort, which is ideal for projects that require continuous testing during development cycles.
    • Consistency: Automation removes human error, thus tests get executed exactly the same manner every time for more consistent results.
    • Scalability: As your Salesforce solution grows, the number of tests can quickly increase. Automation allows you to scale testing efforts without needing to significantly increase resources.

Challenges of Test Automation:

  • Initial Setup Cost: Creating automated test scripts requires an upfront investment in time, expertise, and resources. This is a big challenge for smaller teams.
  • Maintenance: Automated tests must be maintained on a regular basis, especially in dynamic environments such as Salesforce, where automated tests can break with each new update or change.

Dynamic elements, like changing fields depending on user input or custom components, add complexity to handling dynamic elements in Salesforce applications. The automation of tests for such dynamic elements can get tricky.

If your organization is adopting Salesforce solutions that keep changing frequently or developing big and complex features, then Salesforce test automation will bring great value, especially for regression testing and continuous integration environments.

Best Salesforce Testing Strategies: How to Combine Automation with Manual Testing

While both automation and manual testing have their own merits, the best strategy often involves a combination of both. In leveraging the strengths of each approach, businesses can develop best Salesforce testing strategies that ensure maximum efficiency and thorough coverage.

1. Begin with Manual Testing for Exploratory and UX Testing

Manual testing is ideal for discovering unexpected issues, especially in the early stages of Salesforce development. Before automating your tests, perform exploratory tests to understand the application’s behavior. This is particularly useful for custom Salesforce applications or unique business workflows.

2. Implement Automation for Repetitive Tasks and Regression Testing

Once the basic functionality is verified through manual testing, move toward automation for repetitive tasks like regression testing, data migration checks, and integration testing. Tools like Selenium, Provar, and TestComplete are popular choices for Salesforce test automation.

3. Prioritize Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Testing (CT)

For businesses adopting Salesforce development services, where updates and feature rollouts are more frequent, integrating CI/CD pipelines with automated testing speeds up the delivery of quality applications. Automation tests can be run within the CI pipeline and can give immediate feedback to development teams.

4. Testing Parallel to Development

Salesforce development companies and teams should follow the agile methodology, where testing should occur concurrently with development. This will reduce bottlenecks and allow the teams to solve an issue as soon as it arises.

5. Utilize Automated Regression Testing for New Releases

Whenever there is a new release or update in Salesforce, automated regression tests can help confirm that new changes don’t disrupt existing features. With Salesforce customization services, this step is crucial to avoid the risk of breaking custom workflows.

Final Thoughts: Which Testing Approach is Right for Your Business?

Which one to go for between manual testing for Salesforce applications and Salesforce test automation is actually a decision based on your specific business needs, the complexity of your Salesforce environment, and resources. Here’s a quick guide to help you decide:

If you are dealing with frequent updates, large teams, and complex integrations, Salesforce test automation will offer significant advantages in speed, scalability, and consistency.

Less complex Salesforce instances, or those testing new features for the first time, greatly benefit from manual testing to explore the user experience, catch edge cases, and provide feedback for future automation. In most cases, this is a hybrid approach whereby manual testing is used to perform exploratory and usability testing, while automation can be used for repetitive, regression tests.

If your business aims to craft premium Salesforce solutions, then partnering with a reputable software product engineering company like Tntra that follows Salesforce testing best practices is essential for rendering your Salesforce applications robust, reliable, and ready to take on whatever challenges lie ahead. Contact us today!