Best practices for Salesforce testing

Salesforce testing is one of the key elements of Salesforce administration and development. Salesforce can be customized to decrease its complexity. We can ensure that enhancements and feature updates don’t crash or compromise the other elements of our Salesforce environment. Salesforce testing is key to smooth and efficient project deployment, and following best practices can help make this process as robust as possible.

Challenges with Salesforce Testing

Salesforce testing involves many issues. Few of them are listed as below:

• Testing of Visualforce pages through automation is not an easy task
• Some of the standard functionalities, even when not in use, cannot be removed
• All classic tests need to be recreated for the Lightning UI
• When switching to a test environment, many GUI tests does not work; automated test cases should work for all the environments
• A thorough understanding of the Salesforce implementation is needed before getting started with Salesforce testing

Best Practices for Salesforce Testing

Let us look at some of the best practices that should be followed across different stages of Salesforce testing for a successful implementation:

• Testing should start early in the software development life cycle
  Getting the QA team involved in the project from the very beginning helps the testers to understand the software requirements better. Testing early on helps in anticipating future problems at a lower cost. It also helps reduce the risk of a shorter testing period, thereby helping the testing and QA teams to increase their test coverage and reduce the likelihood of errors.
• Using the right testing tools
  Salesforce testing happens either in the browser or in the Eclipse-based environment. There are loads of Salesforce testing tools that can be used throughout the testing process. Salesforce test management tools, like Panaya ForeSight, helps seamlessly manage critical projects. For functional testing, both Android and Apple provide simulators to test on, and Selenium is a preferable tool for Salesforce test automation.
• Test case walkthrough sessions
  When the QA team is involved in the early stages of the SDLC, they have the time to increase the test coverage. After this, a formal walkthrough session needs to be organized wherein the author of test cases can explain the test cases to stakeholders, including developers. Sharing it with the development team before the implementation phase can help them think outside the box and evaluate their codes better. The walkthrough session helps in solving the shortcomings in interpretation due to some generic terms and in discovering any missing requirements.
• A thorough round of unit testing
  Before handing over to the testers, developers should unit test their code. This will help in the early detection of errors in the SDLC. It will also help in lowering the cost of testing and bug fixing and helps in building a reusable code, which is easy to debug.
• Hiring the right resource
  Hiring resources with prior experience in Salesforce testing helps ensure successful implementation.

Conclusion

There are many benefits that Salesforce offers, which can empower teams to deliver value and achieve a higher ROI. With the above mentioned Salesforce testing best practices, you can improve the efficiency of functional and UAT testing for your projects. Performing sufficient testing in your Salesforce deployment will facilitate smooth rollouts by identifying bugs earlier in the cycle and ensuring that testing is efficient in your future releases as well.