How Salesforce Regression Testing Helps Avoid Costly Errors
Robust Salesforce regression testing capabilities are essential as Salesforce continues to help organizations become more flexible and customer-focused. A custom Salesforce environment enables admins and developers to quickly build and release apps and drive organizational agility and responsiveness. Salesforce also makes regular upgrades and updates to meet growing enterprise needs. However, it is crucial to ensure that these changes do not break the system and ensure that while being quick, these deployments are also accurate. This is where regression testing proves viable.
What Is Regression Testing in Salesforce?
Regression testing in Salesforce ensures that existing functionality operates as designed and does not break whenever there is a configuration, update, or deployment in Salesforce. It tests the entire system, especially the high-risk areas of Salesforce.
Regression testing can be done manually. This approach, however, impedes testing velocity and test coverage. Therefore, automating regression testing becomes an important consideration to increase testing velocity, expand test coverage, and elevate test confidence.
Why Is Regression Testing in Salesforce Important?
Salesforce is a flexible and highly customizable platform. Most enterprises using this platform have it customized to meet the business’s specific needs. The platform deploys major releases thrice a year. Improper testing of Salesforce applications can expose the business to risks.
Salesforce is also leading the low-code revolution and makes it easier for businesses to deploy business applications with a point-and-click. While this age of declarative development boosts business agility, it makes Salesforce admins work harder.
The admins have to make sure that they manage ongoing changes to the application ecosystem effectively and prevent incorrect configurations that may adversely impact other workflows.
Hence, regression testing becomes essential to Salesforce since it allows businesses to mitigate a large proportion of risks. It also allows enterprises to deploy business applications faster and with greater confidence.
How Does It Avoid Costly Errors?
Regression testing helps enterprises avoid costly errors. It becomes all the more important since the cost to fix a bug increases manifold once the product is released. Studies show that the cost to fix a bug found in implementation is six times higher than when discovered during the design phase. Furthermore, it increases to 100 times more as it moves into the maintenance phase.
Tests like regression testing make it easier to spot issues and defects, anti-patterns, security vulnerabilities, and so on, and deliver continuous quality. Regression testing tests the entire application. It ensures that all parts are working as designed and that the system has no bugs, errors, or broken code impacting its performance, availability, and security.
What Are the Benefits of Automated Salesforce Regression Testing?
Manual testing can no longer meet the testing needs of the enterprise. To this end, automated Salesforce regression testing delivers the following benefits to enterprises:
Cost Reductions
Manual testing increases the gap between developing new functionality and the time taken to test it. Since Salesforce is a high-speed release environment, manual regression testing also becomes difficult to scale. The time and resources needed for regression testing add to the testing costs and make it unnecessarily expensive.
Regressing test automation for Salesforce becomes crucial to save costs. The costs of finding bugs increase the later they are discovered. Automated testing expands the testing footprint and accelerates the pace of testing. This helps in extensive and comprehensive test coverage.
Speedier Development Cycles & Shorter Test Cycle Times
Test automation of regression testing accelerates the testing process. It contributes towards faster development cycles and ensures that enterprises can confidently deploy business applications, updates, and upgrades.
Automation expands the testing footprint and allows testers to test fast, test early, and test often. It also enables continuous testing. As a result, it provides an agile way to manage ongoing changes.
More Reliability Than Manual Salesforce Testing
The testing velocity of manual testing is much lesser than automated testing. Regression testing involves checking the entire system to make sure it functions as designed, even after introducing changes to the system. Given the expansive Salesforce environment, manual testing becomes unreliable as this exercise is highly effort intensive and demands wide test coverage.
Regression tests also become more complex and larger as applications become more feature-rich and the Salesforce environment expands. Manual regression testing in this environment becomes virtually impossible and consumes significant time and resources. In fact, the chances of missing an occasional test also become very high. This impacts the testing reliability.
Reduced Time-to-Market
Automated regression testing improves the time to market as well. Automated testing provides quick feedback to developers and delivers the agility to swiftly fix errors or bugs. Since test automation helps teams accelerate testing velocity, adding small updates or fixes to their environment and testing them becomes much faster. This improves the overall team efficiency and reduces the time-to-market.
Increases Test Consistency and Confidence
Since there is very little human intervention, automated Salesforce regression testing ensures that each test cycle is more reliable than the one before.
Test automation tools powered by AI further improve test reliability and consistency. Since test automation allows teams to run tests simultaneously, they can run more regression test cases. This increases test coverage and advances application consistency.
Enables QA To Focus on High-Value Tasks
Robust test automation platforms accelerate the pace of regression testing even further. AI-powered codeless test automation platforms further accelerate the pace of testing as they enable algorithmic & automated test case generation with Salesforce data models.
The QA resources can then spend time in high-value activities since test automation makes it possible to test iteratively, creating a feedback loop and improving test quality in lesser time.
What Are the Best Practices for Automated Salesforce Regression Testing?
Some of the best practices for regression testing are:
Defining the Approach & Test Scenarios
Defining the test automation approach is the starting point for Salesforce regression test automation. This involves evaluating and identifying the scope of test coverage and identifying candidates for automation and components that should be manually tested.
The test approach also must identify the environments needed for regression tests and the reports that must be generated to report on the performance of these tests. The approach must also include the test scenarios and should be able to test both Salesforce Lightning and Classic.
Selecting the Right Testing Tool
The success of test automation initiatives depends largely on the automation tool. Codeless test automation tools become great enablers of quality testing since these do not need programming and constant maintenance. However, the tool must be able to test Salesforce UI & APIs all in the same flow and offer Visualforce component automation for complete coverage.
Along with this, the ideal tool should:
- Enable intelligent abstraction for Salesforce workflows to enable in-sprint automation and allow automated executions orchestrated by CI workflow.
- Provide a clear overview of test cases and their purpose.
- Present the tests intuitively and visually instead of through lines of code to find defects faster.
Analyzing Test Results
It is also essential to analyze the test results for successful regression testing. Identifying why a test failed becomes crucial for quality. However, without the right tools to uncover this, it can become a tedious affair, and identifying the right fix can become an issue.
Therefore, during test result analysis, it becomes essential to:
- Check the automated test cases and ensure they have been built correctly and are testing the intended aspect
- Review the test results to uncover reasons behind failed tests
- Analyze test results to assess why some tests fail more than others
ACCELQ for Automated Salesforce Regression Testing
Given the complexities of Salesforce, regression testing demands a robust tool built specifically for this purpose. The ACCELQ Codeless test automation platform takes all the pain out of regression testing. With this platform, enterprises can supercharge their testing and QA by:
- Enabling manual testers and business analysts to automate without writing a single line of code
- Automating all aspects of the quality lifecycle from test design all the way to test planning & execution
- Leveraging a design-first approach with inbuilt modularity, alleviating the need for custom frameworks
- Allowing seamless integration in the existing ecosystem of tools like Jira, TFS, Jenkins, Bamboo, etc.
- Competently handling all Salesforce dynamic elements & iframes
- Reducing automation maintenance by 70% with self-healing automation
- Increasing the testing footprint and testing velocity with algorithmic & automated test case generation with Salesforce data models
- Leveraging cloud-based execution with cross-browser and OS for complete validations
Connect with our experts to see how our AI-powered codeless platform enables continuous testing for agile Salesforce implementations and improves testing velocity and quality.
