AUTOMATED TESTING WITH SALES-FORCE AND SELENIUM
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Salesforce is a leading cloud-based CRM that is used by FCA, GE, Coca-Cola, Philips, and other major brands and companies.
Being a widely accepted CRM application, quality plays an extremely important part of any of its major/minor releases. Automation testing, which is the most active and the highest-demanded way of testing, can make your life easier by taking over monotonous and repetitive test cases, as well as test the test pyramid levels that can’t be covered manually.
Yes, you can reduce the number of defects in an app by writing the unit test case under the criteria of 75-90% coverage, but it would result in only your APEX code/custom objects being tested, which is not sufficient to push your app over the app exchange. Instead, you need to have an automated way to test your Salesforce app from the perspective of integration testing, including both standard and custom implementations.
An open-source Selenium project is now widely used for all browser-based UI testing, which simulates the end user’s actions and is leveraged by Salesforce to automate their >40,000 test cases.
TEST STEPS, PREREQUISITES, AND TEST DATA
Most testers would agree that test steps, prerequisites, and test data are the three main components of a test case. These rules are also followed in automation testing, and all the testers know the pain of setting up the prerequisites or getting the valid test data because corrupt/invalid test data will fail your test case and create a defect that developers can’t work with.
WHY SHOULDN’T WE USE SELENIUM ALONE TO TEST EVERYTHING?
This is a common question asked by stakeholders because UI test cases are expected to simulate user actions like clicking buttons, selecting menus, or validating text on a web page. These actions must be tested to ensure the quality of the application as an end user. However, the problem with the Selenium test cases is that they are slowest and have a reputation for being flaky. The solution, then, is to take a hybrid approach: set up the prerequisites by leveraging the APIs provided by Salesforce and then manipulate the Salesforce objects. This saves a lot of maintenance effort and reduces the execution time by 20-30%. Additionally, you can utilize any of the other API frameworks like REST/SOAP/APEX.
Having said that, if there is a test case that needs any opportunity as a test data and there are 50-60 such test cases that fit these criteria, then you can create the opportunity through UI for one test case, and then send a “Create Opportunity” request to Salesforce for the others. Leveraging APIs also helps us to fetch data from Salesforce–because it doesn’t have an exposed database, you have to rely on this API framework to fetch the data using SOQL.
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