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SF DevOps Tutorials – Beginner’s Guide
to Salesforce Testing

Founded by Marc Benioff back in 1998, and headquartered in San Francisco, USA, SalesForce.com is now the most popular CRM tool. The primary objective of Salesforce CRM is to build a sustainable relationship between the organizations and their customers before and after delivering a product or service. Over time, along with being the No.1 CRM service, Salesforce also started offering many add-ons like cloud storage, which helped enterprises to avoid the overhead of maintaining on-premise servers and data centres.

The cloud-based approach of Salesforce does not require any additional hardware or software. Salesforce also offers SaaS application development suite, which empowers app developers and enterprise development teams to deliver better software products. So, with Salesforce, organizations can now reduce their development cost to a greater extent and build applications within a shorter time.

Benefits of using Salesforce

Now, about 82000+ companies work on Salesforce platform globally
Salesforce help to ensure better communication between organizations and customers
It will help automate daily tasks for enterprises
Developer productivity can be increased with Salesforce with in-built objects to reduce development effort
No need for any additional software to run on Salesforce
Developers can also use third-party applications in the official Salesforce app store, the App Exchange
Developers can also build their applications for Salesforce and publish them into App Exchange
Salesforce also has an in-built reporting mechanism
Salesforce admins can create users with various privileges within the Salesforce platform
Salesforce dashboard can show a graphical representation of the users with tasks and privileges assigned to each

Salesforce Testing

Here, we may discuss in detail about Salesforce testing for the beginners. This tutorial may give you a basic idea about how to perform SF testing and its benefits and features.

Salesforce testing terminology

Some basic terminology needed to be understood by the testers and developers who are working on Salesforce applications. Let us have an overview of the same.

Opportunity
The opportunity represents a sales deal which the sales team wants to keep track of. It is every organization's responsibility to grab available opportunities to the customers.
Lead
A lead is a potential business or person expressing interest in the given opportunity. This could typically be a call to the organization or an incoming mail or chat to gather more information about the given opportunity.
Account
An account is a client company which someone manages, including all its users, customers, partners, vendors, and prospects.
Contact
Contact is a person working on an account. A contact may be an employee of stakeholder of the particular account.
Events and tasks
Events and tasks consist of all activities associated with a given opportunity, account, or contact.
Reporting
Salesforce offers a wonderful reporting mechanism built-in, which helps to keep track of the real-time data and report daily progress of the tasks.

Process of Salesforce testing

Salesforce testing is the same as testing a normal web application. However, the testers need to have a clear understanding of the customization features during the testing. They may also focus on such features rather than the Salesforce features which are built-in. Testing of the Salesforce apps also needs a production like an environment, which is actualized by Sandbox. The testers and developers can use Sandboxes to check and verify their development purposes.

A typical Salesforce testing should include the default features as below:

SF DevOps Testing should have UI testing, regression testing, functional testing, system testing, as well as system integration testing.
Automation testing should be enforced on Salesforce using any tools as Unified Functional Testing (UFT ) or Selenium.
The tester must be vigilant during the UI testing as many of the Salesforce web pages may also be Visual Force pages. These need to be special attention too as the elements of those web pages may not get loaded in one go.
The tester should also create logical functional flows to include the positive and negative flows to cover entire application functionality.
The workflows of various user role also should be tested and constructed.’
The test cases also should be documented by using test management tools like ALM.
Proper test data should also be prepared to validate the functionality of the reports.

Salesforce testers’ roles and responsibilities

The Salesforce testers are also referred to as 'Quality Engineers' as against the 'Quality Assurance' professionals in the standard testing process. Salesforce requires the testers to build complex frameworks for testing the Salesforce apps by understanding the functionalities of the developed applications and the ability to work with developers and the stakeholder of the projects.

It is also important to note that the default functionalities of Salesforce cannot be removed even if the organization may not use those. The testers need to ignore some of the default functionalities and must focus on customized functionalities which are built by organizations. Further, we will discuss some of the major roles of the Salesforce testers.

Roles of Salesforce testers

Testers must communicate clearly with the developers, which must be understood, and the customizable features must be built into Salesforce.
Testers also need to coordinate effectively with the business whenever needed. Usually, the requirements for Salesforce are complex to understand and also needs a lot of effort to be understood.
As per the standard Salesforce rules, the testers also should ensure that the code coverage is not going below 75%.
Testers need to conduct role-based testing to ensure data consistency across various roles.
Salesforce testers must perform compatibility testing of third-party applications, which are integrated with Salesforce.
Testers also should be familiar with load testing by using tools as JMeter etc. for validation for the complex flows, which may produce some inconsistent results also in Salesforce.
The tester should also be familiar with different application flows in a typical development environment.

Salesforce exploratory testing must involve validation of the data consistency among multiple screens. UI Testing should involve documented test cases based on the requirements. It should also cover negative test flows like deleting default data and validating application behaviors. Salesforce test automation can be done using tools as Selenium web driver, HP UFT (Unified Functional Testing), Cucumber test framework etc.