Salesforce Testing with Selenium

Salesforce Testing receives hundreds of innovative features thrice a year, with seasonal releases in the spring, summer, and winter. These updates have a high potential of disrupting the existing business processes. Hence, enterprises must continuously test Salesforce’s updates before pushing them to production. As manual testing alone can’t cover your testing requirements for regression testing, most organizations choose the source test automation tool Selenium to implement continuous testing. However, Selenium is not the right choice for testing Salesforce due to complexities like highly customized architecture, large numbers of integrations, and in-sprint updates. 

In this blog, we’ll discuss Salesforce test automation challenges concerning Selenium and how to overcome these challenges with AI-powered test automation approaches.

Challenges of Automating Salesforce testing

Dynamic elements are difficult to identify: Salesforce is a complex web application with dynamic elements that do not have a fixed ID, name, class, XPath, or CSS attributes. So, you cannot hard code the locator of the element. Even slight changes in Salesforce’s UI will result in flaky test cases, eventually breaking workflows and business processes. Open-source tools like Selenium cannot be used since they cannot identify dynamic elements. 

Handling Dynamic Tables is challenging: Salesforce comes with database-driven tables in which rows are created dynamically and can be controlled by different tabs. So, simple actions like ticking a Selenium checkbox can be complicated and prone to errors. Selecting the active tab proves extremely challenging when using Selenium, and performing actions such as ticking a checkbox with Selenium can be quite complicated.

Navigating through frames and iframes: Salesforce is a complex application. The front end is built with dynamic frames that can load content independently in the current HTML document. Handling frames is difficult with Selenium as it cannot access the content directly, which results in building lengthy and brittle test cases. 

Shadow DOM: It’s challenging to test complicated elements like Shadow DOM and pop-up windows with Selenium as it does not support such elements directly and requires a significant amount of custom coding. Selenium scripting for these windows requires a lot of time and is incompatible with continuous testing.

As Selenium is not specifically designed to test packaged applications with complicated features, it is recommended that you leverage comprehensive no-code test automation tools that can easily handle Salesforce’s complexities. 

Opkey is a no-code Salesforce test automation platform uniquely qualified to automate dynamic applications with its predictive autonomous testing platform. As Salesforce is a zero code test – automation platform, it enables non-technical employees to create and automate test cases in hours.

Let’s discuss its key features :

Zero-code Test builder– Opkey’s test builder can easily handle dynamic objects and specific controls, providing 70% faster test creation than Selenium. The test builder also provides analytical reports, which help you to analyze the impact of the new features added during seasonal updates. Additionally, the test builder updates continuously to sync with the latest Salesforce updates, freeing you from all maintenance worries. 

Salesforce API testing– Opkey’s automation engine generates tests automatically for all your REST and SOAP services. It can automatically detect API endpoints for your salesforce org, ensuring 70% faster API test creation. Selenium takes hours to build the code-based API test cases, resulting in time-bandwidth overruns. 

Model-Based Testing Approach—With Opkey’s model-based testing approach, you can easily create a model of your application with a drag-and-drop canvas. It provides 50+ Pre-Built Salesforce models for the most comprehensive Salesforce test automation.

Real-time impact analysis—Powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, Opkey’s impact analysis provides you with analytical data on the scope of Salesforce testing after each update. It also provides important data on which business process requires how much testing and the number of test cases. It can easily identify what exactly will break and automatically update your test scripts. 

Conclusion : 

Robust test automation tools like Opkey are specifically designed to overcome the challenges of packaged applications like Salesforce. Most importantly, they enable non-programmers to contribute to Salesforce test automation. Hence, Opkey is highly recommended over Selenium. 

In short, agile teams can create reliable automation tests significantly faster and maintain them painlessly with Opkey’s:

• Predefined templates for configuration tests
• End-to-End test technology: all of your Salesforce integrations can be tested through our platform
• Prebuilt, automated test libraries for Sales Cloud, CPQ, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud
• Integrated Change Analysis and Risk Assessment to ensure seamless admin & tester experience