Automated Testing for Salesforce with Provar

Automated testing is a core requirement for any DevOps story. If you want to achive Continuous Delivery, your testing process can’t be a multi-day manual slog. ‍

Provar Testing has built a solution that makes it easier to create, run and gain valuable insight from automated tests for the Salesforce platform. We’ve been watching them for years and are excited to finally announce a new integration with their test automation platform as the first integration for our new CI engine: Blue Canvas CI.

What is Provar?

Provar is the easiest, fastest way to create automated tests for Salesforce.

Many Salesforce developers are familiar with automated testing via Apex unit tests. But Provar helps with functional testing. They actually have automated scripts that interact at the browser level much like you would have with Selenium Webdriver.

This allows you to test the application on multiple browsers and to catch things that might not be possible to catch via a simple Apex unit tests. For example, in our webinar with Provar we showed a test catching an actual embarrassing typo that would definitely have escaped notice with simple manual and unit testing.

Provar has a few core aspects to their platform, the first being their test creation tool. Provar offers a Chrome extension that makes it simple to create and record test cases without requiring programming knowledge. This allows admins and manual testers to create automated scripts without learning a complicated new programming paradigm.

Once you’ve created tests, Provar helps you execute them. You can run them against multiple browsers and include them as a build step in your CI process. (More on this in a second as we explain how you can run Provar tests as part of your Blue Canvas pipeline).

And finally, once your tests are complete, Provar provides elegant reports that give actionable insights and test results. They even provide actual screenshots of your application at various points of the test.

Introducing the Blue Canvas and Provar Integration

Traditionally, Provar has been something that Salesforce teams run on their own with tools like Jenkins. This works well enough, but you have to configure and set up Jenkins to kick off tests and consume test results which isn’t always the preferred way of doing CI for Salesforce.

(As an example, check out this blog post for what it would require to integrate with Gearset or Flosum.)

Building and maintaining such a system is complicated and can come with relatively high maintenance costs. As we’ve written previously, there are challenges associated with getting Salesforce teams using Jenkins. Blue Canvas exists to make it easier for admins, BAs and devs to use DevOps best practices and source control.

When we started talking to Provar we wondered, what if you could just kick off Provar tests directly from the cloud with Blue Canvas rather than maintaining a separate Jenkins server to do so?

And that’s what we’re happy to announce: you can now run your tests in a Docker image hosted in the cloud as a post-deployment step in Blue Canvas.

The benefits are myriad but here are just a few:

• Getting started is very simple
• Maintenance costs and headache managing servers is eliminated
• You can now consume reports that are built into your CI pipeline

How it Works

Leveraging the integration is simple. Provar users can write tests with the Provar test creation tool just as they normally would.

Once tests are created, you can upload them into an AWS S3 bucket and tell Blue Canvas where to grab them.

As you use Blue Canvas to run your source control and CI process, you can kick off a Provar build post deploy. Each Deployment Request or Story in Blue Canvas can have an associated Post-Deployment step running Provar.

For example, if you do a deployment to QA you can automatically kick of functional tests and have an embedded results report attached to the story. (Note how easy it is to rerun the tests in the cloud with a simple click of the button.)

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You can see a report of the test run and associated it with the story in Blue Canvas by clicking the report.html link in the story.

This means that you always have clear logs and audit trails of how things were tested and deployed. This builds upon Blue Canvas’ code review story so that each change has as much metadata and information about it as possible.

Now you can be continuously running functional tests as part of your CI process and increasing the quality of your Salesforce releases.

Get Access

To get access to this integration please reach out to team@bluecanvas.io.