How to Automate Salesforce Testing in a DevOps Pipeline

Many teams regularly push new improvements for their Salesforce platform and might regularly deploy changes without proper testing. While this can sometimes lead to great results, oftentimes, it means buggy code, failed deployments, and more downtime than you would like.

Many tools on the market currently enable automated testing, which ensures that you only deploy stable, production-ready releases that integrate beautifully.

For most teams, finding the right solution to optimize modern development tools like CI/CD in their pipeline is as simple as implementing them.

1. Why Automated Testing is Critical for Salesforce DevOps

Why automated testing? It allows your team to be proactive! Teams who invest in automating their testing notice more than just time saving benefits.

Some of the biggest qualitative perks include drastic increases in team morale and developer confidence. When you're proactively testing for errors, developers feel less antsy about every line of code they write, and they stop fearing anything short of perfect.

Qualitative perks aside, there are a few quantitative perks too:

• Reduce manual testing hours

• Catch bugs early

• Ensure metadata is safe

Teams that implement testing procedures like this find that they can accomplish more since they spend less time correcting problems in deployment.

2. Key Types of Automated Testing for Salesforce

Let’s get into a few of the most common automated testing tools your team could use to improve their work.

A. Unit Testing with Apex

Apex testing helps validate custom logic in triggers, classes, and controllers.

This is helpful because Salesforce requires 75% of code coverage for your production deployments.

How does it work? It uses bulk testing and assertions to catch edge cases and help you correct them.

B. UI Testing with Selenium or Provar

If you’re making changes that will impact your UI, we recommend testing Lightning pages, Visualforce pages, and custom UIs.

Testing like this mimics user interactions on all browsers and devices, ensuring a united experience no matter where someone is accessing your platform.

C. API Testing for Integrations

Most Salesforce teams support their work via third-party integrations. When you enable API-based integrations, you have to test and validate secure connections for REST and SOAP.

These tests are essential because they ensure your external data is safely moving into your Salesforce environment.

A few tools that work well for this are Postman, JMeter, and SoapUI.

D. Regression Testing

Another great test to automate is regression testing. This should occur after every code update. I know, how boring! But it's important to ensure that any new piece of code you're introducing isn't going to have unexpected or unintended consequences for your existing code.

Regression testing also helps to maintain backward compatibility when you add new features.

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3. How to Integrate Automated Testing into a Salesforce CI/CD Pipeline

A. Setting Up a Continuous Integration Workflow

Before you can automate your testing, you must enable continuous integration within your workflow.  

This is done by using Git branches to commit your changes and can be done for you by tools like Blue Canvas, Jenkins, or GitHub.

Continuous Integration and Deployment help you address failures before you push a release into production.

B. Running Tests in Different Salesforce Environments

Before you push code live, it’s best to test it in all environments to ensure its stability.

In each of those environments, we suggest deploying code and running regression tests and UI tests before you move forward to the next deployment phase.

When you get to production, run post-deployment sanity checks to ensure it’s smooth, operational, and stable.

C. Automating Test Execution with CI/CD Tool

Not only should you invest in testing your UX/UI, and testing throughout all development stages, but the biggest time saver in automating your testing process as a whole is finding a way to leverage CI/CD.

Tools like Blue Canvas, Capado, and Gearset are all options for integrating automation into processes.

Software like this works by feeding results into a dashboard, allowing you to track success or failure and make changes accordingly.

4. Best Practices for Salesforce Test Automation

We recommend a few best practices if you decide to incorporate automatic Salesforce testing.

• Maintain clean test cases so become reusable.

• Test as early as possible in the development cycle so issues don’t fester.

• Test with mock data so you’re not interfering with business property when possible.

• Monitor and update your code continuously as Salesforce evolves.

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5. How Blue Canvas Helps Automate Salesforce Testing

When it comes to picking the tool that’s right for you, here’s what you should know about Blue Canvas.

• We have built-in automation to test for you with CI/CD workflows.

• Our software enables detailed failure logs with real-time test tracking.

• We are a seamless integration with Git and Salesforce to help manage metadata effectively.

Conclusion

Automating testing is an essential part of the workflow for teams looking to stay current with trends and optimize for growth.

With the ability to ensure stable deployments every time, it’s hard not to want to leverage tools that use modern day technologies to make life better.

Ready to learn more about how we leverage CI/CD to help you deploy faster?

Learn more about Blue Canvas here.