Salesforce releases: All you need to know

Undoubtedly, Salesforce is a globally recognized customer relationship management (CRM) software. Over the years, Salesforce has evolved from a really nice CRM to a strategic enterprise  application development platform. Salesforce can be used to create enterprise apps touching CPQ, fulfillment, billing and more. Furthermore, it can be seamlessly integrated with enterprise apps such as ERP, and ecommerce to name a few. Apart from all these features, one of the greatest advantages with Salesforce is its seasonal releases. 

What are Salesforce releases?

As its commitment towards continuous innovation, Salesforce rolls out releases thrice a year. Salesforce releases come packed with hundreds of innovative features that help customers to efficiently manage their marketing, sales, and service departments. Salesforce upgrades or releases are automatic, delivered in real time, with a scheduled maintenance of five minutes. Saying otherwise, all Salesforce customers will run the same version.

Why do you need to test Salesforce releases prior to deployment in production?

Although Salesforce does an exceptional job of testing releases, you still need to execute regression testing to ensure that your customized workflows, critical integrations, and custom reports are working properly. Salesforce can be customized and integrated with a large number of apps. With each seasonal Salesforce release, there’s a possibility that existing business processes may fail or deviate, user-experience may get spoiled or integrations may break. Thus, regression testing with each seasonal release is recommended. 

Challenges with Salesforce release testing

• Salesforce rolls out three releases a year. It means that you need to execute regression testing at least thrice. Since regression testing is often executed by business users, their availability is a major concern as they have other critical jobs to do than just testing.
• When regression testing is executed manually, it consumes a lot of time and effort. Since it is repetitive & monotonous, critical bugs can be missed. They can make their way to production.
• Inadequate test coverage is another big issue in Salesforce release testing. When business users don’t have adequate time, they’ll only test those features which seem important to them. This will lead to a big hole in the test coverage.
• Even if you try to address above mentioned issues with traditional test automation, it will not help you as Salesforce is a dynamic application that features dynamic elements. These elements come with no fixed IDs, names, class or CSS attributes. A minor change in UI can break test automation scripts.

How to address Salesforce release testing challenges?

No code automation: You’re now aware that Salesforce admin along with business users is responsible for testing seasonal releases. As business users are non-technical users, a code-based automation problem won’t work for them. You need a no-code test automation platform that allows them to create test automation scripts without requiring coding knowledge.

Self-healing test scripts: As maintenance of Salesforce test scripts is a great burden on business users due to three seasonal releases, opt for a test automation platform that comes with AI-powered self-healing capabilities. Such platforms are meta-data driven and can autonomously heals the scripts without requiring human intervention.

Risk-based coverage: Opt for test automation platform that automatically recommends test cases based on the highlighted risks so that business users neither under tests nor over test during seasonal releases.