CRM application development is on an all-time hype now, and as per a market forecast by Gartner, the CRM applications market worldwide may reach to 29.7 billion dollars by the year 2022. Back in 2017, it was of about 27 billion dollars, which had grossed an average annual growth rate of about 1.9%.
A report shows that back in 2017-18, the CRM top 10 vendors had grossed nearly 60% of the entire global CRM applications market, accounting for a total of 27.2 billion dollars in terms of licensing, subscription, and maintenance revenues. In the year 2019, Salesforce had led the pack by acquiring about 25% of the CRM market share and also had a 23% steady increase in their CRM revenues. Adbot stood at the next place, followed by Oracle, Genesys, and SAP.
As Salesforce being in the limelight, SF DevOps, an ideal integration of development-operational processes in application development had also come on top of the enterprise preferences in integrated development systems. In this article, we will discuss the process and importance of test automation in SF DevOps enterprise application development.
With seamless integrations made possible, SF DevOps comes packed with offerings of a variety of cloud-based SaaS features, automation feature, continuous integration, and constant development etc. So, the enterprise SF DevOps administrators and developers need to know the implementation and effective integration of Salesforce automation into their development ecosystem.
Why is testing crucial in SF DevOps implementations?
Salesforce can support a lot of CRM activities. It is integrated with other applications in various ways like other web services, portals, cloud services, outbound messaging services, social media, apex programming, data loader and much more. However, in many of such integrations, testing of these are often getting neglected due to the time and budget constraints.
In the end, this negligence may result in poor product quality product, compromised performance, and user dissatisfaction. Further, it may end up in increased quality costs too later to correct the bugs. So, effective testing is crucial to ensure that every business process works normally.
Test Automation in SF DevOps
As Salesforce is a cloud-based application, it can be effectively integrated with other cloud-based enterprise applications. This eases the process of validation based on functional testing. The customized functionality also plays a crucial role in this. Automation for functional testing of the crucial businesses processes of enterprises also brings many benefits and can also support the overall enterprise strategies.
Best practices in SF DevOps automation testing
- Get an expert testing team:
In the case of SF DevOps testing automation, the primary need is for expert QA teams who can handle comprehensive test cases. Say, for example, if an enterprise aims to conduct regression testing or UAT, it is important that only experts who are good at UAT and regression testing to handle it.
- Begin testing at the earliest in SDLC:
It is important to get the software testers involved from the beginning of the software development lifecycle itself. By ensuring this, it will help them to understand the requirements of the applications well and understand the issues at the first point. This will also help to reduce the risks and scope of unexpected failures. This is a crucial way through which QA teams can improve their test coverage and also perform more tests in a quality manner during SDLC.
- Choosing appropriate testing tools:
There are plenty of compatible SF automation tools available, which help to perform effective automation testing. Hence, before choosing a tool, the QA teams need to verify whether the tools they use are capable of handling critical scenarios by meeting all requirements. It is also important to ensure that the tool you use is capable of offering the required simulations for functionality testing.
- Classes & Controllers:
During Salesforce development, adding controller files in each function may make the coding much easier and organized. Using this, you can also get the codes portable and reusable. Even though this is not an ultimately efficient way for developers, it will help to ensure the portability of the test codes are controller code and original class. It will also help the developers not to miss out any test classes during migration from sandbox to the production.
- Ensuring proper naming conventions of test methods
Before initiating any tests in automation, it is important to save the test methods with a proper naming convention. A standard naming convention usually includes three parts in it as:
- Name of the testing method
- Info about test path
- Test condition on which this method is performed.
Doing this properly will help testers to understand the test type and method even before opening it. This will help save time and also make them more efficient.
Benefits of test automation in SF DevOps
- More efficiency and better speed
Manual testing Is always more expensive and functionally challenging. A lot of time and human effort also needed for regression testing. This will not only slow down the delivery, but it can also affect the testing quality. By using automation testing, better speed and efficiency can be ensured by reducing the overall test cost.
- Better test coverage
The development teams also must be able to tackle the changes in their cloud apps and released from time to time. This needs better test coverage by executing a large number of test cases simultaneously, exercising various user scenarios, and validating the edge cases etc. Proper data-driven automation testing in SF DevOps projects will ensure seamless compatibility of applications and performance consistency.
- Preparation of perfect test cases
Performing repetitive testing tasks manually can also cause human errors. Automated testing will help reduce the repetitive testing needs, along with increasing the performance of Salesforce integrated applications. This approach will also help to enhance overall accuracy and enable the testers to do appropriate exploratory testing and risk analysis.
- Automated reports
Generation of test report can also be automated in SF DevOps testing automation, which will also eradicate any manual errors in report making. By delineating the success and failure of each test, a proper report will help in properly running the automated testing and save a lot of time.
There are many Salesforce automation tools available out there like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sales Edge, Force.com, Insight Squared, Active Conversion etc., which all help to meet the above objectives and also makes development a much more cost-effective and speedy affair.
