Best practices for Salesforce Integration Testing

 
 

 Enterprises are digitizing in a big way to streamline their operations and deliver the best quality products to their customers. And when customers are the main force behind the success of an enterprise, ignoring their interests or downplaying their queries/issues can be an unmitigated disaster. Salesforce is a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that helps enterprises to recognize and manage customer interactions throughout the product lifecycle. As a popular CRM tool, Salesforce is highly robust, customizable, configurable, and extensible. Comprising several applications, Salesforce helps businesses to reinforce customer relations and interactions, and client retention thereby leading to their growth.

Any CRM platform like Salesforce has become important in today’s business milieu where enterprises need to manage their relationship with customers once a product is delivered. The platform provides systems, technologies, strategies, and practices to reinforce customer interaction throughout the product lifecycle. Salesforce has myriad applications with which it needs robust integration and interoperability to run various functionalities. This calls for executing Salesforce integration testing covering all modules namely, accounts, campaigns, reports, leads, and contacts, among others.

Why Salesforce testing?

The CRM suite ensures proper management of customer interactions with the organization. It is only by understanding and addressing the concerns of the customers that organizations can ensure customer satisfaction and stay competitive. Salesforce application testing helps to validate the functionalities and their configurations as per the agreed business objectives. Such testing allows for early identification (and fixing) of glitches in the application development process thereupon ensuring the product addresses the needs of the customers.

Best practices for Salesforce integration testing

As mentioned above, Salesforce is the sum-total of applications that execute various functionalities aimed at addressing customer issues and strengthening the interaction. However, these applications should have proper integration among themselves and with the mother software suite (Salesforce) to deliver superior outcomes. Hence, a proper Salesforce testing framework should be established to take care of the integration issues. The best practices to follow while pursuing such testing are mentioned below:

# Collate information: Collate a comprehensive list of all test case scenarios and possible technical exceptions. For each scenario, the expected results and actions to be performed should be documented. Thereafter, test data should be created to validate each scenario.

# Right testing tools: To get the best results, use the right debugging tools offered by the latest browsers combined with the test classes. For example, you may use a powerful object-oriented and case-sensitive proprietary programming language called Apex to execute programmed functions like updates, deletions, custom links, and record insertion, among others.

# Follow naming conventions: Before writing test cases for Salesforce test automation, it is important to name the test methods appropriately. The test methods should comprise the below-mentioned parts:

·         Name of the method – insert/delete/update/undelete

·         Information about the test path – null contact or valid

# Total coverage: Even though the Salesforce directive is to cover about 75% of the code while conducting unit tests, one should aim at covering 100% of the code. Test all cases (positive or negative) as well as data (present or absent). Follow the below-mentioned tips to ensure 100% test coverage.

·         Refresh the code coverage numbers while running Salesforce automated testing

·         Rerun the tests when there has been an update in the business

·         The test coverage depends on the number of code lines. So, if the codes lines are added or deleted, the coverage percentage will be impacted accordingly.

# Test cases with classes and controllers: Developers, in order to make coding portable, organized, readable, and reusable, often create separate classes and controllers for each function. So, even though this enhances the readability of the code, there is not much improvement in its efficiency. Portability can be achieved when the test code is in the original class and there are minimal chances of missing a test class during migration from sandbox to production.

# Agile approach: In this approach, the software application is developed in small incremental builds wherein testers work concurrently and iteratively (using test automation) to evaluate the code.

# Synchronization with current operations: One of the principal features of any distinct Salesforce functional testing is its synchronization with the current operations. So, it is important to verify the test results against reference data signifying quality.

Conclusion

Since Salesforce functionalities add value to the organization, they need to be validated against expected parameters and reference data. Thus, a proper Salesforce integration testing plan should ensure the application build simplifies, streamlines, and enhances the business systems. 

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