Automate Salesforce API Testing: Step by Step Process

Salesforce APIs play a crucial role in integrating and extending the capabilities of the Salesforce platform. As organizations rely heavily on these APIs to exchange data and interact with Salesforce, ensuring their functionality, performance, and security becomes essential. That’s where Salesforce API testing comes into play.

In this blog post, we’ll explore various aspects of Salesforce API testing and how to harness the power of automation to make your API testing efforts more efficient and effective. Let’s get started.

What is Salesforce API Testing?

Salesforce API testing is the process of validating the functionality, reliability, and security of Salesforce APIs by sending requests directly to API endpoints and analyzing the responses. Instead of interacting with the user interface, testers focus on the underlying business logic, data handling, and system integrations that power the Salesforce ecosystem.

This testing ensures that data flows correctly between Salesforce and connected applications while maintaining performance and compliance standards. Salesforce supports multiple APIs such as REST, SOAP, Bulk, and Metadata, each serving different integration and data management needs.

The key types of testing performed on Salesforce APIs include:

• Functional Testing: Validates that API operations perform as expected and return accurate results.
• Integration Testing: Ensures smooth communication and data exchange between Salesforce and external systems.
• Security Testing: Confirms that sensitive information is protected through proper authentication, authorization, and encryption.
• Performance Testing: Evaluates response times, throughput, and stability under varying loads to ensure scalability.

In essence, Salesforce API testing focuses on ensuring the core functionality and integrity of Salesforce integrations, forming the foundation for reliable automation and seamless business workflows.

Check here detailed guide on – Salesforce Testing

Why Use Salesforce API Testing?

Shifting-Left

In DevOps, it is vital to “shift left,” which means you must test your application as early as possible to improve the product release product quality. API testing allows QA to access your application without a UI. This enables testers to identify issues even before the UI is created.

Increasing Test Speed

API tests are usually faster than UI tests, allowing more tests to be completed in less time. It helps improve your testing coverage, catching more defects before they go unnoticed. Also, it helps prevent bottlenecks in the software development process.

Easy Test Maintenance

The user interface of an application may vary slightly depending on the browser, platform, device, or screen orientation. Besides, the UI is often updated based on user feedback and behavior.

So, the QA must create and manage various UI test cases to cover these scenarios and changes. In contrast, Salesforce APIs are more stable, and any modifications are updated in detailed documentation, making it simpler for QA testers to maintain their test cases.

Why Should Salesforce API Testing Be Automated?

It is recommended to be automated for several compelling reasons, including:

Improved Accuracy

Manual testing can be very time-consuming and easily prone to mistakes, increasing the risk of defects going unnoticed till production. In contrast, automated Salesforce API testing is highly accurate and fast.

Also, it helps minimize the chances of defects slipping through and reaching production environments.

Time and Cost Savings

API testing is usually faster than UI testing, and automation can make the testing process even faster. It helps reduces the time needed to test new features, enabling quick software releases and cost savings in development.

Faster Feedback

Automated testing provides quick feedback to developers, helping them identify issues early. It reduces the time spent on debugging and enhances the overall product quality.

Increased Test Coverage

Manual testing may not cover all the possible test scenarios. In contrast, automated testing provides broader test coverage. It helps identify edge cases, uncover hidden bugs, and ensure higher quality assurance.

 how to Perform Salesforce API Testing

Salesforce API testing verifies whether Salesforce communicates correctly with other systems and applications through its APIs. The goal is to ensure that data is transferred, processed, and stored accurately while maintaining performance and security standards.

Unlike UI testing, API testing focuses on how Salesforce functions behind the scenes — validating endpoints, data models, and integration workflows. This approach helps QA teams identify issues early in the development cycle and build confidence in the system’s reliability.

Salesforce provides multiple APIs, including:

• REST API: Lightweight, easy to use for web and mobile integrations.
• SOAP API: More structured and ideal for enterprise-grade integrations.
• Bulk API: Used for handling large data volumes efficiently.
• Metadata API: Helps manage configuration and customization data.

These APIs allow developers and testers to interact directly with Salesforce data and features, making API testing essential for ensuring smooth integrations and system scalability.

Step-by-step Guide on Performing Salesforce API Testing 

Follow this structured process to test Salesforce APIs efficiently and ensure flawless data exchange across your connected ecosystem.

Step 1: Set up API Access

Start by enabling API access in your Salesforce org (Developer, Enterprise, or Unlimited Editions include this by default). Create a Connected App in Salesforce to generate the necessary OAuth credentials like Client ID, Client Secret, Username, Password, and Security Token.

Step 2: Authenticate with Salesforce

Authenticate via OAuth 2.0 to generate an access token, which is required for all subsequent API calls. Tools like Postman can help, but with Testsigma, authentication can be fully automated, eliminating manual token handling or session expiry issues.

Step 3: Execute API Requests

Use the Salesforce REST API to perform actions like querying records, updating objects, or validating triggers. For example:

Ensure that your queries return the expected data and structure, confirming that endpoints behave as designed.

Step 4: Validate API Responses

Inspect the response for:

• Status codes (200 OK, 400 Bad Request, etc.)
• Response time and performance
• Data accuracy (record fields match expected values)
• Error messages for invalid or missing parameters

Testsigma simplifies this step by letting you define validation rules in plain English and automatically check for correct data, status codes, and schema integrity.

Step 5: Test Error Scenarios and Rate Limits

Simulate invalid tokens, expired sessions, or exceeded API calls to verify system stability. Salesforce enforces strict limits, and robust testing ensures your integrations degrade gracefully instead of failing unexpectedly.

Step 6: Automate Continuous API Testing

Manual testing validates functionality once, automation guarantees ongoing reliability. With Testsigma, teams can:

• Automate Salesforce API tests using simple English commands (no scripting).
• Reuse test data and parameters across multiple orgs or sandboxes.
• Run parallel tests across environments for faster feedback.
• Auto-heal broken tests when Salesforce updates its APIs or metadata.

By integrating Testsigma into your CI/CD pipelines, you can continuously validate Salesforce APIs alongside UI and regression tests, achieving a truly end-to-end testing strategy.

Automating API Testing for Salesforce with Testsigma

Automate your end-to-end Salesforce API tests using a powerful AI-driven low-code test automation platform like TestSigma. No hassle of coding test scripts or downloading multiple tools and libraries to automate tests, this robust platform allows testers to create reliable and stable Salesforce API tests using its intuitive visual interface.

Key Highlights

• Zero learning curve. Automate tests using plain English commands that are similar to Natural Language.
• 10x faster test automation, which leads to faster release cycles
• No maintenance overhead, as AI-driven auto-healing helps prevent test failures.
• It supports various native integrations for seamless and continuous testing.
• Run your tests in parallel to accelerate the entire test automation platform.
• A unified platform, where you can test various web, mobile, desktop, SAP, and API applications, apart from Salesforce.

Benefits of Automating Salesforce API Testing with Testsigma

Automating your Salesforce API tests with Testsigma offers a ton of benefits, including,

• You can write tests in minutes without writing any line of code.
• Simply execute your tests on the cloud without the need to install any extra tools or frameworks.
• Run parameterized REST API tests.
• Validate API methods against different comparison modes
• Store and reuse API responses automatically
• Makes testing 10x faster
• Test all API methods like GET, POST, DELETE, PUT, and HEAD for continuous validation.

• It supports 3000+ real devices and tablets and 1000+ browser/OS combos for cross-browser compatibility testing.
• Makes testing easy by providing a simple and easy-to-use interface.

Sample API Test Cases

Some sample Salesforce API test cases that validate the functionality and integration of Salesforce APIs:

• Verify that the API endpoint requires valid authentication credentials (For example, OAuth token, API key).
• Validate that the API rejects requests with invalid or expired authentication tokens.
• Test different user roles and permissions to ensure proper access control.
• Verify that the API endpoint returns the expected data when querying Salesforce objects (For example, accounts, contacts, and opportunities).
• Verify that the API returns appropriate error responses (with proper HTTP status codes and error messages) when encountering invalid requests or server-side errors.
• Test scenarios where required parameters are missing or have invalid values to ensure appropriate error handling.
• Test API interactions with related objects and their dependencies to ensure data integrity and proper handling of relationships.
• Verify that triggers, workflows, or other automation processes are correctly triggered when using the API.
• Conduct load testing to evaluate the API’s performance under heavy concurrent usage.
• Validate that sensitive data is properly encrypted and protected during transmission.
• Test for potential security vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS), and verify that the API is protected against such attacks.
• Verify that changes in API versions do not break existing integrations.

Salesforce API Testing Template

To get started, take a look at this free-to-use Salesforce API testing test case template sheet. You can use this template as a resource to start with this testing.

Automate All Your Salesforce API Testing Tasks in One Place

With Testsigma, you can automate all your testing, like Salesforce regression testing, UI testing, API testing, integration testing, cross-browser testing, and more, in one place. You don’t have to use different tools to run different tests. Execute all your testing tasks using Testsigma and achieve greater ROI and product quality.

Summary

Automating Salesforce API testing can be a game-changer for businesses looking to streamline their testing processes and ensure the APIs are working correctly. Businesses can validate the functionality, performance, and security of APIs by leveraging the right automation tools and test practices.

In this blog, we reviewed the importance of Salesforce API testing and automating it. We also threw some light on how to proceed with automating it. Testsigma is one tool that we recommend for automating your Salesforce API tests.

Frequently Asked Questions