Salesforce Regression Testing: Benefits and Best Practices

As businesses continue to rely on Salesforce to manage their day-to-day operations, it’s more important than ever to have a solid regression testing strategy in place. By performing regular Salesforce regression testing, you can ensure that your Salesforce applications continue to work as intended, even after a code change.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the challenges of Salesforce regression testing, best practices, and tools you need to know to get started. So, let’s dive right in.

What is Salesforce Regression Testing?

Salesforce regression testing aims to verify that existing functionalities have not been broken due to any updates or code changes. It involves testing the entire system or high-risk areas to ensure that critical features and processes continue to work as expected.

Why Regression Test Your Salesforce Application?

You might be aware of the fact that Salesforce releases frequent updates and new features to its product. Reportedly, they have three seasonal releases yearly – Spring, Summer, and Winter. During every release or update, you must ensure your salesforce implementation is stable and working as expected. Salesforce Regression testing helps to identify bugs that may have been introduced due to code changes or updates and also ensures that it does not impact the existing functionalities. It helps maintain the overall quality and reliability and guarantees that your Salesforce application is stable, efficient, and works as expected.

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Benefits of Implementing Regression Test Automation in Salesforce DevOps

Salesforce automated regression testing offers multiple benefits to businesses, from cost savings to reducing testing time, thus boosting DevOps and faster deployment.

1. Faster Feedback Cycles

Automated testing provides rapid feedback to the developers. It allows them to fix bugs or glitches in the application quickly. Thus, it helps ship products faster.

2. Accelerated Regression Tests

By incorporating test automation into your DevOps pipelines, you can schedule test cases anytime, anywhere, leading to faster results with less effort and time spent on releases and deployments.

3. Fully Autonomous

The autonomous nature of test automation allows users to schedule and execute tests overnight. It avoids the need for human intervention, thus allowing you to test your product overnight and get the test reports by morning. This enables the QA team to focus more on critical tasks.

4. Cost-effective

Automation reduces the time and effort required for testing, leading to cost savings in the long run. Additionally, automation reduces the likelihood of defects making it into production, which can result in fewer costs to fix.

5. Improved Accuracy

Automated Salesforce regression testing ensures that the test cases are executed accurately and consistently, leading to high-quality software. Also, they can test a large number of scenarios, thereby leading to broader test coverage in a shorter time. This means that you can identify bugs earlier in the development cycle, leading to improved overall quality.

Best Practices for Regression Testing Salesforce

The following are some of the best practices of salesforce regression testing that you can follow to ensure that your testing is fast, secure, and cost-efficient.

1. Define your approach to Salesforce regression testing

You must create a clear testing strategy for your Salesforce regression testing. Before your testing, decide on certain factors, such as,

• What test cases to automate and what test cases to perform manually?
• How much test coverage are you planning for?
• What test environments are required for regression tests?
• How will you report the performance of the regression tests?

Also, the testing approach may differ based on the Salesforce interface you’re working with – Lightning or Classic.

Salesforce Lightning is the latest version that is easy to use and fast. Yet, most businesses still use the Classic version. However, Salesforce plans to move all its customers to its new version in the coming years.

Salesforce testing in Lightning and Classic differ in difficulty. For instance, creating a test script on the classic version is more straightforward since the elements are more easily defined. Conversely, scripting on lightning is more challenging due to the dynamic paths of CSS and XPATHS.

2. Select test cases

You must select the specific test cases to be executed during the testing process. It includes identifying the critical functionalities that need to be tested to ensure they are not affected by any new changes. Always test the core functionalities and the new feature updates.

3. Frequently update your regression suite

As the code changes, the test cases will change too. Keeping your regression tests up to date is part of the process.

When new functionalities are added to your Salesforce application, you need to add them to your regression suite as well. It will help to ensure that all functionalities are tested thoroughly during the testing process.

Since testers will have to edit the test cases frequently, it is best to choose an automation test tool that lets you edit or update tests easily.

4. Define testing frequency

You need to decide how often you will run regression tests. It depends on the frequency of changes to your Salesforce application. Typically, QAs perform testing whenever new functionality, feature, or element is added to the system.

Since testers have to perform this testing frequently, manual salesforce regression testing could be challenging and time-consuming. That is why automation is a perfect choice. Also, automated regression tests save time and effort. Testers can easily identify bugs in the system, and developers can quickly work on fixing them.

What to Look For in a Salesforce Regression Testing Tool?

Although the requirements of each organization may vary, there are certain factors that are essential to consider when selecting a testing tool in order to optimize the effectiveness of your testing approach, such as,

• Full cross-technology support
• Easy to use
• Highly scalable
• Third-party integration
• Supports different types of testing

Let’s discuss this in detail below and the ideal tool for Salesforce testing that best fits your organization.

Full cross-technology support

Does the tool provide comprehensive support for the technologies the Salesforce application interacts with? The automation tool should work seamlessly across all operating systems and platforms that are needed for Salesforce to work.

Easy to use

Easy-to-use, simple, easy-to-learn, and low maintenance are the capabilities you should look for before investing in an automation testing tool. Also, using low-code automation tools makes automation easy and accessible for a large group of people because it requires low to no coding skills.

Highly scalable

As the regression test suite keeps growing, it is best advised to use a tool that can automate all such tests, providing more ROI. This way, you will not have to invest in multiple automation tools to manage your regression suite.

Third-party integration

A tool that integrates easily with your existing tools and supports third-party integrations is preferred.

Supports different types of testing

What if you can perform all your Salesforce testing in one place? Pick a tool that supports various types of testing, such as end-to-end testing, regression testing, visual testing, and API testing, in the same place.

Check here – Salesforce Automation Testing Tools

Testsigma for Automating Salesforce Regression Testing

Testsigma is a cloud-based low-code GenAI-powered test automation platform that allows you to automate Salesforce testing without requiring coding expertise. You can perform Salesforce regression testing across multiple environments – Salesforce Developer Sandbox – Developer Pro, Partial Copy, and Full sandbox. 

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Key reasons why Testsigma can be a perfect testing platform to automate Salesforce regression testing,

10x Faster test creation: Create Salesforce tests in plain English without writing code scripts.

Zero setup: Create, execute, and maintain automated Salesforce tests on the cloud infrastructure.

Simple interface: Provides a simple and user-friendly interface, making the platform easy to use for everyone.

GenAI-powered testing: Get automated test case and test scenario suggestions within seconds by interacting with Copilot using prompts, a GenAI test assistant for QA teams.

Faster regression testing: Edit your test cases whenever a code changes and quickly rerun them to check if the code is intact and doesn’t affect existing functionality.

Parallel testing: Run multiple SFDC tests across different environments simultaneously to reduce execution time.

AI-powered auto-healing: Reduce test maintenance with auto-healing test cases that prevent false test failures by remapping elements whenever a change occurs.

Faster release cycles: You can integrate automated Salesforce tests with your existing CI/CD and DevOps pipeline and test continuously. This speeds up feedback on code and release cycles, thereby reducing time-to-market.AI-powered debugger: Get real-time and actionable test insights after every test run to identify bugs.

Summary

Salesforce regression testing is an essential part of ensuring the quality and reliability of your Salesforce application. By automating the testing process, you can save time and effort while also improving the accuracy and coverage of your tests.

Also, by identifying and fixing issues early on, you can prevent bug-fixing costs and keep your business running smoothly. Automating your Salesforce regression testing process with Testsigma will help reduce the risk of bugs and ensure that your applications meet your business requirements.