Salesforce Releases: All You Need To Know

Over the years, Salesforce has evolved from an online contact management system to a massive application development platform. Built on the principle of continuous innovation, Salesforce touches every corner of your enterprise, including marketing, Sales, CPQ, fulfillment, billing, and more. Furthermore, it also integrates seamlessly with accounting, ERP, eCommerce, and beyond. One of the biggest advantages it offers to its customers is “continuous innovation” that comes in the form of Salesforce releases. In this blog, we’ll discuss these releases and automation testing can help you adopt new features without breaking anything.

What are Salesforce releases?

Salesforce proudly rolls out three releases a year. Also known as seasonal releases, these releases are rolled out in Spring, Summer, and Winter. Since Salesforce is a multi-tenant platform, these releases are available for every customer automatically. It means that all customers will operate the same version of Salesforce with all the latest features.

If we talk about Salesforce’s latest releases, the Spring ’23 release dates are given below:

• January 13, 2023
• February 3, 2023
• February 10, 2023

Undoubtedly, innovation thrice a year is a great thing. However, customers often ponder how they possibly keep up with that. The answer to this question is Salesforce automated testing.

Automation testing Salesforce means you can eliminate repetitive, error-prone manual testing activities that consume too much time and resources with an automated testing framework that automates those repetitive but necessary tasks.

However, the challenges with Salesforce tests are difficult to automate. Some of the reasons why Salesforce is difficult to automate are given below.

• Salesforce is a metadata-driven, highly dynamic platform. It means that even a small change in the UI can make test automation scripts flaky or brittle. It undermines the whole purpose of test automation in which test scripts can be used again and again.
• Salesforce has exposed its APIs for custom development. It means that developers can leverage Salesforce’s SOAP and REST web services to create custom apps. To test those apps, you need to write test cases and create their automation script. However, if we use a code-based test automation framework, business users will not be able to participate in testing. This will impact risk coverage.
• Salesforce can be integrated seamlessly with third-party productivity apps. End-to-end coverage for those integration points is a challenging task.

To address these challenges, you need to consider the following points while selecting the test automation framework for Salesforce.

• Since Salesforce releases are tested by admins along with business users, always opt for a no-code test automation platform that requires no coding knowledge to operate.
• Salesforce is a highly dynamic application. Even a small change in UI can break test scripts. Always opt for a test automation platform that comes with self-healing capabilities. This minimizes the test script maintenance burden.
• As Salesforce can be integrated with different third-party apps, always opt for a test automation platform that offers end-to-end coverage.
• Opt for an AI-powered automation tool that provides you with risk-based test automation coverage.

Considering the above-mentioned points will help you find the right Salesforce test automation platform.

Functional users have difficulties during Salesforce release testing

Test case creation: Since business users are the ones who are most familiar with their daily business operations, they must be included in the functional validation process. Business users and functional consultants must develop test cases based on actual scenarios in order to confirm that the Salesforce apps are, in fact, providing users with the requested information without problem or delay. Operating a script-based automation platform will be difficult for them because they aren’t programmers.

Updating test scripts: The majority of test automation platforms develop automation using object recognition methods. However, Salesforce is unable to use this object recognition: Because Salesforce uses dynamic elements, automated scripts are unstable and prone to errors because there are no fixed ID, Name, XPath, or CSS values. For functional users, the three Salesforce releases per year constitute a significant burden because fixing problematic scripts after each release takes a lot of work.

Managing test scripts: A thorough test suite has hundreds or even thousands of different test cases that need to be executed at various times. These include name a few, sanity checks, smoke tests, regression checks, and sprint closures. The number of releases each year increases the size of the test suites, making manual management more challenging.

Calculating the size of the regression suite: Regression testing is essential for Salesforce releases. It’s not always viable to execute a whole regression suite of test cases in a hectic development environment. It is challenging to determine the bare minimum of test cases required to guarantee a reliable seasonal release. As a result, the majority of organizations either do too many tests, squandering time and resources or conduct too few tests, putting their business processes at risk.