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After working in various sectors during my employment of 24 years in industry experience in Program/Project Management, Software Testing and Software Development across the projects and Marketing in Service Industry, I was introduced to Salesforce application by my friend, who had completed 5 certifications in Salesforce in a month and started his own Salesforce consulting firm.
As I started learning it, obviously there were so many questions coming to my mind related to test engineering services in Salesforce as I did hold my major experience in running test services representing MNC organizations. The biggest question was the cost control over testing services from client and business perspectives. Given Salesforce is the ocean offering multiple services and allowing the customers to customize according to their needs, of course, test automation has been the bigger challenge as the product goes over many iterations. As we all know, there will always be budget constraints on test engineering services. To add to it, the current situation like COVID-19 will squeeze the budget further. However, test automation with a scalable framework can enhance the productivity of the Software Development Life Cycle in multifold leading significant savings.
Though Selenium offers excellent codeless test automation that is more comprehensive by extending its capabilities to test web components, the cost has to be still within the budget of the client. Though framework concepts are very popular and many companies adopting the framework approach, there would be limitations that it still has a dependency on the test engineering team besides cost. This kicked off us on building a multi-layer framework with below advantages:
- It can be run by anyone regardless of the role of Business, Product, Sales, or UAT executors or zero IT knowledge with a single click.
- The executor can view results in excel.
- The new test cases can be built by anyone with a single call to our microservices built within the framework. Needs very basic knowledge leading to very minimal cost to the organization.
- Multiple regression packs can be run from a single or multiple machines and results can be easily viewed.
- User doesn’t need to install Selenium or any other test automation tool on his/her machine.
As obvious, there is only a limitation that they should have installed Java SE on their machine.
So, how did we build our framework?
Bolt Automation Framework
To make it simple, we have designed our test automation framework in 4 layers and 1 helper supporting misc. function such as Excel Data Read and Write, Calculate Time, Parse Strings etc.
How Our Framework looks
Framework Layer Description
| Sr No. | Layer Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Execution layer | Comprises of the test scripts selected for run i.e. Customizable/Configurable Regression Packs |
| 2. | Scripting layer | Comprises of the all tests in a single layer. Each script is constructed using keywords to make it simple English. i.e. Keywords Driven Testcase Construction |
| 3. | Navigation Layer | Heart of the framework comprising the micro services for Salesforce. i.e. Microservices based Architecture |
| 4. | Data Layer | Comprises of all data that needs to be used in the test scripts under different scenarios. i.e. Ability to execute Regression with multiple data sets |
| 5. | Results Storage | Stores the results of every run with data and time stamp |
How it works
Step 1 – Initialize the scripts to be run in the Initiator
Step 2 – Build the scripts using the microservices from Bolt Framework
Step 3 - Verify the Results
How does the framework look?
Summary
- Most importantly, Selenium is open-source tool which can be easily integrated with multiple services.
- Selenium testing tool is considered as one of the most popular for web applications testing.
- Because Selenium provides flexibility of implementing it in any scripting language, OS, browsers
Salesforce is incredibly powerful if it's configured properly and customized more precisely for the unique needs of your business. The bottleneck situation comes when product goes for many iterations and test cases grow significantly. There us budget & time constraints to complete all testing manually and ensure product quality. This is where our Salesforce test automation services can help. The test automation framework allows businesses to create test cases and get them executed at click of a button, removing dependency on IT teams, reducing time and ensuring qualify.