Salesforce gives enterprises the ability to become more agile and customer-focused. But there is a catch! The challenge is that since most regression testing is performed manually, it can often be a major bottleneck and given the complexity of testing, testing can be overwhelming for your Salesforce DevOps team.

Given that the average cost of fixing a bug in the production process is approximately $10,000 and the post- pandemic era will likely see an explosion of low code revolution, a robust testing strategy is vital.

Traditionally, testing, although integral to successful Salesforce DevOps strategy, remains a development function and tends to be an afterthought. Thus, bugs and defects and unexpected delays remain top issues as a result of inadequate testing culture, and oftentimes negatively impacts the user experience.

As an enterprise's Salesforce ecosystem grows, so does the pace of change and updates. Thus, testing too must be fast enough to ensure accurate and faster deployments. Moreover, since the Salesforce platform enables citizen developers, admins, and developers to quickly build and release applications, infusing test automation in regression testing helps reduce testing and application development times.

As per the latest survey by Compuware, 90% of application development managers say that test automation is the single most important factor in accelerating innovation. Moreover, the 2020 State of DevOps Report, shares that the most effective change management is achieved by firms that emphasize a high degree of testing and deployment automation. The blog discusses why it is critical to have a regression test automation seamlessly integrated with Salesforce DevOps release management tools like Flosum to advance innovation and efficiency.

What is Regression Testing?

Even as declarative development or low code revolution becomes commonplace in 2021, and helps boost business agility, it also adds places an additional burden on the DevOps team to manage ongoing changes and incorporate the latest features with each new Salesforce release into the apps. This is where Regression testing delivers incredible value to an enterprise by helping boost the velocity, quality, and performance of applications to production org.

The types of tests performed during regression testing include API tests, UI Tests, automated tests, and manual tests. The most important part of regression testing isn't the volume of tests, but what is being tested. In addition to mission-critical components of an application, regression testing must include testing of new features as well as bugs that have been caught by users.

Regression testing verifies that the application which was previously developed and tested still performs the same way after it was changed or interfaced with other software. Regression testing is typically performed when there are:

• Change management/ Application lifecycle

Every salesforce org undergoes regular changes to enhance their system to leverage new features or expand usage to new teams. However, these changes still need to be tested before they are applied to the production org or before introduced to other users and teams

• Salesforce 3x release Testing

Salesforce has three releases per year, Spring, Summer, and Winter releases. Additionally, they also provide a prereview release and a sandbox review release which allows teams to find issues before they hit the production org. Thus, using the sandbox preview window allows you to get a headstart. Before release, you need to focus on regression testing before you implement any changes, and even after you have made any changes or added new features. Apart from the three above releases, Salesforce also deploys weekly patches to fix known issues. Using regression testing helps meet regulatory compliance or even to mitigate business risks over those changes

• Critical Release Updates

Salesforce continues to provide more features, functional, and non-functional through release updates. Although these critical release updates are usually planned for full release at a future date, these allow you time to check the impact on sandbox preview alone. Here again, regression testing should be a top priority.

• Releases from Salesforce AppExchange Vendors

Most enterprises use one or more apps from the Salesforce AppExchange and when these apps are updated as per the third vendor's timeline, they too require regression testing.

Why It Is Critical To Automate Regression Testing And Solve The Regression Gap?

According to MABL The State of Testing in DevOps Survey 2020, manual testing or DevOps processes by themselves don't improve the customer experience. The key to customer happiness is more test automation-at least 4-5 different types of tests - and a strong QA foundation to shape your test automation strategy.

It is very easy to get caught up in the release cycle of new functionality and overlook the business outcomes that decision-makers expect from the investment in Salesforce. Delivering user and customer disruption can have a significant impact on your business and therefore as you continue adding more and more users and new functionalities, it becomes critical to constantly test the application from both development and business value outcome. Moreover, as the application moves ahead with each release, the challenge really comes down to bridging the regression gap.

Over time there is an increasing gap between new functionality and the resources/time it takes to test them. This is termed as Regression Gap. So, can we handle this increasing gap and the need to test all existing coding configurations alongside the new developments as well as reduce the time it takes to test them? How can we close the regression gap in the high-speed release environment? Spending more time on manual testing is not the most feasible option as it is only going to compound. Neither is it feasible to add more testers since it will neither be viable nor scalable as well as being too costly. Therefore, automating existing regression testing is the best choice so that with each release cycle, you do not have to worry about dedicating resources to test the code. It is thus important to automate your regression testing as much as possible to boost DevOps efficiency help streamline it.

Benefits of Implementing Regression Test Automation in Salesforce DevOps

Regression test automation offers numerous benefits to enterprises. From cost savings to reducing test development time and test cycle time to enabling faster deployment and boosting DevOps.

• Faster Feedback and Time to Market

Test automation offers an immediate feedback loop to developers and allows instant rectification of bugs or glitches. It also makes adding quick updates or fixes to your application fast, easy, and hassle-free. Thus, ensuring higher efficiency which helps reduce the time to market.

• Improved Consistency

It infuses consistency in releases and testing strategy. Test automation ensures that every regression cycle will be consistent, robust and there will be no variation. Moreover, since a higher number of tests can be executed, it leads to higher test coverage, which translates to a higher quality of the application.

• Increases Speed and Efficiency

Manual Salesforce regression testing consumes time and often slows down the entire release cycle as well as the overall performance of the application. Test automation can be completed quickly and run repeatedly. The hassle- free fast test execution and ability to retest results in shorter SFDLC, frequent releases, quicker changes, and higher DevOps efficiency.

• Accelerated Regression

Test automation speed ups your regression cycles and saves time. Due to quick implementation, regression testing even of intricate and complex processes can be carried out repeatedly. Thus, by factoring test automation into your DevOps pipelines, you can schedule test cases overnight and save time on your releases and deployments which delivers faster results each time with lesser effort and time. Thus, not only can regression testing take a lesser amount of time, but it also results in higher quality testing and saves time due to shorter test cycle times.

• Fully Autonomous

Since test automation is fully autonomous, it eliminates the hassle of scheduling and executing them. They do not require human intervention thus you can test your app overnight and get the reports first thing in the morning. This also allows QA engineers to focus on more value-adding and critical tasks.

Develop and Optimize Strategic Testing with Flosum

Flosum was built for QA! Test automation and Flosum can help address some of the biggest challenges associated with Regression Testing. Flosum not just allows decision-makers to develop and optimize strategic testing plans, it also provides complete native version control, thus offering lot of flexibility as well as easier customization.

As the preferred choice for fast, efficient deployments, Flosum helps developers, Salesforce admins, and architects accelerate deployments, release faster, and deliver more value. With Flosum, we make deployments fast, easy, and hassle-free. Shorten your release and deployment cycle with Flosum today!