Is Selenium the Best Tool for Salesforce Test Automation?
Being free, open-source, and the most popular test automation tool in the world, Selenium WebDriver is the default choice for software testing. But how good is it in testing Salesforce applications? And how does it compare to other Salesforce test automation tools?
Let’s take a quick look.
Salesforce Test Automation: Tools That Can Survive Lightning
Salesforce is an ecosystem where apps evolve quickly. Perhaps this is why Salesforce enables faster iteration of business logic and a hassle-free UI development. In order to achieve this, Salesforce offers a Lightning Design System. Developers can build consistent UI that are easy to change and maintain.
While the Lightning system helps in faster UI development, it also hides element identifiers. But this creates a problem for test automation. That’s because Selenium WebDriver depends on identifying visual elements on a page.
Also, the Lightning web components use Shadow Document Object Model (Shadow DOM) for better compatibility across web browsers. It prevents components from affecting one another but also breaks traditional ways of locating elements on a page. So the beloved Selenium WebDriver, requires a lot of additional work utilities to support Shadow DOM testing.
In addition, Selenium can be faster than the browser’s ability to render. So the dynamic and complex Lightning components like modal pop-up windows may render later than Selenium’s intention to interact with it. Such situations can lead to “false positives” where Selenium falsely reports an exception in interacting with the element. Many testers end-up wasting precious time in order to investigate and fix these trivial issues, driving test automation costs through the roof.
WebdriverIO is a potential alternative to Selenium for test automation of Salesforce applications. Compared to Selenium, WebdriverIO has inbuilt capabilities for identifying Shadow DOM and offers simpler test scripting. However, the testing efforts aren’t reduced significantly—they still need to maintain: test scripts for frequent UI changes, third-party services, integrations, and updates.
Both Selenium WebDriver and WebdriverIO can “survive lightning” albeit at the sacrifice of your team’s time and energy.
CloudQA: The Selenium Cloud for Salesforce that Just Works
CloudQA simplifies test automation for Salesforce applications. Built on the open source Selenium WebDriver, CloudQA augments Selenium to handle complexities like modal window pop-ups, Shadow DOM elements, maintenance, and so on.
Any tester can use CloudQA’s advanced test recorder to generate test scripts and execute with various browsers and data parameters within minutes. If your lightning UI changes often, the Impact Analysis feature can help testers find and update test scripts that are affected by the change in UI in one go!
CloudQA also comes with out-of-the-box solutions for report generation, collaborations, popular third-party integrations, and customer onboarding and support. Schedule your demo to learn more.