A streamlined DevOps pipeline is the best way to bring reliable and secure applications to market. This expands your value to customers either by enabling your team members to provide better service or by offering new products directly to the customers themselves.
Salesforce test automation is an essential aspect of producing these applications and updates in a timely manner.
Fast release cycles allow you to address your customers’ needs as they evolve. Every industry is seeing giant leaps in technological offerings, and you don’t want to be left behind.
There are many tools that can help your DevOps team increase their output, but how can you be sure you aren’t sacrificing quality for speed? Salesforce test automation allows you to confidently move a project toward deployment without worrying about any quality checks slipping through the cracks.
Here are 8 ways Salesforce test automation streamlines your DevOps release cycle:
1. Reduction of Redundant Work
Any time spent by your team addressing issues with existing lines of code is time they are taken away from producing new work. And it’s difficult to move projects forward when your team is distracted by reworking existing components.
Finding and rectifying errors earlier in the DevOps pipeline reduces the amount of work it might take to fix the same problem if it’s found later.
Salesforce development projects can grow quite large—perhaps thousands of lines of code go into a singular update or application. And as this repository of data grows, it becomes more difficult to sift through and correct bugs or mistakes. Ample testing finds these errors earlier, reducing the amount of redundant work so your team members can focus on moving the project forward.
2. Reliable Coding Structures
The quality of code that makes up your development projects is everything. It’s the equivalent of the bricks that build a house. Any mistakes in the way they are arranged, or any bricks that aren’t stable can result in completely compromise the structure.
Salesforce test automation verifies the quality of code commits so you don’t run into any surprises during deployment.
There are a variety of safety measures that can be put in place to ensure your code is healthy. Static code analysis automatically verifies your code as it’s written. Continuous Integration provides another level of coverage when lines of code are committed into the shared repository.
3. Less Touchpoints
Automation, in general, provides a variety of benefits to your Salesforce DevOps platform. One of the most immediately seen benefits is how it frees up your team members to address more urgent matters instead of being distracted by rote, simple tasks.
Salesforce test automation takes important but time-consuming tasks off your team members’ hands so they can address more pressing issues.
Allowing your team members to focus on moving a project forward instead of verifying what has already been done will expedite the process of reaching deployment. Streamlined operations depend on productive actions from your team, and Salesforce test automation provides the opportunity to do so.
4. Increased Testing Coverage
Manual testing of Salesforce development projects takes a lot of time. We’ve discussed how this affects surrounding processes by occupying your team members. However, these lengthy processes will affect the testing procedures themselves.
Time consuming, manual tests will lead to testing smaller sections of a project, potentially missing bugs and errors that could have been addressed.
Automation has been associated with higher team member productivity, and it’s not difficult to see why. Freeing your team members up to work on more interesting and more beneficial tasks increases overall output and increases speed to market.
5. Ability to Repeat Processes
Procedures become refined over time. This applies to how our teams can best utilize the tools available to them. Each project will help you understand how to adjust your approach and improve upon repeatable procedures.
Proper utilization of Salesforce test automation can be used on every project, providing predictable results that can be worked into your DevOps processes.
Refining your DevOps approach takes some work, but can streamline your operations once you get it dialed in. Automation is an incredible tool to help achieve this goal.
6. Address Various Aspects to Support Functionality
Salesforce DevOps projects are often multi-faceted. This means there are multiple aspects of a given update or application that will need to be addressed through the attention of your team members as well as that of your testing automation.
Salesforce test automation can be customized to address various aspects of your application to ensure functionality of all applicable updates.
Manually going through the separate parts of an update and testing each of them one by one will take a long time. And when you want to get your product in front of your customers quickly, you don’t have this time to spare. Automated testing speeds this process along by simultaneously addressing these various aspects.
7. Create Synergy with Other Automated DevOps Tools
The benefits of automation don’t end with testing. There are a series of beneficial tools that can be integrated to optimize your Salesforce DevOps pipeline. Testing automation helps ensure the project is build on sturdy ground and operates as it should. Other tools assist with backups, integration, deployment, and more.
Pairing Salesforce test automation with other types of DevOps automation will help optimize your efforts and increase ROI.
Automated backups of your Salesforce environment ensure that you are never left in the dark in the from a data loss event. Automated release management offers a series of benefits including deployment automation that reduces failures and increases release velocity.
8. Release Your Salesforce Updates Confidently
Confidence is important when it comes o releasing a new update or application. And although it might not directly assist in bringing the application to market any faster, it provides peace of mind when doing so. Knowing your application has undergone thorough and reliable testing through automation dramatically diminishes the chances of experiencing negative issues after deployment.
Being confident in your releases allows you to be assertive as you turn your attention to the next release.
Test automation for Salesforce reduces the workload on your DevOps teams and increases the quality of the eventual product. Human error is a massive factor, especially when a singular project will pass through the hands of a large team. Automated testing ensures nothing gets overlooked.