Salesforce Test Automation with Guljeet Nagpaul

Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast where we all get together to learn more about automation and software testing with your host, Joe Calantonio.

Hey, it's Joe. And welcome to another episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Today we'll be speaking with LG all about Salesforce Test Automation. Galji is accomplished leader with experience ranging from software engineer to leading platforms and marketing strategy. He also has 10 years at what was my favorite company at one time, Mercury, where he was the North American head for ALM practices and during that time ALM captured the highest market share and Mercury then was acquired by HP and he was a key leader in the growth of ALM portfolio along with I think it was Spy Dynamics and Shunra acquisitions among others. So he really knows his stuff and he really has a great background. Actually a lot of these what people claim to be newer technologies or new innovations really I think started with Mercury and it's just people now trying to catch up. Anyway, that's a topic for another day. Gal G currently works for Accel Q he thinks is the biggest breakthrough in continuous testing since the introduction of the ALM tools by Mercury. So really excited to have him on the show. He was on previously on when we used to be called Test Talks. So it's great to have him on the new branded Test Automation podcast. So you don't want to miss this episode. Check it out.

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Hey Guilji, welcome to the Guild.

Hi Joe, thanks for having me again. It's good to be here.

Great to have you back. Before we get into it guilt G is anything I missed in your bio that you want the Guild to know more about? No.

Those were some very kind words and I appreciate it. I just have always have fun in this forum which is very agnostic to kind of, you know, everything which is commercial and which is truly community oriented. So yeah, I always enjoy chatting with you.

Awesome. Same here. So I guess at a high level, before we dive in into Salesforce, there may be people that don't even know what Salesforce is. So what is Salesforce?

So you know Salesforce started out as a company which kind of almost reinvented the whole CRM space. But more than doing that, you know what Salesforce was able to really accomplish is, you know, over a decade ago, if you recall, when the SaaS based application and software as a service was just kind of taking its turns. Right. And it was being talked about as the next big thing. Actually Salesforce was the one that revolutionized this space. And before Salesforce, software as a service was one of those things which you think was going to one of those self driving cars which you think would be in future, but it actually made it happen pretty much almost in an overnight fashion. And they did it in such a robust, scalable and secured manner that even the largest of the big enterprises with the most secure data were able to trust Salesforce with their business processes, the automation around it and so on. But you know, over the period of 10 years, you know, this whole platform as a service has taken a new shape and to be honest, Salesforce has been on the forefront of it. And as we see this whole kind of world of packaged application taking its new era. Right. I believe Salesforce and we can see the writing on the wall, Salesforce is going to give it's run for the money to the Oracle saps of the world. Because the way it's changing this low code, no code packaged application space, it's the days of years of implementation and specific scripting languages to configure and even off the shelf ERP platforms and so on. It's just changing that whole game. And it's very much in aligned with this new wave of no code application platforms. That's basically in a nutshell what Salesforce is. It's so much more than kind of, you know, where it started out in the CRM space. It's now kind of all over with its recent acquisition to, you know, with Velocity being in kind of, you know, healthcare ERP space to operations, to healthcare, to financial services, clouds and what have you. So hopefully that gives you kind of an idea of the context of where Salesforce plays in these days.

Absolutely. So I know you're a vendor, a great platform for testing, so you probably speak with a lot of clients, a lot of different companies. So how common is a Salesforce application that people need to actually go and test? Yeah, like is there a big percentage like you said, is it growing now that they're, you think they're actually about to take off? So maybe this is a good time to get in to learn how to test them.

Yeah, absolutely. So you know, with Accel Q like you kind of introduced, we are a codeless automation and agile test management platform. I almost felt that I am a Salesforce employee the way I was giving you a pitch for Salesforce. But we are an automation platform, right? And Salesforce happens to be one of our strategic alignments. To be honest, our customers range from healthcare companies to financial services to insurance giants. All of these that test 200 plus different applications on Axel Q platform. So Axel Q supports from modern web applications like Salesforce of the world to the legacy mainframe, to anything in between, including the Java forms, old school EBS applications to SAP GUI and what have you. But what we are, the reason for bringing Salesforce up from an axle queue standpoint is what we see, Joe today is I don't see any customer across these industry verticals who don't have some level of Salesforce implementation. And it's growing so rapidly that it has become one of those things where you start out with a SaaS based application and you think it's a no code platform. I just need a few developers or configuration resources to learn doing configuration and I'll be good to go with the implementation. But what we see in this industry right now is that little Salesforce application that may have started out as CRM for these customers has quickly grown to actually supporting their core business processes. What I mean by that is a financial services cloud might be powering one of the biggest banks across the world, right? A healthcare cloud would be powering the Athena, the Anthem Health, the Cardinal Health of the world. And same with insurance, same with kind of other verticals including service cloud, sales cloud, marketing cloud. So bottom line is their user base and their implementations within the company has grown so rapidly that customers are scrambling to now implement more automation across the SDLC of the Salesforce implementations. And as you apply automation, obviously as you know, test automation is the critical part to achieve kind of that release velocity, right? And Salesforce specifically, similar to SAP if you recall, has always been nasty in terms of automation, right? SAP automation used to be, if you remember, kind of its space and it still is. But I mean SAP is kind of struggling with this SAP GUI and so all of the likes of that, right? So Salesforce similarly gets pretty tricky in terms of doing automation and if you think about it, kind of reinventing the wheel in terms of writing code for a no code platform just doesn't add up, right? So that's kind of where Accel Q steps in pretty seamlessly. Because of our kind of, you know, AI driven no code automation approach and especially having strategic alignment with Salesforce, we've been able to kind of help a lot of customers out so that's kind of the context of where Salesforce and test automation starts playing in.

Great. So I want to dive into that a little bit. But first, if folks are listening, they may think, what's the big deal? How different is it automating a Salesforce application compared to, say, testing a typical standard browser application?

Totally. So let's get into a little bit of that technical detail. Right. So Salesforce, you know, like with a lot of packaged applications, Joe, as you can imagine, these no code or low code application platforms that needs to be configured in terms of business rules, needs to be configured in terms of business processes, the customizations of the workflow rules, the customizations of customer specific kind of forms, and so on, that configuration requires the underlying technology stack of the application to be pretty dynamic. Right. So right off the bat, the way these applications, and especially Salesforce under the hood is developed is it has to be extremely dynamic. What that means is every business rule, every field, every form, everything that you see on the screen is pretty much dynamic. And it's driven through a configuration resource as opposed to a traditional way of developing web applications. Right off the bat, that means everything on the page becomes extremely dynamic. And then Salesforce takes it to the next level in terms of using iframes. Just when we all thought iframes was no longer the. Was a thing of kind of past. Still very much there in fact. Dynamics, CRM, Pegas of the world, all these packaged applications kind of use iframes to a large extent. Right. And Salesforce goes one step beyond because of the configurable nature and the lightning web components which are kind of its flagship things which have made them so successful. They use nested iframes that are dynamic in nature. Right. And then on top of it, they use shadow doms. Right. So when you combine iframes with nested iframes with dynamic objects on it, and you put shadow DOM elements on it, it makes it very nasty for kind of the Selenium and the xpath of the world to basically do automation on the overhead. And the brittleness of that automation is just way too high to be able to cope up with really getting any ROI out of that automation. So that's kind of one of the specific things. And then other than that, you know, it's a cloud based application, so you need a more modern approach to automated as opposed a code based application that sits behind in your own data centers, right?

Absolutely. So with it being cloud based, what kind of modern challenges you think it has then? Does it update software on you behind the scenes and all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh, we're on a new version and this doesn't work anymore.

Totally. So it's gone are the days of doing data migrations and doing a big bang upgrade after two years when you're forced to doing it. Those were the days of the older packaged applications, Salesforce kind of modern applications. And it's not just Salesforce for Axel Q we see the same thing, you know, something similar to Microsoft's Dynamics CRM or even Pegas of the world, right. So you know, for us it's, it's kind of similar alignment. Given Axle Q is kind of organically built on cloud. We align with these kind of pretty seamlessly because that's kind of how we've evolved ourselves. Right. Axel Q was organically built on cloud and that's pretty much why Forrester put us on leader quadrant. We are actually one of the first companies, Joe, which entered the quadrant as a leader. So think about it for a second. This space has 40 plus tools in the market and never it has happened in the history of any research, including idc, Forrester and Gartner, where a company has entered straight into the leader quadrant. So we pretty much bypassed the complete contender challenger and all that. Right. And there is a reason and that's kind of what these guys also call out that because of our cloud alignment, right. So things like for instance Salesforce and Dynamic CRM, their release pattern is spring, summer and winter. They do three releases. Whether you like it or not. You get a preview a month in advance. As, as a customer, you got to do what you got to do in that three week window, actually not even a month and then you're upgraded. So you really have to figure out everything. And if you don't have a reliable robust automation test suite, then you're pretty much on your own. And the use of these applications has expanded to the core business models of these companies. It is ultra critical to be able to validate within that short period before the release comes. When I say strategic alignment, it's pretty deep rooted. For instance, with Accel Q, we are working with their engineering team, we are an ISV partner, access to their releases much sooner in advance. So if there is alignment that needs to be done in terms of product, we can do that. Right. For Dynamic CRM, Salesforce of the world, right. As well as their own engineering team has started using Accel Q because they saw how seamlessly it works. So that's kind of how deep rooted our partnership With Salesforce Works, there are.

Some people that are like, oh, we only use open source technology, but could you just explain a little bit about Accel Queue? Does it use Selenium behind the scenes? And I think it's critical that when people work with vendors is like you said, you have strategic alignment with these companies, that you have expertise that could help shunning the learning cycle for a team that may have to test these type of applications. Basically, I guess you have built in best practices, built in modules that they can automatically use while having to think about common functionality that they may need to test. Am I understanding it correctly?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, built in functionality, built in modules. You know, Salesforce Lightning components are pretty complex, right? So their dropdown would not be like an HTML5 dropdown, to give a specific example. Their dropdown would be a combination of a regular dropdown to a dynamic search to one of those Google autocomplete kind of things where you start typing in a lot of complete. It's a complex component. Similarly, their web tables is no longer those old school just DDTR based HTML web tables. They are pretty dynamics with sorting, searching, deleting rows. It's a dynamic component. That's what makes Salesforce so lucrative to its customers because it has these components which make your implementation of the same application almost ten times faster. Right. And the way Axel Q deals with this is it has pre created libraries aligned with their release changes. And if you recall, you know, and if folks have seen a bit of Axel Q, that whole universe model based approach, we've partnered with Salesforce to actually pre create these universes for various clouds like financial services, cloud, community cloud service cloud, sales cloud, right. So the customers kind of get this pre built ready to go universe which is actually in alliance with Salesforce. So at the object level as well as at a business process level, it kind of makes it a lot more streamlined to get to that go to market to your regression suite. And to your point, we do recognize the sentiment of today's world in terms of being, you know, using that open source technology and we are pretty modern from that standpoint. You know, not being cognizant of the fact that we are not vendor locking our customers and our users because you know, let's be honest, you know, the reason in the last six to eight years we've seen so much adoption in Selenium and open source of the world is because customers and end users need that power and flexibility. The technology stack is changing every day. Today it's lightning web confidence, tomorrow it could be something else. It's angular three, it's angular five, what have you. There could be a European niche high charts company that only does charting. So there is no way any vendor, even as modern as ours, can catch up to the changing technology landscape. So we've created an open source based community forum where our customers, our end users, are constantly able to extend the platform. So as long as you know Java, you can extend the technology stack. If you're testing, let's suppose Headless in Axl Queue Enterprise Service Bus with, you know, with IBM MQ and your company adopts RabbitMQ, you can extend the framework without being dependent on Axel Q, or without worrying about the fact that, hey, this vendor now has logged me in and is gonna milk me for more license money if I change my technology stack, which was the old school mentality. So we've kind of aligned ourselves with open source so that it's the community which is helping us expand, rather than only Axel Q trying to kind of control that technology landscape.

Nice. Now, on a previous episode, I have a security podcast and a performance podcast. Now, I spoke to an SAP expert and they said a lot of people aren't aware that SAP has an API that they can use to create more reliable tests rather than having to go through the ui. Does Salesforce have something similar or do you see, I'm just curious to know, how does API test fit in maybe into this Salesforce, since it sounds like a very complicated application to actually automate through the ui, they do.

So typically when we do regression, we see regression suites. And the way Axel Q also works is Salesforce also has something called EPICS Classes. I don't know if that name rings a bell, but it's pretty heavily used in its own Salesforce implementation. Because as with SAP, Salesforce, all these ERP kind of packaged applications, their ecosystem is pretty complex within an organization, right? They hardly work standalone, so even within their own implementation they have to integrate. And these same APIs are extended to actually do some level of kind of testing and validation. So we very often see a regression suite which kind of goes across UI API databases. And actually that's another thing why Axel Q was selected by Salesforce's Technology Innovation board, right? Because of its handling of UI to API, to database, to a file, to an email, pretty much without writing a single line of code. Right? And that really resonated kind of with Salesforce's own cloud based, no code kind of application implementation approach.

So when someone uses a tool, say like Excel Queue for Salesforce, do you have like a roadmap to walk them through how to test it, or is it just like here's some modules and just go at it?

Yeah, absolutely. So we start with a universe, right? Customers can kind of start out with a universe based on what kind of implementation they have with Salesforce, whether it's service, sales, financial, all these different clouds have pre created universes. And those universes, like I said, is not just set of objects, which used to be the old school accelerator. It's actually set of recommended business processes so that the customers can get to their first version of regression suite, at least to get them started pretty quickly, and then they can scale up their automation from there. Because the biggest challenge initially is, all right, what do I really make contenders for my first level of regression suite? What can I rely on for release? To release as that baseline regression suite with that tests kind of all my core business processes. Right. So that's kind of what we help out with the universe is to start a customer out.

Great. Now, because this is a cloud based application, are there any extra type of testing? We focus mainly on functional testing. Do you help with anything like security testing or performance testing? Are there any common things testers need to be aware about with security and performance when they're dealing with a Salesforce application?

So with Salesforce, you know, they've become pretty formalized in terms of sharing performance and security details and they have every compliance under the sun you can think of. Right. From SOC compliances to Phi Data compliances to what have you. So typically we see customers being pretty secured in terms of not being needing to reinvent the wheel. But then Salesforce does offer special sandboxes if a customer who has some high level of Phi data compliance that for instance, need to run a pen pen test on it. Right. So Salesforce does offer certain unique kind of aspects to actually spinning up sandboxes pretty much on the fly. So their level of automation in spinning environments is to a level where the whole workflow is completely automated. And that's what Axl Queue has also achieved in terms of being able to spin a sandbox and help customers as they're going through some massive upgrades even within axle queue and so on. Right. So we see it every now and then from an axle queue standpoint. It is in our roadmap for later this year to actually add security testing for both APIs and then performance for APIs and then performance for UI would come later in 2021. Right. But yeah, maybe a topic for one of your security podcasts.

Absolutely. Remind me about that. So also, Guilji, I know you have modules. I know a lot of times people struggle with test data. Do you have anything built in that when you use these modules, it knows, hey, this is a financial application. Here's some common data you can use to, to populate your application with these common fields.

Sure. So synthetic data generation has always kind of been a tricky topic. I don't think anyone has cracked it to that extent yet. But Accel Q does have a pretty unique capability of actually hosting data models as well as hosting kind of, you know, the typical list of values, you know, for instance, for wherever the list of values are selected, maybe a dropdown or what have you. Right. And interestingly, there is also an.

From an Accel Queue standpoint, which actually runs through the various combinations of data across all these data driven parameters. In your test case to mathematically suggest the number of permutation combinations you should test a particular workflow or a test script with to really achieve the maximum coverage with minimum number of permutation combinations. So, you know, accelq has approached it with a little bit more mathematical standpoint as opposed to, you know, kind of shot in the dark, which is typically how AS data works today. Right. So it actually uses a flavor of pairwise algorithm. So that's kind of where a little bit of kind of those AI based algorithms kicks in. Right. Where it actually goes through all the data models associated with the data driven parameters and then comes up with touching each node at least once. So you're not over testing and you're not under testing and then comes back and suggests, here are the permutation combinations of data. We wish to get to synthetic data generation outside of this, but that's kind of where we've started out that it gives you a mathematical permutation and lets you generate those test cases automatically. And then in our roadmap we want to get to synthetic data generation for those permutations. Also, synthetic data is always a tricky topic because customers really a lot of times want to test it with some real data also. So it's something which we are also trying to figure out.

Okay, Guilji, before we go, is there one piece of actionable advice you can give to someone to help them with their Salesforce automation testing efforts? And what's the best way to find contact you or learn more about Excel Queue?

Sure. You know, one single piece I would say is as you invest your effort in evaluating various options for Salesforce, just keep in mind that, you know, doing that first script is not you know the answer to automating Salesforce. Think of it from a standpoint of how you can scale up that automation and how your current Salesforce configuration team can become part of not just doing their manual testing, but also becoming part of doing, you know, automation testing without having to kind of, you know, write a lot of programming and code around doing that automation. Right. And look for an option, you know, on their App Exchange. Their App Exchange is the single source of truth in terms of what Salesforce themselves recommend. Right? So that's the right place to look at. And yeah, I think you can easily find Axel Q and what capability it has related to Salesforce Test Automation. Just go on Axel Q.com and sign up for a free trial. Experience it for yourself.

Thank you Guilji for your automation awesomeness. The links to everything of value we covered in this episode. Head on over to testguild.com a 3:15 and while you're there, make sure to click on the Try it for Free Today link under the Exclusive Sponsor section to learn all about Sauce Labs awesome products and services. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed with creating Full Stack Automation Awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

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