The need for end-to-end enterprise Salesforce test automation
Overview
Salesforce is a central part of Varian Medical System’s mission to forge a new, more unified, and smarter standard of oncology. Their goal is to connect us all through more intelligent data, insights, and solutions to realize a world without fear of cancer.
This connectivity includes enterprise applications. Like all large enterprises,Varian’s Salesforce applications are not only highly customized, but also highly connected. Many applications are involved in the end-to-end lifecycle of service, sales, customer support and customer education. Even a simple sales order travels a complex path across multiple systems from Salesforce to SAP, triggering customer apps along the way through Dell Boomi integration technology.
Working in a highly-regulated industry, Varian has a longstanding commitment to providing exceptional quality. This commitment to quality extends to Salesforce and the rest of its enterprise applications.The challenge facing Varian was how to manage quality in an IT environment with continuous upgrades, patches, customizations and data refreshes across multiple applications. Rigorous manual testing is extremely resource-intensive for systems of Varian’s complexity. They need to quickly and effectively test all 3 annual standard Salesforce updates, ongoing changes to the applications Salesforce touches (all on independent release cycles), and any changes to the integrations. On top of all that complexity are the customizations that any enterprise instance of Salesforce requires.
So when Varian implemented a sales and service management solution that connected Salesforce, ServiceMax, and SAP, they knew they needed a testing upgrade. With updates being deployed to production every 2 weeks,their traditional manual testing and legacy tools simply could not provide the speed and scalability requiredto meet their agile ambitions.
Tricentis helps Varian Medical System run tests in multiple environments, which has reduced the length of their test cycles and significantly reduced their costs.
Challenges
- Testingthe impact of Salesforce updateson connected applications and customizations
- Testing the impact ofconnected application and customizationsupdateson Salesforce
- Regression testingwas extremely cumbersome and resource-intensive
- Updates deployed to productionevery 2 weeks
- Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceMax all havedifferent release cyclesand cannot be tested in isolation.
- Highly-regulatedenvironments demanded strict approvals and tracking
- 複雜的測試噠tawas being extracted from production, prepared for testing, and refreshed to handle consumption and expiration
- Testing had tointegrate with Jira requirementsmanagement
- Legacy Salesforce toolcreated conflicts with simultaneous code changes and didn’t maintain version control
Solution
To find a modern testing solution that could handle enterprise challenges such as theirs,Varian turned toInfostretch. Infostretch kickstarted Varian’s continuous testing efforts using the Tricentis continuous testing platform, leveraging Tricentis’ comprehensiveSalesforce testingcapabilities and its flexibility in testing across other enterprise applications and environments.
With the Tricentis continuous testing platform, Varian established an automated end-to-end testing process that crosses Salesforce, SAP, and other connected applications. To ensure the traceability critical for their industry, they use Tricentis qTest to plan tests and link to them to user stories created in Jira. Thesetests are then automated at the unit, API and GUI layers using Tricentis Tosca.
Tosca’s test data management, service virtualization, and risk-based testing capabilities help Varian solve other speed and scalability issues that can throttle testing. Two of the biggest testing bottlenecks are access to test data and access to test systems. Varian creates and manage test data within Tosca to ensure the right test data is always available to automated tests. Service virtualization meansautomated testing can occur even when dependent systems are unavailableor not yet created. And Tosca’s risk-based test coverage ensures Varian’s business-critical functions are always tested, enabling the company to move fast with confidence.
To streamline quality even further into Varian’s development and deployment processes, the entire continuous testing processintegrates into their CI/CD pipelineand automates the process of code promotion from one environment to the next with version control.
“現在,當代碼檢查,成礦d verification and smoke tests are run automatically to create a quality gate,” notes Infostretch. “The application can be promoted tothe QA environment in a completely automated hands-free way. This allows for a more thorough and QA-oriented test suite. After any challenges are found and bugs are fixed, a manual approval promotes the code into production.”
One measure of success for Varian’s testing transformation: Salesforce testing cycles thatused to consume a 10-person team for two weeks are now completed automatically in just three days. With Tricentis, Varian’s Salesforce test automation is not only helping the company protect its stringent quality standards; it is also helping them deliver life-saving innovations, faster.
Product Mix
“Tricentis托斯卡Salesforce引擎了l the objects repositories within Salesforce fully automatically. It’s a one-step test tool that tests GUI and APIs while also virtualizing services that were not available in production. This saves significant time.”
Manish Mathuria — Founder at Infostretch
“Salesforce is an essential component in the enterprise world, bu it’s one of many key components. When testing end-to-end processes, you need a solution that’s capable of testing transactions as they go from one application to another and that can validate the transactions at multiple layers…the GUI, the APIs, and even the database underneath.”
Manish Mathuria — Founder at Infostretch
Results
- 2-week test cyclesreduced to 3 days
- 35% reductionin cost
- 19-minute average test case execution time replaced withautomated execution
- GUI, API, and data testing across multiple application types (Salesforce, SAP…)centralized in a single tool
- Automated quality gates ensure fast,accurate progression through the CI/CD pipeline
- Test data is being created and managedalongside test automation
- Service virtualization allowstesting of integrationsto applications that may be offline
- All test assets, including test cases and test data, aremanaged through version control
- Risk-based testing enablesimpactful smoke testing
- Full traceabilityto user stories in Jira
- End-to-end testing across Salesforceand all of the applications that touch it
- Reusable test artifactsfor new applications