While Salesforce was originally developed as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, today, hundreds of thousands of enterprises use Salesforce to manage their daily marketing, sales, and commerce operations.
Salesforce testing is crucial since it ensures that critical business processes like CPQ, Fulfillment, Billing, and more work as intended, especially after seasonal releases & functional improvements are deployed.
While most organizations understand that Salesforce test automation is vital to making the most of their Salesforce applications, this blog post will highlight key differences between Selenium, the world’s most popular open-source test automation tool for Salesforce, and Opkey.
Opkey: An Introduction
Opkey is a no-code test automation platform, launched in 2016. Opkey supports more than a dozen packaged applications, and enables organizations to run complex, end-to-end tests that span across multiple applications and technologies. Opkey’s automation testing platform is robust enough to automate the most complex Salesforce tests, yet simple enough for any non-technical Salesforce user to use. At a high level, Opkey streamlines test automation through:
- Instant test discovery: Opkey’s test discovery platform surfaces the legacy tests that have been run in a client’s environment, along with process logs to identify gaps in coverage.
- Easy test creation: Opkey’s no-code interface allows any user to create tests to automate Salesforce application testing.
- Painless test maintenance: Failed tests are easy to diagnose and fix with self-healing technology. Opkey also provides easily digestible reports on which tests have passed and failed, along with screenshots.
Advantages of Opkey for Salesforce testing:
- Tests can be created in minutes, even for small changes in a highly customized Salesforce environment.
- Opkey allows tests to be scheduled and executed anytime.
- End-to-end testing, across multiple applications and technologies, is supported for SF Lightning/Classic.
- Opkey supports integrations with other test tools in the Salesforce AppExchange.
- Opkey has intelligent object recognition capabilities that can easily identify Salesforce’s hidden and layered objects.
Read more: How to evaluate a test automation solution for Salesforce.
Selenium: An Introduction
Launched in 2004, Selenium is the world’s most well-known test automation tool. Selenium is a free web application, allowing experienced coders to write test scripts in programming languages like Ruby, Java, NoseJS, PHP, Perl, Python, and C#. Selenium’s client libraries allow coders to execute browser automation with scripts written in practically any programming language, and the platform works by coding a series of commands to simulate a user’s Salesforce actions in a web browser.
Selenium can be integrated with your CI/CD pipeline to make sure changes to your Salesforce applications do not affect current workflows. Selenium consists of three tools to enable automated testing:
- Selenium IDE: A record and playback tool that can be used to create and edit test cases and test suites.
- Selenium WebDriver: A programming interface to create test cases using element locators.
- Selenium Grid: A parallel testing interface.
Advantages of Selenium for Salesforce testing
- It’s free.
- It’s open-sourced and allows modifications to its source code.
- Multiple programming languages, operating systems, and major browsers are supported.
- There is a large community support and a vast network of users.
Watch our video Opkey vs. Selenium for a real-time analysis of running a test script.
Salesforce automated testing comparison: Opkey vs. Selenium
Now that we’ve been introduced to both platforms, we’ll take a closer look at the two platforms side by side. A list of common questions from Salesforce IT and QA managers has been added into the below chart:
Usability and Adoption questionsUsing OpkeyUsing Selenium WebDriver
Learn more by reading our blog, How to test Salesforce applications faster.
Conclusion
As you can see, both Opkey and Selenium offer pros and cons for automating Salesforce testing, depending on what’s most important to your organization. Though we’re slightly biased, we’re confident that Opkey’s solution is the better option because it’s no-code, allowing any Salesforce user to contribute to test automation, and can perform true end-to-end testing from day one.
Originally published at https://www.opkey.com.
