Test automation, particularly in end-to-end testing, has emerged as a cornerstone in the contemporary software testing landscape. In the early days, manual testing dominated the era, which consumed considerable time and resources.

However, the need for a more efficient and scalable approach became evident as software systems grew in complexity and development cycles shortened. This led to the widespread adoption of test automation, enabling organizations to streamline their testing processes.

As organizations strive for continuous delivery and deployment, the significance of end-to-end testing automation will intensify, ensuring that software products meet the highest quality and functionality standards in an increasingly competitive market.

In this blog, we’ll dive deep into the intricacies of end-to-end test automation with Provar. Uncover the nuances and best practices that elevate your understanding of streamlined test automation processes.

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Dive into the world of end-to-end test automation by watching our LambdaTest Experience (XP) Series webinar to gain valuable insights and best practices in test automation. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

About LambdaTest XP Series & Speaker

LambdaTest Experience (XP) Series includes recorded webinars/podcasts and fireside chats featuring renowned industry experts and business leaders in the testing & QA ecosystem. In this episode of our XP series webinars, we’re excited to feature Zac Taylor, a seasoned Senior Solutions Engineer at Provar, bringing nearly seven years of invaluable experience to the discussion.

Zac’s expertise extends beyond mere involvement in software development and quality teams; he is a dedicated solution provider with a deep commitment to assisting organizations, irrespective of size, in delivering exceptional software solutions.

Getting to Know Provar: Testing Solution Pioneer

Provar has led integrated quality management and Salesforce testing since 2014 and is well-known for being a Salesforce-first testing solution. Provar allows testers to reliably test full end-to-end scenarios that involve various web applications, APIs, databases, email services, and more. Provar has a global presence with offices in the US, UK, and India, and we have over 250 customers worldwide.

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Beyond Browsing: Unpacking Salesforce Testing

Zac mentioned some differences and nuances regarding Salesforce testing compared to generic solutions. With Salesforce testing, you can overcome different challenges that you face in day-to-day life. As some of you may or might not know, Salesforce releases roughly three times per year with multiple UI changes that can be wide-sweeping or may not get much information to deal with such changes.

To combat this situation, Provar comes into play with its metadata-driven approach to Salesforce testing with a close relationship with Salesforce and its roadmap. So anytime Salesforce comes out with releases, Provar releases immediately that minimally impact any previous changes.

Additionally, Salesforce has a very complicated and deep DOM with dynamically changing IDs that are changed every time the page is re-rendered. It has a lot of different page layouts based on the profiles and permission sets you’re testing against. This is quite a challenge, especially regarding generic testing solutions. So, leveraging Provar ensures you have a declarative approach to Salesforce testing and handling this complicated DOM.

Salesforce also introduced the Shadow DOM. You might know that shadow root and Shadow DOM elements have been difficult to penetrate. To help facilitate testing in this environment, Provar has a proprietary locator technology called “NitroX” that allows users to penetrate these elements with standard XPath notation. Additionally, there are a lot of brittle and nested frames within Salesforce, which makes it very difficult to traverse.

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Mastering Rework: A Spiral of Improvement

Zac emphasized that Salesforce has a complex ecosystem with many coding and testing platforms divided into production environments, developer environments, sandboxes, and other categories. Provar includes an elegant approach to override these within specific test cases to ensure no duplicate tests.

It enables parameterizing the connection, pointing towards various environments and organizations, and using the same test cases. This way, you don’t have to mirror test cases for every node we’re testing against. Hence, these issues, nuances, and challenges lead to “The Rework Spiral”. So, the rework spiral is an example of a suite of automated test cases.

Essential Salesforce Testing Features

Zac highlighted various features of Provar for Salesforce testing. Some are listed here:

• Ability to handle multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on support

• Allows seamless environment overrides and switching

• Allows auto-navigation for apps and different tabs

• Allows Integration testing

• Provides APEX commands and SOQL support

• It allows you to perform email testing as well.

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Provar Demo: In-Depth Exploration

Zac showcased Provar’s demonstration with the following steps:

Step 1: Set up and edit connection details

As for Salesforce, there are options for communities, portals, and normal connections. It also offers Auth-based support along with MFA and SSO. You just need to populate the username and password. You’ll notice that some environments will override the ones specified here.

Step 2: Create a New Provar Test Case

Let’s start with building a simple test case here. Click on this New Test button. Then, choose a test folder name and the application or connection specified for the demo org. Finally, you need to select a Salesforce application to load into. These will be specific to your org and user profile. Once you have selected the application, click ‘Finish’.

Step 3: Add New Contact information

Step 4: Login to your Salesforce account to get started.

Step 5: Run Test Builder, and you’ll be able to see your desired contact form.

You can also perform email testing, as demonstrated. Email testing has come up quite a bit, especially for things like marketing campaigns, ensuring that those emails are hitting the appropriate recipients and subjects. So again, we can test that via the UI or the API.

For more information, visit Provar’s support documentation.

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How Does LambdaTest Elevate Test Scalability Infrastructure?

Zac mentioned that LambdaTest, an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform, provides scalable infrastructure-less test execution on the cloud that helps facilitate clients/organizations from all walks of life and different points in their automation journey to get the most value.

To get started with LambdaTest on Provar, go to our Test Settings tab and under our Browser Providers and just add a new browser provider. Then, choose the browser provider you want. For example, LambdaTest passes in the appropriate authentication methods. Then, you can do machine and browser-specific testing by choosing particular browser versions and screen resolutions for your mobile and web testing.

You also add particular properties, additional information if anything is needed, and environment-specific variables. It’s very easy to set this up from within the application, get those test cases running on a regularly scheduled cadence, and be able to get the results.

Interactive Q&A: Testing Insights

Q: How can Provar enhance the field locator strategy and enable the framework to extend beyond Salesforce testing?

Zac: Since our baseline was the page object model, many other automation testing frameworks have been used to extend, really leaning into our Nitro X and fact-based, component-driven framework. So, identifying specific components that aren’t tied to particular pages gives you a lot more versatility when testing, a lot less time having to map elements that you’ve already mapped on previous pages, and allows you to extend that framework significantly.

Additionally, in fact, you can, you know, variablize and parameterize different inputs. The world is your Oyster, so to speak, regarding what we can do to extend NitroX.

Q: How do you integrate Provar into different CI/CD pipelines with the help of version control?

Zac: Provar has a direct integration with Git from our desktop client. So you can push, pull, commit, and collaborate as needed. We also have all of our test case files on your local machine. So, if you use another version control system outside of Git, we also fully support that.

So once you have everything checked into a version control system for collaboration, Provar offers many options for continuous testing; no matter what your flavor of CI/CD is, Provar can enmesh itself in your day-to-day operations effectively. This is by no means a comprehensive list. These are just some of the larger players we’ve seen in the industry.

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Wrapping Up! I Hope You Enjoyed It!

In conclusion, our exploration into the intricacies of end-to-end test automation with Provar underscores its indispensable role in the contemporary software testing landscape. As the software development ecosystem continues its dynamic evolution, incorporating robust testing methodologies, particularly those centered around end-to-end automation, remains integral to ensuring the delivery of high-caliber and reliable software solutions.

Brace yourselves for the exciting episodes in the LambdaTest Experience (XP) Series webinars. Until we converge again for more revelations in the expansive universe of software testing, remember to stay curious and resilient and, above all, keep testing! Until next time, the journey persists, and we look forward to sharing more insights with you.

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