Copado Streamlines Custom Salesforce App Testing

Copado today added a testing tool to its platform for managing DevOps workflows in Salesforce application environments that automatically creates scripts based on manual tests being conducted.

Announced at the TrailblazerDX conference hosted by Salesforce, Copado Explorer enables DevOps teams to integrate those scripts into testing processes that can be repeated as required.

David Brooks, senior vice president and lead evangelist for Copado, said the goal is to make it simpler for DevOps teams to add those tests to the regression tests that are incorporated into pipelines created using the Copado continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

In addition, markup and annotation tools enhance collaboration by allowing non-technical subject matter experts to provide detailed feedback and insights to quality assurance and development teams as part of an effort to streamline communications between product owners, testers and developers. Testers without a technical background can use that capability to contribute to the creation and deployment of effective automated tests. That capability makes it possible to shift testing further left to incorporate the business teams that better understand how an application should function, said Brooks.

The challenge is far too many organizations still overlook the importance of testing, noted Brooks. There is a tendency when using low-code tools to assume that not as much testing is required because the tools that generate code create a false sense of instant quality despite flaws that might not manifest themselves until an application is deployed, noted Brooks.

Rather than constantly updating applications, more testing should improve the quality of the applications being built sooner. That’s critical because most organizations don’t have the time and resources needed to continuously iterate applications until they eventually arrive at what the business requires, said Brooks.

It’s still early days so far as the level of DevOps maturity that organizations using the Salesforce platform to build and deploy custom applications have thus far attained, noted Brooks. However, just about every organization that licenses the software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform from Salesforce customizes those applications to better align them with their internal business processes, he added.

Each organization will naturally need to determine to what degree they are prepared to deploy customer applications, but it’s clear it’s becoming simpler to build them. Late last year, Copado, for example, added generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to make it easier to manage the DevOps workflows used to build these applications, which means the speed at which these apps are built and deployed is about to exponentially increase.

Salesforce, of course, is only one of many SaaS platforms that organizations rely on to build and deploy custom applications. However, as one of the most dominant platforms, the pace at which custom applications are being built continues to increase, with a larger percentage of these applications being built by professional developers familiar with DevOps best practices.

Eventually, those DevOps workflows will be extended to every kind of developer, but for now, most organizations building applications are looking for more consistent outcomes regardless of what type of tool is used to build them.