At Dreamforce 2019, Canada Drives led a very insightful session around using Salesforce test automation to support their ambitious delivery cycle.
In this session, Chandra Alahari, QA Automation Engineer at Canada Drives, described his strategy for implementing Provar at Canada Drives and the benefits they achieved. You can watch the full session video recording at the bottom of this page.
What Benefits Did Canada Drives Realize After Adopting Provar?
Using Provar’s test automation for Salesforce, Canada Drives reduced their manual regression effort by 95%, saving 38 hours for every deployment.
Canada Drives also reduced their automation maintenance effort by more than 80% after adopting Provar, saving 33 hours every month.
Discover how Canada Drives achieved this fantastic success story with Provar.
About Canada Drives
Canada Drives’ presenter at Dreamforce was Chandra Alahari. Chandra is an experienced QA Automation Engineer with over 13 years of IT experience and seven years in automation engineering.
Canada Drives is a Fintech company specializing in auto loans, auto refinancing, mortgages, personal loans, and credit rebuilding loans, which operates across Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The Fintech company won several awards, including Canada’s Best Managed Company in 2019.
Canada Drives and Salesforce
Chandra began by describing the impact of Canada Drives’ growth on its technology stack. As additional products were developed, they created more websites, integrations, and processes for their internal teams to manage these customers and loans. All of this was primarily done in Salesforce.
Testing Strategy
Chandra noted that a critical tenet of Canada Drives’ testing strategy is to preserve quality by testing sooner and more often. The testing team starts preparing test cases while development is in progress and begins feature testing as soon as the product is complete.
In terms of regression testing, regression test cases are added or updated with each new feature. Once feature testing is complete, they run regression testing on the potentially impacted areas.
Scalability Challenges of Manual Testing
In Canada Drives’ rapid growth environment, the team began considering automation after seeing scalability issues with their regression effort.
Chandra said,
“With our test suite size increasing with each new release, we needed to understand how to maintain a high quality of regression while maintaining their rapid delivery pace.”
Canada Drives noted four critical challenges with manual regression testing:
- Time-consuming: each new feature meant an increase in the size of the regression test suite. Manual regression testing was taking progressively more time to complete.
- Blocker to delivery: the extended time taken to complete manual regression started to bring deployment delays, directly impacting customers.
- Quality concerns: accelerating regression testing or reducing its scope could result in a drop in quality. It was important for Canada Drives to maintain a good balance between quality and speed.
- Human error: performing the same tests multiple times could be prone to error if done manually.
Canada Drives Test Automation Challenges
This company began searching for a test automation solution to help address the challenges of manual regression testing.
They identified the following goals for their test automation solution:
- Keep up with the pace of development
- Test new features on time
- Minimize manual regression testing
- Run automated regression testing on a nightly basis.
Canada Drives first tried to deliver their Salesforce test automation with traditional automation tools available on the market.
Chandra said of this approach,
“With traditional test automation tools we were able to address most of our pain points, but there were some particular challenges.”
Challenge 1: Technical complexity
“Firstly, we were expecting Manual testers to learn how to program. It was challenging for them as they had to dedicate time to manual testing and ramping up their programming skills.”
Challenge 2: Managing Environments
“Secondly, adding new sandboxes to the test environment was not straightforward. For every sandbox, we had to maintain usernames and passwords for every profile we wanted to test. This was completely manual and time-consuming.”
Challenge 3: Automation Maintenance
“Finally, as we had very dynamic and ever-changing requirements, new fields were added, modified, and removed. We always had to update the automation code based on these changes. Automation code maintenance was taking around 40 hours a month.”
Adopting Provar
After identifying these pain points around traditional automation solutions, Canada Drives sought a better Salesforce test automation solution.
Chandra outlined four critical aspects of Provar that were particularly beneficial:
Benefit 1: Code-less Automation
Chandra said:
“In Provar we can achieve automation without any coding. There is a user-friendly interface for creating tests.
“This is a huge advantage as manual testers can create automated tests in a short time. Today the coverage of our automated tests is high because our tests are created by functional testers.”
Benefit 2: Environment Management
“Using Provar, new sandboxes can be added in a few clicks. Once you configure and test your connection as a System Admin, you can log in as any user without entering the user’s password.”
Benefit 3: Secured Connections Through Encryption
“With Provar, all your Salesforce usernames, passwords, and security tokens can be encrypted. That way, we remain very secure even when we store the automation script on Git or Bitbucket repositories.”
Benefit 4: Significantly Reduced Maintenance Effort
“With Provar, once connected to your Salesforce org, Provar will download the metadata for page layouts, objects, fields, and record types. Once downloaded, you can add or remove fields from an automated test in just a few clicks.
“Because of this unique metadata integration, the complexity and time needed to maintain our automation has come way down.”
Canada Drives’ Automation with Provar
So where is Canada Drives today?
Since adopting Provar, Canada Drives has achieved some awe-inspiring results:
- Automated around 80% of their regression suite, including the majority of the most time-consuming scenarios
- Reduced manual regression effort by 95%, a saving of 38 hours per deployment
- Reduced automation maintenance effort by more than 80%, saving 33 hours every month.
Chandra said,
“We have come a long way from where we used to be. Before we implemented Provar’s test automation, we used to carry out 1 deployment every 2 weeks. With Provar, we can carry out multiple deployments every week, at least 2 per week.”
“Finally, we have also been able to set up daily automation jobs running on Jenkins using Provar’s integration capabilities. By integrating Slack into the Jenkins jobs we get all the automation runs reported to a Slack channel, including pass or fail details. This keeps devs, admins and testers informed of progress.”
A final benefit Chandra noted was that automation jobs could be easily configured to be run on developer sandboxes.
Chandra said,
“Developers can also run the automation on their own sandboxes to find the defects sooner, meaning an even shorter feedback loop.”
Provar and Continuous Integration
Michael Dailey of Provar noted,
“It’s great to see the success Canada Drives has seen by integrating Provar with Jenkins and Slack.In addition to Jenkins, there are a lot of other continuous integration and release management tools that our customers currently use with Provar.“Provar supports all of the tools highlighted below, and our goal is always to provide integrations for the tools you already have, along with documentation, to make your adoption of Provar as seamless as possible.”
Thank you, Canada Drives!
All in all a fascinating talk from a company that has achieved remarkable results through careful planning and strategic automation engineering. Thanks to Chandra Alahari, QA Automation Engineer at Canada Drives, for his insightful commentary.
Watch the Video about Implementing Code-less Test Automation
Canada Drives: Implement Code-less automation to keep up with a rapid development model
Interested in Learn More?
We’d love to discuss how Provar could help your team reduce its manual testing while minimizing automation maintenance. Book a demo today at a time that suits you.
