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Varian

Salesforce test automation brings agility to varian

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reduction in testing costs

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Company 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 required to meet their agile ambitions.

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    Industry: Healthcare
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    Organization size: 5,001-10,000 employees
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    Location: United States
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    Challenge

    • Testing the impact of Salesforce updates on connected applications and customizations
    • Testing the impact of connected application and customizations updates on Salesforce
    • Regression testing was extremely cumbersome and resource-intensive
    • Updates deployed to production every 2 weeks
    • Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceMax all have different release cycles and cannot be tested in isolation.
    • Highly-regulated environments demanded strict approvals and tracking
    • Complex test data was being extracted from production, prepared for testing, and refreshed to handle consumption and expiration
    • Testing had to integrate with Jira requirements management
    • Legacy Salesforce tool created 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 to Infostretch. Infostretch kickstarted Varian’s continuous testing efforts using the Tricentis continuous testing platform, leveraging Tricentis’ comprehensive Salesforce testing capabilities 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. These tests 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 means automated testing can occur even when dependent systems are unavailable or 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 process integrates into their CI/CD pipeline and automates the process of code promotion from one environment to the next with version control.

    “Now, when the code is checked in, build verification and smoke tests are run automatically to create a quality gate,” notes Infostretch. “The application can be promoted to the 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 that used 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.

    “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 cycles reduced to 3 days
    • 35% reduction in cost
    • 19-minute average test case execution time replaced with automated 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 managed alongside test automation
    • Service virtualization allows testing of integrations to applications that may be offline
    • All test assets, including test cases and test data, are managed through version control
    • Risk-based testing enables impactful smoke testing
    • Full traceability to user stories in Jira
    • End-to-end testing across Salesforce and all of the applications that touch it
    • Reusable test artifacts for new applications