Panaya ForeSight Upgraded to Optimize Testing
Panaya, a software vendor with offices in Tel Aviv and Hackensack, New Jersey, earlier this month announced enhancements to Panaya ForeSight, an interactive change intelligence tool for Salesforce. This upgrade to ForeSight aims to let Salesforce platform owners optimize the use of testing resources. “Test automation increases quality and improves efficiency,” said Oz Lavee, ForeSight CTO for Panaya. “However, automation does not prevent you from automating the ‘wrong test’ i.e., the one that you didn’t really need, which we see among many clients. With Panaya we understand what to automate based on the risk level and business impact that we identified with Panaya ForeSight,” added Mr. Lavee in a press release. Panaya is a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys, the leading global IT services based in Bengaluru, India.
Boosts Panaya Multi-SaaS Strategy
This upgrade to ForeSight helps Panaya direct attention to their Salesforce testing product. Prior to adding Salesforce services, Panaya has done change management and testing on the SAP and Oracle ERP platforms for several years. Then, in 2021 they expanded their offerings to include Salesforce versions of their change intelligence and testing products.
Testing Resources Are Not Infinite
ForeSight now analyzes the impact of proposed changes to a Salesforce org. It then it shows testers which specific tests are needed to cover changes. Test frequency is analyzed, which helps to identify rarely-used tests.
Focusing on optimizing testing costs sounds like a good strategy. Planning a testing strategy for each Salesforce installation should go beyond the minimum of ensuring adequate test class coverage. But implementing that testing plan requires a diversity of skills, ranging from coder to business analyst. And when a test involves a manual tester running a script, the costs go beyond the time and compute resources required to run automated tests. These considerations can prohibit the use of a full suite of tests every time a Salesforce deployment pipeline is executed.
Using ForeSight to optimize Salesforce application testing makes sense because creating and running tests in Salesforce can be cumbersome and expensive. That is why it is so important to know which tests are really needed when making a change in a Salesforce org.
Metadata Intelligence Drives Salesforce Devops
Panaya ForeSight is a leading product in the SalesforceDevops.net Map category Change Intelligence. It shares a common characteristic, metadata intelligence, which is found in many Salesforce devops products. This is where a devops product ingests the metadata associated with a target org and processes that information to optimize the Salesforce release management process.
In a post last year, I forecasted that Salesforce devops vendors like Panaya will continue to innovate off of their investment in metadata intelligence. This ForeSight upgrade is a welcome example of that happening. Going forward, I expect vendors to emerge who have new takes of metadata intelligence, plus more metadata-driven improvements like this test optimization capability from Panaya ForeSight.
