2 June 2023
Odoo Application Automation Testing
27 June 2025
5:55 MIN Read time BY
Pradeep K
As Odoo becomes one of the most flexible and widely used open-source ERP platforms, ensuring its reliability through effective testing is no longer optional—it’s a necessity. Whether you’re an Odoo developer building custom modules, or a business owner managing operations on Odoo, automation testing can save time, reduce regression errors, and improve deployment confidence.
Whether you’re testing Sales, CRM, Inventory, Invoicing, or any custom workflow in your ERP, this blog will help you explore the right tools and methodologies to streamline your automation process for Odoo.
Why Odoo Needs Automation Testing
1. Regular Odoo Updates Demand Fast Validation:
Odoo ERP releases frequent updates and improvements across versions (e.g., v14, v15, v16, etc.). Automation ensures that all modules continue to work smoothly after an upgrade, without spending days on manual verification.
2. Customized Modules Must Be Regression-Safe:
Each business typically uses Odoo in a customized way—adding new modules, changing workflows, or integrating third-party tools. Automation testing ensures that these changes don’t break existing modules or workflows elsewhere in the system.
3. Integration Testing Across Modules & User Roles:
Odoo’s modules are deeply connected. For example, changes in Sales may affect Invoicing or Inventory. Automation allows you to simulate workflows across modules and across user roles (Admin, Sales Manager, Accountant) to verify everything works together as intended.
4. Full Test Coverage Across Functionalities:
Manual testing often misses edge cases. Automation enables comprehensive test coverage across all critical workflows—ensuring nothing slips through, even in complex ERP scenarios.
5. Large Application, Minimum Turnaround Time:
With automation, you can test large, complex Odoo systems within minutes or hours—not days. This is crucial for CI/CD pipelines, client demos, or rapid release cycles.
6. Reduce Manual Effort and QA Resource Overhead:
By automating repetitive scenarios (e.g., order creation, invoice generation, approval workflows), your QA team can focus more on exploratory or business logic testing, reducing burnout and improving productivity.
7. Save Time:
Automated test cases can be executed repeatedly, 24/7, and even integrated into nightly builds. This speeds up feedback loops and saves significant effort for QA and development teams.
8. Save Cost:
With fewer human hours needed and fewer post-release bugs, automation leads to reduced maintenance costs, lower bug resolution expenses, and overall better ROI.
9. Improve Accuracy:
Unlike manual testers, automated scripts don’t make mistakes or skip steps. This ensures high precision in every test execution.
10. Deliver Bug-Free, Stable Applications:
The ultimate goal of automation testing is to help teams catch issues early and release stable, bug-free applications to production, thereby improving user satisfaction and trust.
Automation Testing Suite for Odoo
When implementing automation testing for Odoo applications, organising your test cases into well-defined test suites helps streamline execution and improve test management. One of the most essential suites is the
Regression Testing Suite: This suite ensures that existing functionalities remain unaffected after code changes, version upgrades, or the integration of new modules. This is particularly important in Odoo, where even a minor update in one module can impact others due to the tightly integrated structure.
Smoke Testing Suite: Designed to quickly validate the core and critical features of the application after each deployment or update, this suite acts as a basic health check. It helps determine whether the system is stable enough to proceed with further testing.
End-to-End Testing Suite: This suite is essential for validating complete business workflows that span multiple modules. It simulates real-world scenarios—for example, converting a lead into a sale, generating an invoice, and processing payment—thus ensuring that interconnected processes work seamlessly across various user roles.
Data-Driven Testing Suite: This suite executes the same test logic using multiple sets of data inputs. It is particularly useful in Odoo scenarios where functions like tax calculations, pricing rules, or HR approvals depend on varying configurations. Automating such data-sensitive cases improves test coverage and minimizes duplication.
Best Automation Testing Tools for Odoo
Selecting the right automation testing tool for an Odoo-based application depends on various factors like the complexity of your workflows, the technology stack, team expertise, and long-term scalability. Odoo’s modular structure, dynamic interface, and high level of customization require tools that can handle asynchronous operations, data-driven workflows, and role-based testing scenarios effectively.
Playwright
Playwright is a modern open-source testing framework developed by Microsoft. It’s widely regarded as one of the best tools for Odoo automation, especially because it handles dynamic UI elements, multi-tab sessions, and iFrames—all of which are common in Odoo apps.
Playwright supports TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, and Python, making it flexible across developer and QA teams. It offers auto-waiting, network mocking, parallel execution, and full cross-browser support (Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit).
Odoo’s UI often uses AJAX calls and reactive elements—Playwright’s ability to intelligently wait for elements and handle async operations makes it highly reliable for regression, E2E, and smoke testing in Odoo.
Cypress
Cypress is another popular testing tool known for its ease of use and tight integration with the browser. While it was initially limited to JavaScript and Chromium browsers, Python-based workflows can be enabled through wrappers or plugin-based setups.
Most core features of Cypress—including local test execution, real-time reloading, and debugging—are free and open-source. However, advanced features like the Cypress Cloud dashboard (for analytics, test history, and parallelization in CI) are part of their paid plan.
Cypress is particularly strong in UI-level testing—great for verifying page elements, input validation, form behaviour, and frontend logic in Odoo customizations.
Can We Automate Odoo with Selenium?
While it is technically possible to automate Odoo using Selenium, it is not the most efficient or reliable choice for this platform. The primary challenge lies in how Odoo renders its frontend. Most of the UI elements in Odoo use dynamically generated IDs, classes, and XPath paths, making them difficult to locate and interact with consistently.
Selenium, though still a leading open-source automation tool for web applications, lacks built-in smart waiting mechanisms and struggles with dynamic and reactive content. In Odoo, where many screens load asynchronously (e.g., modals, drop-downs, AJAX-driven tables), Selenium scripts are more prone to failure due to element timing issues or unstable locators.
Moreover, writing and maintaining Selenium scripts for Odoo requires a lot of custom waits, complex XPath strategies, and retry mechanisms. This increases script complexity, maintenance time, and flakiness in test results.
Best Automation Testing Frameworks for Odoo
To ensure scalable and maintainable automation for Odoo applications, choosing the right testing framework is just as important as selecting the tool itself. A good framework helps define structure, reusability, readability, and integration support for test automation. Below are three popular and effective frameworks used for automating Odoo-based ERP applications:
Why Choose External Automation Tools Instead of Odoo’s Built-in Testing Framework?
Odoo comes with its own built-in testing framework, primarily designed for unit tests and backend logic validation using Python’s unittest module. While it’s useful during development, especially for module-level tests, it has several limitations when it comes to full-scale application testing—particularly in UI, integration, and end-to-end workflows.
1. Odoo Framework Focuses on Unit Testing
2. Lack of Frontend and UI Automation
3. No Cross-Browser or Device Testing
4. Limited for CI/CD Integration and Scalability
6. Test Coverage Beyond Backend
2 June 2023
Founder of Testvox Helping startups and SMEs deliver high-quality software products to market, with over 10 years of experience in the software testing industry. Expertise in Automation Testing, Exploratory Testing, and Performance Testing. Passionate about enabling businesses to achieve seamless and robust software solutions through innovative testing methodologies.
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