Retail is one of the industries the most impacted with the digital transformation. A retailer reputation is at risk if the consumer has a bad experience either in a store or in front of an e-commerce website. Software quality assurance and software testing are important activities to prevent issues. This article discusses some main challenges of test automation in the retail industry.
Author: Pradeep Parthiban, Indium Software, http://www.indiumsoftware.com/
E-commerce websites are required to keep transforming in order to satisfy the needs of the competitive market. Several retailers are switching to online stores to increase their profit and sales, but an online store cannot be a guarantee of success. Lack of interactive elements in the design of an e-commerce store can hinder your business growth. Several online retailers integrate essential features in their online store, but they fail to execute test automation or miss software testing. You can surpass these obstacles by focusing on the top 5 challenges of automation in retail e-commerce testing.
1. Collaboration of Teams
Collaboration is an actual challenge for developers, conventional testers and test automation engineers. Test Automation may cause serious issues because it needs more communication, foresight, collaboration, and planning. It depends on traditional testing of data, proof-of-concept and tester experience. Testers have to work with customers and developers to increase the accuracy of this procedure.
To increase your success chances, a team should actively involve in automation. Keep it in mind that moving pieces will come in from several departments. You have to manage buy-in before automating your tests. You can do it in a collaborative environment where team members can communicate effectively to decrease risk and deliver timely results. Make sure to document everything for the management to provide updates.
2. Configure Behaviors
Retail outlets can’t survive in the market without making constant changes. The behavior of customers is gradually changing and you have to work according to these changes. Physical stores can decrease the prices of their products or introduce something new to grab the market during festivals. Similarly, your online store needs changes in functionality and user interface. For this purpose, you have to make considerable changes in coding and software testing.
Fortunately, cloud-based platforms are available for your assistance. You can make changes in the functionality and UI of your platform without changing codes. It may decrease the time for test automation by executing parallel test cases in desktop and mobile through a cloud-based platform and consistent integration.
3. Multiple Integrations
An e-commerce site needs 3rd party integrations that coordinate in a way to accomplish a specific workflow. This is true especially in e-commerce platforms like Magento, Big Commerce and Shopify. These integrations are necessary to manage tax calculations, fraud orders, and legacy gift cards. It is essential to ensure effortless synchronization and placement of third-party integrations with an e-commerce store or app.
With a test automation framework, you can manage the stability of all elements on your website. It must have complicated and vital modules, such as loyalty management, gift certificates, and e-certificate, tax-calculation, address validation, etc. Sometimes, many tests are necessary to check the performance of your e-commerce store. Automated retail testing allows you to interact with different systems and ensure perfect synchronization seamlessly. It will eventually provide end-to-end flawless functionality testing without human intervention.
4. Change Data of Products and Services
An e-commerce store is incomplete without a list of products and services. You have to change the data of your services and products according to the behavior and demand of the user. These changes will help you to run your business successfully in a competitive market. If you want to flourish in this fast-growing market, you have to satisfy the needs of the target audience.
Test automation allows you to test framework, data used and scripts. Make sure to update the testing standards and testing tools with time to decrease the chances of false values in an automation report. It proves helpful in the stability of test scripts.
5. Choose the Best Test Approach and Tools
a) Selection of Approach
It is essential to choose the best testing approach before purchasing new testing tools for automation. You will need the right tools, but you have to decide your testing approaches, such as manual tests and automated tests. The selection of tools will not help you with this decision. The tools can focus on an area regardless of your needs. You must have experts to automate these tests. Keep it in mind that you can’t automate all tests in certain areas like recovery or compatibility.
Before you start test automation, you have to define a particular criterion for every test case. You have to pay attention to the areas with unknown elements because these can create a significant risk for the success of your product. Pay attention to complicated functional regions that are interesting or useful to customers. Risk-focused test automation prioritizes the testing of elements that hold the potential for negative consequences. While assessing the risk level, you have to consider these points:
- Monetary impact of potential failures
- The possibility of failure for every vulnerability (get an input of developer)
- Safety issues for equipment and humans
- Service level agreements (with customers and clients)
Each industry has to follow agile development methodologies. It means that software applications need significant changes with the iteration of new products. These changes may translate into testing explosiveness. In this situation, you may find it challenging to implement and design test automation to identify changes in the apps. A test automation framework can handle this for an online e-commerce store.
b) Selection of a Good Tool
Several testing tools are available that try to automate manual tests. Sometimes, these tests can be harmful to the productivity levels of teams. You may find it difficult to find tools to meet actual needs and improve software testing. Evaluation of tools can be unachievable for several reasons:
- Indefinite knowledge of tools (whether they need particular needs)
- Lack of expertise to get the most out of a specific tool
- Misconceptions can increase the desire for an imaginary tool
- A tool is favorite, but it cannot perform the full test
- Cost of the tool may exceed the budget of the team
The challenge of selecting a useful software testing tool is a serious problem. You have to choose the best team for assessment of available tools. The assessment procedure will start by outlining the requirement criteria for tools. You have to consider the acceptance criteria of users for every product. If you don’t have a team, you can get the assistance of experts at networking events and conferences.
About the Author
Pradeep Parthiban is a Content Writer and Digital Marketing Specialist at Indium Software with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. He likes to write articles on software testing, big data and latest digital trends. Apart from work, he is interested in photography, enjoys watching movies and listening to music.
Contact SoftwareTestingMagazine.com if you want to contribute quality software testing and software quality assurance content on this website.