Making a List, Checking It Twice: A Testing Strategy for the Holidays

Along with the festivities of the holiday season is the joy of shopping. We have so many options today with online, mobile, and in-store shopping. Changing consumer behavior and demographics mandates that retail technology must continuously evolve at a very fast rate.
This poses immense challenges for the testers in this industry who have to ensure that all channels offer a custom experience with high performance and quality in a very short time. Testing the right systems and integrated touch points, optimizing test coverage, using the right tools, benchmarking user performance, and ensuring multichannel scalability and security are core components of a holiday testing strategy.
Below are some key business and technology testing imperatives.
Financial systems testing: Test scenarios include ensuring sufficient cash flows are available for business and identifying the most profitable items. In particular, understanding scenarios relating to real-time sales performance by channel, store, geography, demographics, and inventory is critical. This is the most complex piece for testing because it necessitates significant domain knowledge.
Retail analytics systems testing: This includes functional and real-time performance scenarios of "big data," combining data from web browsing patterns, social media, industry forecasts, existing customer records, etc., to predict trends, pinpoint customers, and optimize pricing and promotions. Creating real-time data with the right set of tools and a team who understands analytics are essential for this type of testing.
Supply chain systems testing: Effective supply chain management (SCM) is the key element for a retailer to maintain profitability. Testing of the SCM IT systems in a real-time, production-like environment is crucial. Any error in order management or merchandise tracking has huge potential to bring the business down in minutes.
Online channels testing: In 2013, consumers spent $1.198 billion in desktop online sales on Black Friday. Testing all online channels for user experience, be it webpages or mobile, for functional and real-time performance is important. This is also the area that offers the most scope for automated testing, including functional, mobile, security, compatibility, and performance testing.
Merchandizing software testing: This includes test scenarios for forecasting and auto-replenishment of stores.
In-store testing: This primarily involves regression testing of point-of-sale systems and the connectivity to payment systems, inventory, and logistics, particularly for performance and security.
Testing the right elements by understanding the ever-changing consumer and mastering the integrations of all the technology components is the key to building a successful testing strategy for the holiday season.

Source: TechWell

QA and Testing Trends for 2014-2015

QA and Testing Trends for 2014

QA and Testing Trends

The year 2013 has come to an end and most of the IT professionals and businesses are interested to know how Quality Assurance and Testing domain fared last year. I am sure they also must be eager to find out how Quality Assurance will fare in the year 2014. Let’s begin with some interesting findings from a recent survey conducted by Gartner. Here’s my observation and analysis of this very specialized domain.

Cost Optimization

Cost Optimization is going to be a key factor the QA industry will focus even in the year 2014. QA functions are trying to acclimate to the business demands by streamlining and centralizing their structures to achieve higher efficiency and improve cost optimization. Keeping this in mind, businesses have been allocating more budgets to QA domains rather than traditional IT functions. QA and Testing budgets have now increased anywhere between 4-6%, whereas IT budgets are seen declining to 2-3% a year.

Process Optimization

The IT industry is witnessing a gradual transition, there is now an increased focus on QA and Testing rather than core product development. Going forward, QA and Testing would be more process centric and businesses would be keen to involve themselves in the entire testing process. We can definitely expect a collaborative approach towards work with the hybrid model with active involvement of business clients.

Technology Evolution

The mobile technology is evolving in quantum leaps and has made its impact felt in various aspects of our lives. Businesses are developing and launching mobile applications at frequent intervals, but they are lacking adequate mobile testing specialists to perform app testing resulting in increased complaints and bug reporting from the end users. The Industry is looking out for:

• Streamlined and stabilized processes, where the scope of mobile testing is higher.
• Developing test methods that help IT firms offer mobile testing solutions and strengthen the base for testing functions.
• Businesses are keen for testing partners and professionals with experience on multiple platforms, multi devices, designing on cloud, network simulations.

Existing Challenges

Some of the other major challenges that were widely reported in the mobile testing domain were:

• Absence of mature testing tools
• Test automation is still a big challenge
• Lack of concrete solutions for security and performance

Emerging Technologies

The next big buzzword of the year is CLOUD, though many business enterprises are not so keen to adopt cloud computing technology, but it is going to be the future of computing. Generally, businesses prefer the traditional way of testing applications, but they don’t realize that cloud testing is going to offer better solutions to them rather than conventional testing methodologies.

Cloud Testing

Although cloud testing has slowed down its pace due to various challenges that center around security and performance, which I am sure, would soon be addressed by the industry. Businesses are keen on investing in hardware and software, but this would not help them to a great extent, as there is an immense shortage of cloud testing professionals due to the increased demand. I am pretty sure all these challenges are going to be addressed this year.

Agile Environment

As we all are aware, Agile Development is now a widely adopted practice, but when it comes to testing domain, this is still a challenge. When we say Agile testing or testing in an Agile environment, particularly in relation to testing methodologies, this sphere is yet to be explored. Most of the software testing professionals cited various challenges while performing agile testing. The most critical challenges that were commonly reported include:

• Lack of adequate testing approach
• Difficulties in identifying the focus area for testing

Test Center of Excellence (TCOE)

TCOE, as we all know stands for Test Center of Excellence. This is going to play a crucial role in deciding the future of the software testing vendors. The statistics state that businesses are very keen on this emerging trend and are looking for IT partners, who have fully operational TCOE’s. Normally, it takes 3 – 6 months to build a TCOE and it takes about 3 years to taste the fruit of TCOE. If you are planning to create a TCOE, now is the time to initiate the process.

The Future of QA & Testing Domain

A Plethora of opportunities are being created for software testing with each passing day and this would certainly help the Indian IT firms involved in software testing. Verticals such as e-Commerce, Cloud Computing and Mobile Application Development are going to provide positive impetus to both the development and testing fraternities. It’s time for us to gear up to meet the challenges and taste the fruits of software testing market in 2014.

Soure:Evoke Tech