What is the Role of Continuous Testing in Retail Applications?

The retail industry has been one of the foremost industries to embrace digitization in a big way. While this created stiff competition among the retailers, it brought about a bonanza of sorts for the customers with plenty of options to choose from. So, should you happen to be a retailer with a website and/or mobile app to boot, you need to deliver superior customer experiences to stay at the top of your game. Also, make sure the software is updated and in sync with the latest technology and design trends of the day. Since retail applications are accessed by people across device platforms, they need to function seamlessly on such devices and deliver great user experiences. Hence, it calls for applying continuous testing throughout the SDLC in order to detect and fix any underlying vulnerability or errors.

Why continuous retail testing?

The technology-savvy customers of today want to have the best navigating experience across devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks. Retail companies are aware of the need to deliver better customer experiences thanks to online purchasing catching up progressively and becoming the norm. In the DevOps scheme of things, any retail software under development should be tested at every stage to eliminate the presence of bugs or glitches. This ensures the software element under development that is passed to the next stage is free of errors.

According to Walker study, Customer Experience (CX) is likely to overtake other considerations such as product and pricing as the key differentiator for a brand. Segment survey suggests that around 49% of shoppers have made impulse purchases after getting a personalized experience. Further, a PwC research states that 86% of shoppers are willing to pay more for a product provided they receive great customer experiences.

The omnichannel retail model has necessitated continuous testing to ensure the delivery of a consistent, safe, and reliable customer experience. Continuous testing in DevOps of retail applications generates constant feedback for the developers to eliminate or fix all bugs before the applications go into production.

Benefits of employing continuous testing services

The retail industry is benefitted by switching to online services. However, to ensure the services perform as expected and without any glitches, the applications should undergo continuous test automation. The reasons why the retail industry should not ignore Continuous Testing (CT) are as follows:

• CT enables the faster release of applications
• CT reduces the market risk for applications
• CT improves test coverage
• CT ensures consistency and transparency

How do continuous testing solutions help the retail industry?

With customer experience becoming the key differentiator for the adoption of retail applications in the market, continuous testing has become the need of the hour. It ensures the applications perform to their optimum in an omnichannel environment.

Guarantees customer experience: Customer experience is the outcome of many activities that customers undertake after accessing the retail application. It can be good or bad depending on whether they face issues like downtime, latency, malware, or bug, among others or not. Hence, with continuous testing, regression errors and other performance issues can be identified and fixed before the application enters the production stage.

Early bug detection saving time and cost: In the waterfall method of development, testing comes after development by which time the identification and fixing of errors can become a challenging proposition. Since the development team has to often untangle all the integrated elements within the software to fix bugs, it consumes additional time and escalates the cost of development and deployment. On the other hand, continuous testing DevOps ensures early detection of bugs during development thereby saving time and cost.

Manual testing not enough: The comprehensive testing of retail applications across devices, operating systems, browsers, and networks requires the implementation of continuous test automation. It eliminates errors that are often left undetected during manual testing thereby saving time and effort. Moreover, manual testing of regression errors can be highly challenging and may leave many attributes and elements within the application to remain untested. With automation testing and service virtualization, every element of the software application gets tested for performance as desired leading to the delivery of better user experience.

Conclusion

The online retail industry is continuously evolving with the incorporation of technologies such as AI and Data Analytics, among others. In order to ensure these technologies perform at their optimum level and the applications deliver the best user experience, continuous testing of retail applications should become the norm. It ensures the product becomes market-friendly, safe, and competitive.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality