Author: Navya Manoj

Testing your digital platforms as part of a digital experience program is a vital element of ensuring that your customers have a seamless and user-friendly experience as they interact with your digital platforms. Of course, as with any other aspect of the testing process, some challenges can arise, but this is to be expected.

It is our intention in this blog post to discuss some of the most commonly encountered challenges in the field of digital experience testing, including dealing with the complexity of digital platforms, ensuring cross-browser and cross-device compatibility, personalizing and localizing, performance and load tests, security testing, user experience testing, as well as the need for continuous testing. Moreover, we will provide you with strategies to overcome these challenges and ensure that your digital platforms provide your customers with the best experience possible. This article offers valuable insight and information to anyone involved in software development, quality assurance, or digital product management who will be navigating the complexities of digital experience testing, whether they are software engineers, quality assurance professionals, or digital product managers.

Building a digital experience is all about setting up a digital technology-based holistic interaction interface between a user and a company. Websites, mobile apps, e-commerce sites, social media content, in-store kiosks, and smart devices all provide a digital experience to customers, partners, and employees and give them a way to interact with a company or brand.

Digital experiences enable businesses to move beyond digitizing paper-based procedures; it enables them to develop services that are only made feasible by the internet and other contemporary technologies. Therefore, it has become crucial for organizations and businesses to incorporate well-defined and planned digital experience testing strategies to keep customers loyal, satisfied, and happy.

Companies are using DevOps to respond quickly to changing market dynamics and customer requirements.

In any case, the biggest bottleneck in implementing a successful DevOps framework is testing.

The evolution of mobile has made it a revelatory digital touchpoint in the customer decision-making journey. For enterprises, this omnipresent device offers an ideal platform to reach a broad base of consumers and deliver services.

As Gartner said, ‘To enhance the mobile marketing experience, marketers must look beyond pure functionality and consider the emotional reaction of users.’ The physical response, especially in the case of differently-abled consumers, is critical. Accessibility testing of mobile applications should be a priority for enterprises to ensure that mobile services are readily available to all, including those who are differently abled. In doing so, enterprises will widen their customer base and fulfill legal compliance and corporate social responsibility, all of which enhance their brand image with customers.

In 1924, W. A. Shewhart of Bell Telephone Laboratories developed a statistical chart to control product variables. This chart is the beginning of statistical quality control as we know it.

After the second world war, engineers W. Edwards Deming and Joseph M. Juran, who worked as consultants in the Japanese manufacturing industry, created the concept of Total Quality, in which quality extends beyond the manufacturing process to all organizational processes and instills the values of quality in every worker called – Total Quality Management (TQM)

Customers and employees today are demanding increasingly high-quality digital user experiences. This means new DevOps teams need to implement applications securely and efficiently.

As enterprise needs become more complex, so does their DevOps process. For example, web and mobile UI require multi-platform development, which means multiple processes. In addition, as the complexity of the system increases, processes need greater observability to ensure that all the necessary steps are implemented before code is released.

It is a fact that software testing is time and resources consuming. Testing the software can be observed from different perspectives. It can be divided based on what we are testing. For example, each deliverable in the project, like the requirements, design, code, documents, user interface, etc., should be tested. Moreover, we may test the code based on the user and functional requirements or specifications, i.e., black-box testing. At this level, we are testing the code as a black box to ensure that all services expected from the program exist, work as expected, and with no problem. We may also need to test the structure of the code, i.e., white box testing. Testing can also be divided based on the sub-stages or activities in testing, for instance, test case generation and design, test case execution and verification building of the testing database, etc. Testing ensures that the developed software is, ultimately, error-free. However, no process can guarantee that the developed software is 100% error-free.

Though manual testing is often responsible for missed bugs, sub-optimal test coverage, and human errors, it is impossible to completely replace it with automation testing, even in large projects. Testing such as UX, usability, exploratory, etc., requires human factors because an automatic tool can’t mimic user behavior. Automated testing doesn’t work for security testing, either. Automated vulnerability scanning requires a subsequent manual check because it provides many false positives.

In the present world that we live in, software is a vital component. As users, we interact with an ever-increasing amount of software every day. The wheels of innovation are constantly churning out new digital experiences.

The old way of testing was based on the waterfall model. The product was passed on from one team to another. A product would have separate development and QA phases. QA teams usually needed more time to ensure quality. If businesses want to keep up with the ever-increasing customer expectations, they’ll have to deliver their software faster without hindering its quality. Continuous Delivery (CD), a practice that ensures that the software can be released into production at any time, can help businesses with that. Businesses use a build pipeline to automatically test the software and deploy it to their testing and production environments with continuous delivery.