The pandemic forced many industries to create or focus more on an online presence for their business. One industry that saw a definite impact was retail. According to Statista, supermarkets saw the highest increase in online traffic.
Users now prefer to use apps to buy groceries and other items. We must build high-performance, secure, and bug-free apps to ensure we meet their requirements. However, the retail industry's current state highlights the need for improvement.
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Challenges In Retail That Indicate a Need for Continuous Testing
Legacy Systems
Many retailers who have been around for the past few decades still use legacy systems for their day-to-day functions. Legacy systems are unstructured and difficult to maintain. To meet the constantly changing requirements of users, they need an adaptable system. Software testing in retail domain will ensure these versatile systems always meet user requirements.
24/7 Requirements
Online shopping has made buying products convenient. Users can access online stores at any time of the day. Tackling online shoppers 24/7 is a massive requirement that many retailers have failed to meet. Effective continuous testing can ensure your app performs its best 24/7.
See: How Does Continuous Testing Accelerate DevOps?
Compatibility Issues
Mobile devices and web browsers have grown exponentially over the past decade. Your customers may be Android or iPhone users. They may speak different languages, run the latest software version, or their phone stopped receiving updates. Either case, your customers are diverse, and so are their devices. Your app needs to cater to all their needs, and compatibility issues cannot be a part of it. A continuous testing strategy will ensure your app is compatible with your users.
See Also: Top 9 Tips to Improve Retail Mobile App Testing
Secure Transactions
Security is of paramount importance to users. If your app cannot guarantee the security of sensitive information like a user's payment data, this is a red flag. Your app needs to meet specific security requirements under ethical laws put forth by the state. Implementing continuous testing strategies can help you ensure your app is always in compliance with these laws.
An Overview of Continuous Testing and Its Benefits
Continuous testing is a methodology that enables testers to test the app's software at all stages of the development process. It aims to help identify and address issues that can potentially impact user experience. Checking code changes as early as possible eliminates risk, improves business, and keeps users happy.
Benefits of Continuous Testing
Testing Throughout The Development Pipeline
One of the most significant benefits of continuous testing is that developers can start it right from a project's inception. Developers do not have to release a build to start testing; a functional code submission could run through a test script. They can test every consecutive revision and addition.
Early Risk Exposure
Due to continuous testing, developers will notice a marked improvement in risk management. Testing apps early will lead to identifying risks early. Additionally, continuous testing encourages an agile work environment promoting collaboration between developers and testers. Testers understand the design and development process, which helps them develop unique testing methods. This agile environment ensures that teams find potential risks before they can grow in complexity.
Analyze Your Test Process
Continuous testing processes involve storing test data. Since developers implement continuous testing right from inception, the amount of data collected over time is valuable. This data not only helps you understand how your apps progress but also helps you track test performance. Bottlenecks in test processes can cause hiccups in development, so keeping tabs on them is essential.
Instant Feedback
Continuous testing ensures that you get instant feedback for your tests. This feedback is vital as it improves your time-to-market by a mile. Instead of completing your build and running tests to identify issues, instant feedback and immediate fixes ensure your final build will be perfect.
Continuous Testing Benefiting The Retail Industry
Helps Improve Velocity of Release to Match Constant Change
Retail apps require constant updates since the industry is time sensitive. Different aspects, such as holidays, sales, and new product launches, lead to change. These events usually involve redesigning the app to match the event's theme - a Christmas or New Year redesign, for example.
Continuous testing helps improve release velocity by running tests on every change. This testing allows developers to fix errors and launch their redesigns as soon as possible.
Improves Customer Experience
Customers using a retail app or website or visiting a retail store expect a seamless experience. Users wish to shop at anytime and anywhere. They may start their shopping journey on the website, visit the store during the day, and decide to buy the product using the app. Ensuring your users enjoy a seamless omnichannel experience is essential to user loyalty.
Continuous testing can help you test your software for bugs, performance issues, and regressions. Catching bugs early will help avoid problems during the app's release that can disrupt a user's omnichannel experience.
Complements Human Testing
A retail app undergoes constant changes. However, software changes can have unexpected side effects. Regression testing is crucial to ensure this does not happen. Repeated tests on new releases ensure that developers find those hidden bugs. Since continuous testing ensures automation of these tests, human errors are minimal.
Time And Resource Saving
Retail apps need constant improvements to meet the needs of their customers. Since continuous testing ensures early testing, developers can detect bugs early and correct them with less effort. Additionally, automating continuous testing reduces infrastructure maintenance costs significantly.
The HeadSpin Platform Enabling Continuous Testing
The HeadSpin platform provides the perfect setup to perform continuous testing. Here's what the Platform offers:
Data Science for Root Cause Analysis
Collecting data and analyzing it is crucial for continuous testing. The HeadSpin AI enables automatic error detection and analyzes root causes on every stack layer - giving you a comprehensive report on all issues found with actionable insights to help you quickly fix the problem.
Real Device Testing
HeadSpin lets you test on real devices. This crucial aspect ensures your test results are always accurate. These devices are in over 50+ locations worldwide, on real carrier and Wi-FI networks.
Empower Global Teams with Remote Access
HeadSpin empowers your global teams by giving them remote access to real devices. This setup provides a perfect structure for your agile infrastructure. Development teams and testers can collaborate to perform seamless continuous testing.
Performance And UX Issue Capturing
The HeadSpin Platform provides complete visibility into your devices to help you detect and fix issues with performance and functionality in every stage of the app's development process.
See Also - How leading retailers can maximize performance and online revenue
HeadSpin Empowering Retail Application Testing
HeadSpin's software testing solution for retail helps global retail companies to improve business performance and deliver a premium customer experience. The HeadSpin Platform helps with:
- Providing customized customer experiences
- Analyzing scenarios to ensure accurate integration
- Testing on various devices to check app compatibility
- Enabling companies to test globally to meet changing customer requirements
- Proactively monitoring and detecting bugs and errors
Improving retail businesses by perfecting digital experiences
- Better Business Results: The HeadSpin Platform helps you improve performance by avoiding technical challenges. It also helps build customer trust by assisting organizations in offering improved digital experiences.
- Improve Customer Loyalty: Organizations can improve customer retention rates by using the HeadSpin Platform to develop high-quality apps. HeadSpin also helps improve customer service by assisting organizations to automate their SMS, blog posts, or emails.
- Provide Best Customer Experience: The HeadSpin Platform helps organizations build clean and simple websites and helps provide effective CTAs that help improve customer experience.
The HeadSpin Impact
HeadSpin Helps Detect Performance Regressions
The second-largest e-commerce platform in India needed a way to enhance user experience and analyze its app's launch time and performance regression. HeadSpin helped the company identify data points that could help the app launch faster. Additionally, HeadSpin deployed NimbleApp to help the client analyze the performance of the company's app and detect the root causes of app crashes.
With HeadSpin, the company identified several bottlenecks and two major regression problems impacting app performance. HeadSpin also helped the company reduce app load time through its retail testing solution.
Read: From browsing to buying -The importance of omnichannel retail performance testing for businesses
HeadSpin Helps Improve User Retention and Engagement Rate
This client is the biggest department store retail chain in the US. This client needed a way to measure its app's performance across multiple devices and networks. It also wanted to improve its user retention rate and engagement. The HeadSpin Platform gave the client the infrastructure to run performance tests on its app on real, sim-enabled devices. Through HeadSpin's regression testing capabilities, the client performed 3000 tests on multiple devices.
With HeadSpin, the client improved its user retention rate by 64% on Android and 39% on iOS. Through the HeadSpin retail application solution, the client could also enhance its app's user engagement.
Conclusion
The HeadSpin solution for retail applications ensures it meets all the requirements for a modern retail app. From providing a platform that enables its users to connect to real, sim-enabled devices to detailed, AI-driven insights into regression tests, the HeadSpin Platform is perfect for all your continuous testing needs on your retail app. Reach out!
FAQs
Q1. What types of tests come under continuous testing?
Ans:
- Unit Testing
- API Testing
- Integration Testing
- Load Testing
- Regression Testing
Q2. How does load testing benefit retail?
Ans:
- Load testing helps identify bugs that could affect performance.
- It ensures bottlenecks stay at a minimum.
- Since retail apps need to constantly evolve, by stretching the apps to its limits, it ensures the developers of the apps capabilities.
- Load testing helps support app scalability.
- Developers can ensure a consistent omnichannel experience through load testing.
Q3. How does continuous testing help build an agile environment?
Ans: Continuous testing enables quick delivery and fixing of errors. To ensure this is effective, it encourages testers, developers, and QA teams to interact with each other. Keeping every team member informed about the tests and their results speeds up the development process, thus improving the app's time to market.
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