1. The Role of AI in Quality Assurance
2. Challenges of Implementing AI in Quality Assurance
3. Benefits of AI-Led Quality Assurance
4. AI Testing Tools for Quality Assurance
5. Conclusion
6. How can TestingXperts help transform QA using AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is drawing substantial financial investments and genuine enthusiasm from prominent entrepreneurs because of its promising advantages. Companies are eagerly adopting AI in quality assurance to streamline their operations and lower expenses. AI facilitates the efficient sharing of data, forecasts customer behavior, offers product recommendations, identifies fraudulent activities, tailors marketing to specific demographics, and delivers valuable customer support.

If you’re still uncertain about the practicality of AI, here are some astonishing statistics:

• 63% of companies acknowledge that the pressure to cut costs will drive them to adopt AI.

• 61% of business leaders assert that AI assists them in identifying business opportunities they might otherwise overlook.

The Role of AI in Quality Assurance

To evaluate software and its functionalities, it is essential to develop a test suite and generate test data. Nevertheless, this procedure is time-consuming. On average, when employing manual testing methods, it accounts for more than one-third (approximately 35%) of the total time expended during a testing cycle.

In addition to this, manual testing is susceptible to human errors, which can lead to increased expenses and consume more time and resources – something no business is eager to invest in.

Additionally, as software becomes more intricate, the number of tests naturally grows, rendering it progressively harder to maintain a test suite and ensure sufficient code coverage.

In such situations, leveraging artificial intelligence for quality control can expedite the mobile app testing procedure and surmount all the aforementioned challenges. The key areas where AI enhances testing processes in quality assurance encompass:

• Comprehensive supervision of API testing.

• Automation of testing operations.

• Determining the optimal timing and methodology for executing a test script.

• Utilizing AI-based spidering tools for more effective data analysis.

Here are a few limitations of manual testing and How AI can change that:

Challenges of Implementing AI in Quality Assurance

Implementing AI in Quality Assurance (QA) introduces a range of complex challenges that organizations must address to ensure the successful integration of artificial intelligence into their quality control processes. These challenges include:

Data Quality:

QA teams must grapple with the need for high-quality training data. Ensuring that the data used to train AI models is accurate, representative, and free from biases is a crucial initial step.

Integration Complexity:

Integrating AI into existing QA systems can be a daunting task. Ensuring compatibility, data flow, and proper synchronization with legacy processes is essential for a smooth transition.

Regulatory Compliance:

Depending on the industry, there might be specific regulations and data privacy laws that must be adhered to when implementing AI in QA. Ensuring compliance with these regulations is a critical concern.

User Acceptance:

Convincing QA teams and stakeholders of the benefits and reliability of AI-driven processes is essential. Education, training, and effective communication are required to gain trust and acceptance.

Benefits of AI-Led Quality Assurance

The utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in software testing brings forth distinctive advantages that can significantly transform the quality assurance process. Let’s explore these benefits in detail, particularly focusing on how AI contributes in transforming Quality Assurance:

Speedy Timelines:

Efficient Test Execution:

AI-driven test automation can execute a vast number of test cases at unprecedented speeds, significantly reducing the time required for testing. Tasks that might take human testers days or weeks can be accomplished in a matter of hours.

Faster Regression Testing:

AI streamlines regression testing by automatically re-running test cases to check for unintended side effects. This ensures that new code changes don’t break existing functionality, enabling faster release cycles.

Well-Researched Build Releases:

Predictive Analysis:

AI can analyze historical testing data and software performance metrics to predict potential defects. By identifying areas of the software that are more likely to contain issues, teams can focus their testing efforts on high-risk areas, leading to more well-informed build releases.

Continuous Monitoring:

Real-time monitoring by AI can detect anomalies and performance issues in production, helping in pinpointing areas that require immediate attention before a new build release.

Going Beyond the Limits of Manual Testing:

Comprehensive Test Coverage:

AI can perform extensive and exhaustive testing, covering a multitude of scenarios and edge cases that manual testing may overlook. This thorough test coverage ensures that software is rigorously examined.

Scalability:

AI-powered testing is highly scalable, accommodating the increasing complexity and size of modern software projects. It can adapt to new technologies, larger datasets, and evolving testing requirements, something that manual testing often struggles to achieve.

Effortless Test Planning:

Intelligent Test Case Generation:

AI algorithms can autonomously generate test cases, making the test planning process more efficient. These generated test cases often cover critical paths, boundary conditions, and high-impact scenarios, saving time and effort in test case creation.

Test Prioritization:

AI can prioritize test cases based on their criticality and potential impact, simplifying test planning by ensuring that the most important tests receive primary attention.

AI Testing Tools for Quality Assurance

AI testing tools for quality assurance have gained popularity in recent years for enhancing testing efficiency and accuracy.

Applitools:

• Applitools offers Visual AI testing, a technology that uses AI and machine learning to automatically detect and analyze visual differences in the user interface of applications. It’s particularly useful for web and mobile app testing.

• It can identify visual defects such as layout issues, rendering problems, and functional bugs.

• Applitools provides a visual validation platform that integrates with various test automation frameworks and tools, making it easy to add visual testing to existing test suites.

Test Sigma:

• Test Sigma is an AI-driven test automation platform that aims to simplify test creation and maintenance.

• It uses natural language processing and AI to enable testers and non-technical users to create automated test scripts.

• The platform offers features like self-healing tests, easy maintenance, and cross-browser testing.

SauceLabs:

• Sauce Labs is a cloud-based platform for automated testing, including both web and mobile application testing.

•While it’s not exclusively an AI testing tool, it offers AI-powered testing capabilities to improve test execution and analysis.

•It provides a wide range of real devices and virtual environments for running tests and supports various testing frameworks.

TestCraft:

• TestCraft is a cloud-based test automation platform that uses AI to generate and maintain test scripts.

• Its AI engine identifies changes in the application under test and adjusts test scripts accordingly to ensure they remain functional.

• TestCraft supports web and mobile app testing and offers integration with various CI/CD tools.

These tools leverage AI and machine learning to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of quality assurance processes. When choosing the right tool for your specific needs, consider factors such as the type of applications you’re testing (web, mobile, desktop), the level of technical expertise in your team, and the integration capabilities with your existing testing framework or tools. It’s also essential to evaluate factors like cost, scalability, and support to determine the best fit for your organization’s requirements.

Conclusion

The integration of Artificial Intelligence into Quality Assurance is ushering in a new era of efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness in software testing and product quality control. AI-driven solutions are revolutionizing the way businesses approach quality assurance, from automating repetitive and time-consuming testing tasks to enabling predictive defect identification and improving performance and security testing. With AI, organizations can streamline their testing processes, ensure consistent quality, and ultimately deliver higher-quality products to their customers. This transformation not only enhances product reliability but also reduces costs, accelerates time-to-market, and equips businesses with the agility needed to thrive in an increasingly competitive technological landscape. AI’s impact on quality assurance is a testament to the ongoing evolution of technology in the pursuit of excellence and customer satisfaction.

How can TestingXperts help transform QA using AI

TestingXperts, as a specialized software testing and quality assurance company, offers comprehensive AI-driven solutions to facilitate the transformation of your quality assurance processes. They can leverage AI to enhance the efficiency, accuracy, and agility of your testing initiatives. By employing AI-powered test automation, TestingXperts can help you reduce manual testing efforts, accelerate test execution, and enhance test coverage. Their expertise in developing self-healing test scripts and frameworks ensures that your tests remain robust even as your applications evolve, reducing maintenance overhead. Additionally, they can optimize test data management through AI, ensuring the availability of diverse and realistic data sets for thorough testing. This not only improves the quality of your tests but also contributes to data privacy compliance with AI-driven anonymization techniques.

Furthermore, TestingXperts can assist in predicting potential defects through AI-based analysis of historical data and patterns, allowing your QA teams to proactively address vulnerabilities before they impact your software’s performance. Their AI-driven performance testing solutions simulate real-world user behavior and load patterns, providing valuable insights into system performance under varying conditions. With their expertise in AI-enhanced security testing, TestingXperts can identify security vulnerabilities and weaknesses, helping you safeguard your applications and data. Whether you need to optimize test cases, automate testing processes, or bolster your security measures, TestingXperts’ AI-driven solutions are tailored to elevate the quality assurance landscape of your organization, enabling you to deliver robust, secure, and high-quality software products to your customers.

The post How AI in Quality Assurance Enhances Efficiency and Improves Accuracy first appeared on TestingXperts.

Today, the demand for high-quality software is rapidly rising for businesses across industries. Every business needs scalable, robust, and high-quality software to deliver a greater user experience. But, how can companies to achieve high-quality software? It can be achieved by leveraging Quality Assurance (QA), which helps track the software quality and ensures that the specified software meets the defined business requirements.

Content 1. What is Quality Assurance (QA)? 2. Benefits of leveraging QA testing services 3. Major difference between QA and QE 4. What role does Quality Assurance play in DevOps? 5. What is the significance of QA across leading industries in 2022? 6. Best QA practices for software testing in 2022 7. Major types of QA testing for businesses to leverage 8. Top 5 QA Trends to watch in 2022 9. Leading QA testing tools in 2022 10. As a Leading QA testing services provider, how can TestingXperts help businesses? 11. Conclusion

What is Quality Assurance (QA)?

Quality Assurance or QA testing determines whether the software meets the specific quality standards. Software quality assurance involves evaluating the software based on functionality, performance, usability, security, etc. QA testing also involves checking the quality of the process used to develop, test, and release the software. Thus, QA is an integral part of quality management focused on providing confidence internally to business managers and stakeholders and externally to customers, government agencies, regulators, and third parties.

According to Wikipedia, Quality assurance (QA) prevents mistakes and defects in manufactured products and avoids problems when delivering products or services to customers. ISO 9000 defines QA as part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled.

Benefits of leveraging QA testing services

Ensures proper procedures are followed:

By leveraging QA testing, businesses can ensure that their software is developed and tested by following proper procedures throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Ensures bug-free software:

QA testing ensures that software is free from bugs as the product is tested end-to-end by QA testers.

Improves product quality:

QA teams perform testing, process monitoring, audits, and product evaluation to enhance the overall product quality.

Protects brand reputation:

By leveraging QA testing, businesses can improve product quality and achieve bug-free software that ultimately uplifts their reputation and delivers a greater customer experience.

Ensures security:

QA testing ensures that the software is built and tested and is free from any security loopholes, which ultimately improves the security-based features of the software.

Improves customer satisfaction:

QA testing ensures that the software has all the required features, works appropriately, and improves customer satisfaction.

Major difference between QA and QE

QA teams help prevent defects in the software by ensuring it is built and tested by following all the procedures throughout the SDLC. This QA process ensures that software meets all quality standards and is free from bugs. On the other hand, Quality Engineering (QE) assures high standards during software development and is explicitly suitable for agile and DevOps methodologies. Typically, quality engineers play a critical role in quality engineering by creating, implementing, and maintaining systems to ensure effective quality assurance processes.

Another significant difference is that the software quality assurance team or the software quality analysts focus on implementing quality in the software during its built stage. They even perform quality tests. Whereas the software quality engineers focus on further improving the QA process. They work only after the software quality analysts complete their work and submit QA requirements.

What role does Quality Assurance play in DevOps?

Today’s businesses are rapidly adopting DevOps processes to automate software deployment and embrace a culture where development and testing are taken up parallelly. The DevOps methodology helps ensure quality checks at every step of the software development and ensures faster releases and faster time-to-market.

Since quality is deeply integrated into DevOps, QA becomes an integral part of the DevOps processes, as stated below:

• In a DevOps environment, the QA teams work collaboratively with development and operations teams to ensure faster releases with continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to get high-quality software.

• Quality is ensured with QA in place throughout the software development, software testing, and software delivery cycle within the DevOps processes.

• By ensuring QA in DevOps, the development and testing teams take full responsibility for the software quality.

• QAops is the combination of QA with IT Operation and Development teams. It helps deliver high-quality software at a faster pace and enables better communication between cross-functional teams in the software development process.

• Thus, QA helps release code consistently and ensures quality is not just limited to removing the bugs but is built throughout the software release cycle with DevOps.

Further, businesses across industries need quality software, and seemingly QA plays a significant role in enabling quality products for all industries.

What is the significance of QA across leading industries in 2022?

Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI):

Today, the BFSI industry heavily depends on digital transformation technology and needs high-quality apps to deliver a great CX, which can be achieved by leveraging QA testing. Some of the other factors which establish QA testing needs for the BFSI sector include:

• BFSI apps usually have multi-tier or N-tier architecture with several underlying app layers that need effective QA testing validation.

• BFSI apps should have proper integration with third-party apps and payment gateways, which requires QA testing.

• BFSI industry should ensure no app downtime or server outage situations, which is ensured through effective QA testing.

• It is essential to conduct QA testing of BFSI apps to ensure there are no security loopholes in the app that cyber attackers can exploit.

• Moreover, BFSI apps must comply with open banking standards, regulatory compliances, and web content accessibility standards which are ensured through effective QA testing.

Retail/eCommerce:

The demand for high-performing eCommerce apps is rapidly rising. Even a small bug in an eCommerce app can drastically decrease sales volume or result in visitor/customer loss, revenue dips, and more. Thus, QA testing is essential for eCommerce and retail apps. Some of the other factors include:

• QA testing ensures seamless eCommerce app cart functionality for sudden price changes, discounts, special offers, or when a new product is added to the shopping cart.

• To ensure the correct display of the product page, proper app navigation, and fully functional links, QA testing is essential.

• Also, eCommerce apps must perform seamlessly on all devices, platforms, and OS to attract more customers, which again needs QA testing.

• eCommerce apps must be secure as it contains customer’s sensitive data like their phone no, banking credentials, card details etc. which must be protected by leveraging QA testing

• QA testing ensures eCommerce apps comply with WCAG guidelines to ensure seamless access of apps to all.

Telecom:

The Telecom industry plays a critical role in keeping the world connected, and as the apps are interconnected, they should perform seamlessly, which needs QA testing. Some other reasons why the telecom industry needs QA testing include:

• Telecom apps usually are complex and have several underlying API layers which need effective validation, which can be achieved through QA testing.

• The Telecom industry has to deal with complex tasks like network configuration, network inventory, fault management, and service provisioning, which need proper QA testing.

• By leveraging security testing, telecom businesses can be ensured that their apps are free from vulnerabilities and security flaws.

• Further, QA testing can also help telecom businesses optimize their time-to-market and reduce the number of customer complaints.

Healthcare:

The healthcare sector deals with critical patient information and must ensure that healthcare, pharma, and other apps are free from bugs and security loopholes that need effective QA testing. Some of the other reasons why the healthcare sector needs QA testing include:

• QA testing is required for the functional validation of the healthcare apps

• Healthcare apps need to be accessible to all people, including people with certain disabilities, which can be ensured by leveraging QA accessibility testing.

• The healthcare sector can ensure quick loading speed, effective app navigation, and seamless compatibility of their apps across OS and devices by leveraging QA testing.

• The healthcare industry is data-rich, and there is an essential need to store and organize information properly, which needs big data testing, an integral part of QA testing.

Travel and Logistics:

Logistics is an essential part of the supply chain for every industry and is constantly under pressure to deliver products faster. Due to the rapid technological advancements, the logistics sector needs to adopt disruptive QA solutions to ensure continuous improvement, enhanced communications, better visibility, and faster delivery. Some of the reasons why this industry needs QA testing include:

• With QA testing, the travel and logistics industry can save itself from situations of communication failure that can lead to fatalities, delayed deliveries, inappropriate supplies, and loss of business, client, reputation, and money.

• QA testing also improves the operational efficiency of the logistics industry

• Security vulnerabilities can be identified and removed from the logistics and related software by leveraging security testing.

• The logistics sector heavily depends on technology and is adopting cloud apps rapidly. QA testing ensures proper functioning, security, and data migration from physical storage to cloud apps.

Best QA practices for software testing in 2022

Ensure continuous monitoring:

Ensures continuous monitoring of the SDLC process to ensure that the agreed standards and procedures are followed while the software is built and tested.

Include risk management:

For an effective QA process, testers must include risk management and other related processes to identify, assess, prioritize, monitor, and control the risk.

Check compliance with industry standards:

QA testers must check that a product meets all the necessary compliance and industry standards by leveraging compliance testing.

Prioritize bugs based on risk and usage:

It is best to prioritize the bugs before fixing them based on the risk and usage of that particular area of an app.

Ensure testing throughout the SDLC:

Testers need to conduct QA testing throughout the SDLC to remove bugs as early as possible.

Automate regression suite:

Testers must automate the regression suite to ensure automated regression tests whenever changes in the software are introduced. The automated regression suite ensures there are no bugs in the software even after frequent code changes.

Ensure accurate reports documentation:

It is best to document the software testing results in a report as it acts as excellent training material and helps stakeholders make informed decisions.

Major types of QA testing for businesses to leverage

Functional testing

• Unit testing

• Integration testing

• Regression testing

• Test automation

• User acceptance testing

Non-functional testing

• Security testing

• Performance and load testing

• Usability testing

• Accessibility testing

Next-gen & Specialized testing

• RPA testing

• AI-based testing

• Digital testing

• IoT testing

• Blockchain testing

• API testing

• Cloud testing

• Data migration testing

Top 5 QA Trends to watch in 2022

QAOps to leap in 2022:

Today’s digital businesses are rapidly adopting DevOps methodology to deliver software faster. However, faster delivery alone is not enough to deliver a great CX, and it is essential to ensure quality along with faster delivery. This is where QA in DevOps or QAOps plays its role, and it is expected to take a leap in 2022.

RPA to lead charts in 2022:

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an extension of automation, and it can be applied to automate almost anything in a structured form. In the upcoming years, the usage of RPA in software testing is expected to rise more as it will let testers automate large and complex data through an easy-to-use interface. Testers will be able to give commands to already taught robots to perform several tasks easily and can significantly save a lot of time and effort.

According to Globenewswire, the Global Robotic Process (RPA) Automation Market size is expected to reach $7.2 billion by 2025, rising at a CAGR of 32.6% during the forecast period of 2019-2025.

Rise in the usage of AI and ML in software testing:

As businesses have moved towards digital transformation, it has become essential to embed advanced technologies like AI and ML into software testing. AI and ML in software testing can help businesses understand customer behavior, predict market demand and deliver software faster with advanced testing techniques. Due to this reason, the use of AI and ML in software testing is expected to rise more in 2022.

According to Gartner, Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) software revenue is forecasted to reach $62.5 billion in 2022, increasing 21.3 percent from 2021.

Low code/no-code automation to gain prominence:

The low-code/no-code automation platforms are software programs that require little to no coding knowledge. It offers pre-designed workflow templates and a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface for customizing workflows that people without back-end computer programming knowledge can use easily. Since it provides various benefits to businesses, like faster time to market, scalability, self-service capability, etc., their usage is expected to grow more in 2022.

According to NASSCOM, the global low-code development industry was valued at $13.8 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28.1% during the forecast period 2021-2025

Cyber Security Testing to gain more attention:

Due to the rapidly rising cyber-attacks, cybersecurity has become an essential need for all industries and has also become a boardroom discussion for CXOs and CIOs. Today, businesses have realized the importance of security testing of their applications, networks, and systems to ensure secure transactions and complete protection of their customer data. Thus, cyber security testing has gained a lot of importance, and its prominence is expected to rise more in the coming years.

According to Mordor Intelligence, the Global Cybersecurity Market was valued at USD 132.94 billion in 2021, and it is expected to register a CAGR of 14.5% from 2022 to 2027.

Leading QA testing tools in 2022

UiPath Test Suite

It is an open-source RPA testing tool that can automate any desktop or web app. This RPA tool offers a complete suite for functional testing under one roof. The UiPath Test Suite contains StudioPro, Orchestrator, Test Management Hub, Test Manager, and Robots. UiPath can be hosted in virtual terminals or cloud environments and works well with .Net, Java, Flash, PDF, Legacy, SAP, etc.

Tricentis TOSCA:

It is an AI-driven, next-gen test automation testing tool that allows Agile and DevOps teams to achieve test automation goals rapidly. This tool enables teams to go beyond continuous testing with AI. Tricentis allows automating end-to-end testing of software applications. This tool combines multiple aspects of software testing (test case design, test automation, test data design and generation, and analytics) to test GUIs and APIs from a business perspective.

Selenium:

It is an open-source web automation tool and supports all OS like Windows, MAC, Linux, etc., and web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. It supports programming languages such as Java, PHP, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. It comes with a record and playback feature that helps test web applications. Testers can run various scripts in parallel using Selenium, making the test automation process faster.

Katalon Studio:

It is a codeless automation tool used to test API, mobile, web, and desktop applications. This testing tool supports multiple platforms like Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it also supports both SOAP and RESTful for API and services testing. This tool has some great features like recording actions, creating test cases, generating test scripts, executing tests, reporting results, and easily integrating with many other tools throughout the SDLC.

Botium:

It is an open-source test automation tool provided by Selenium and is used for testing chatbot applications. It supports chatbot makers in training and quality assurance: Chatbot makers define what the chatbot is supposed to do.

Conclusion

Today’s businesses need high-quality products to deliver a greater CX and to beat the competition. Quality assurance is an effective way to ensure the quality of products and services, and it can save cost, time, and effort by preventing defects in the software as QA teams identify them. Businesses should leverage software quality assurance testing from a next-gen specialist QA and software testing services provider for superior quality products and deliver a great CX.

As a Leading QA testing services provider, how can TestingXperts help businesses?

TestingXperts (Tx) is one of the 5 largest pure-play software testing services provider globally. Tx has been chosen as a trusted QA partner by Fortune clients and ensures superior testing outcomes for its global clientele. We have rich expertise in enabling end-to-end testing services for global clients across various industry domains like healthcare, telecom, BFSI, retail & eCommerce, etc.

Our wide range of QA testing services includes:

Test Advisory: TestingXperts’ Test Advisory Services provide you with specialist advice to help you achieve overall product quality, reduced release cycle time, faster time-to-market, and significant reductions in QA costs. Our Test advisory services will help you move to the next maturity level in QA.

DevOps Consulting Services: Our DevOps experts will analyze your business needs and help you achieve a strategic DevOps adoption roadmap. Our wide range of DevOps services like DevOps consulting, DevOps CI/CD implementation, Enterprise DevOps Transformation, IAC consulting and Implementation, and Test Automation in DevOps will help you achieve faster and quality releases.

Test Automation: We have in-house test automation experts with rich expertise in industry-leading test automation tools. We can help you reduce regression time and cost with our end-to-end test automation services with our in-house test automation accelerator Tx-Automate.

Functional Testing: Tx has years of experience providing functional testing services for clients across domains. Our wide range of functional testing services includes automation, manual, regression, and mobile application testing. We have in-house mobile test labs with numerous mobile devices.

Non-Functional Testing: Tx provides a wide range of non-functional testing services such as performance and load testing, security testing, usability testing, and accessibility testing. We also have an in-house performance testing accelerator, ‘Tx-PEARS,’ which helps with all non-functional testing requirements, including continuous monitoring of your infrastructure in production as well as in lower environments.

Next-gen Testing: Our wide range of next-gen testing services include AI testing, RPA testing using UiPath Test Suite, Digital testing, IoT testing, etc.

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Below is the infographic of important penetration testing tools in 2022:

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Content 1. An overview of the current banking industry 2. What are today’s customers looking for in banking apps? 3. Latest statistics depicting banking apps usage dominance during the pandemic 4. Why should banking systems leverage Quality Assurance (QA) testing? 5. 10 Reasons why QA testing should be leveraged by banking systems 6. Conclusion

An overview of the current banking industry

There has been a lot of buzz regarding digitization and the use of new-age technology in the banking sector in recent years. Undoubtedly, the current pandemic has led to the increased usage of banking mobile apps and web apps. According to Sensor Tower, there have been nearly 1.24 billion downloads of finance apps in Q2 2020, 840 million of which were made through Google Play, compared to 395 million through the iOS App Store. This statistics depicts the increased interest of customer towards banking applications.

It is predicted that to achieve more digitization in banking systems, the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud services, and blockchain is expected to rise. The customer experience (CX) and customer data security continue to remain the primary focus for the financial sector for which banking systems are looking for ways to improve their applications, simplify customer journey, and provide them with a seamless omnichannel experience. Hence, we are sharing some of the important features which today’s banking customers are looking for in digital banking apps.

What are today’s customers looking for in banking apps?

● Customers prefer banking applications to be instantly loaded, easy to operate and smooth transactions processing to deliver them a simplified and great user experience

● Experts believe that banking through mobile devices is much safer in comparison to open websites. Thus, today customers are looking for more secure and reliable banking applications that deliver a seamless transaction experience

● Due to the current pandemic, irrespective of the person’s age, everyone continues to focus on online banking having easy interface and quick access to various transactions features

● Customers also prefer apps to load faster and balance loads of users and remain flawless with no downtime while in use

● Customers want their banking apps to notify them of their balances and other important notifications to ease their banking process and get informed messages

● Mobile app ATM Connectivity to enable access to ATM via scanning is one upcoming trend that people are looking forward to

● Banking application features such as voice payments and image recognition are some more features needed by banking app users

Latest statistics depicting banking apps usage dominance during the pandemic

● According to Globenewswire, the global mobile banking market was valued at $715.3 million in 2018 and is expected to reach $1,824.7 million by 2026, registering a CAGR of 12.2% from 2019-2026

● According to Statista, 90% of users in the U.S. use mobile banking apps to check their balances, 79% do it to view recent transactions, 59% to pay bills, and 57% to make transfers. These statistics depict that a large set of the population uses mobile banking services and thus, the great UI of the mobile application is the need of the hour

● According to Statista, the average weekly usage of fintech apps in Japan went up by 55 percent, in South Korea it went up by 35%, and in the United States by 20% between December 29, 2019, to March 1, 2020, which coincides with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic

● According to the World Retail Banking Report 2020 (WRBR) published by Capgemini and Efma, the report states that over half (57%) of the consumers now prefer internet banking, up from 49% pre-COVID-19, and 55% prefer banking mobile apps, compared with 47% previously, the stakes have risen further as the COVID-19 context continues to move consumers towards digital banking

With the sudden spurt in the usage of digital banking apps, it becomes important for banking systems to ensure their mobile and web apps are digitalized and deliver a great user experience by leveraging Quality Assurance (QA) best practices.

Why should banking systems leverage Quality Assurance (QA) testing?

As technology is evolving, financial institutions are rapidly adopting digital technology and are moving towards digitization. The banking industry now heavily depends on technology and various types of banking applications, which need to perform seamlessly to provide a great experience to the customer.

Since banks deal with crucial customer data and heavy transactions 24/7, it becomes essentially important for banking systems to have the right QA strategy in place. QA testing helps to improve the quality of these banking products before releasing them to the market to ensure the product is defect-free, enabling seamless transactions and deliver a great customer experience. Hence, it is essential for banking systems to leverage QA testing to get high-quality and flawless mobile apps.

10 Reasons why QA testing should be leveraged by banking systems

1. Numerous underlying app layers require QA testing:

Banking applications usually have a multi-tier architecture or N-tier architecture. The most common 3 tier architecture has three layers namely presentation, application, and database layers. Since the API layers contain the logic of an application and directly touches both the data layer and presentation layers, it requires end-to-end QA testing.

With the advent of Open APIs, new business opportunities are delivered at the core of banking services. Thus, to enable such services, the back-end and middleware systems must be prepared to support open APIs which involves complex integrations. Hence, it becomes mandatory to validate all these underlying layers through API testing with a robust quality assurance process involved.

2. Integration with third-party apps & payment gateway needs end-to-end validation:

Banking systems require large scale integration with third-party apps such as eCommerce apps, gaming applications, food delivery applications, etc. To ensure that applications are well integrated with third-party applications and function properly, it is essential to conduct Integration and functional testing of banking systems.

Many times, we hear of cases where customer’s money gets stuck in the payment gateway and leads to transaction failure or pending status along with the deduction of money from their respective bank accounts. These type of glitches annoys the customer deeply. Hence, to ensure that your banking systems have stable payment gateway integration that provides a seamless transaction experience to customers, an effective QA testing is essential.

3. Server downtime/outages require testing:

Many times, banks face server issues or downtime which affects the working of banks and customers as well. Server downtime or outage leads to delayed payments or failed transactions which in turn causes loss to banks and customers get annoyed as well. Therefore, banking servers and applications need to be quality tested and assured to avoid server outage and ensure high performing applications under all load conditions.

4. Data security from cyber-threats need security testing:

Banks deals with crucial and confidential customer data and therefore the safety and privacy of data are of utmost importance. Banks ensure all possible efforts to save the data from cyber-attacks. But, as technology is evolving, hackers are using all possible means to hack customer data many-a-time.

Therefore, it is very essential to conduct vulnerability testing of banking systems to see there are no security loopholes in the system which can be exploited by cyber attackers.

5. Regulatory compliance necessitates QA testing:

Financial institutions have to comply with certain rules, compliances, and regulations. Therefore, all banking systems need to be QA tested to validate that they are not missing on any open banking API terms and conditions.

6. Cloud-based banking solutions need proper testing:

With the increasing surge of cloud technology, banks are moving their infrastructure to the cloud. Most of the banks have adopted a hybrid cloud model, where they have considered the private cloud for most critical processes and applications, and the public cloud for non-critical processes and applications.

Successful cloud implementation is still a challenge for many financial institutions. Hence, cloud app testing helps in ensuring the smooth functioning of cloud-based banking solutions by ensuring the successful implementation of cloud solutions. This cloud testing process also ensures that data is migrated successfully without any loss, while data migration takes place for the banking systems.

7. Application compatibility requires compatibility testing:

A large population of customers accesses banking applications on different mobile devices, operating systems, and browsers. Therefore, it is essential for banking systems to ensure their banking apps are compatible with various devices, OS, etc. Therefore, mobile app compatibility testing should be leveraged.

8. Seamless app navigation requires usability testing:

As users access the mobile or web apps, they must navigate to the exact page the user is looking for and should deliver easy and simple navigation through the app. Thus, to ensure the app allows easy and proper navigation and gives accurate output against the input given by the user,usability testing of banking applications and web apps is necessary.

9. Equal access of app to differently-abled people necessitates accessibility testing:

Since banking services are availed by almost every section of society which includes a differently-abled population as well, hence it becomes a mandate to have such applications that follow all accessibility regulations and enables easy access to a differently-abled population to ensure inclusivity and to fulfill societal responsibility.

10. Effective AI implementation requires AI Testing:

The banking sector is constantly striving to adopt AI to enable advanced data analytics, reduce fraudulent practices, and save considerable cost and time. According to an April 2019 report from IHS Markit, the business value of AI in global banking will reach $300 billion by 2030. Thus, AI testing of the banking system is essential to help the banking sector enable effective AI implementation to ensure innovation and deliver exceptional customer experience.

Conclusion

Today, the banking industry is rapidly evolving and moving towards digitalization. Banking applications are an essential part of the banking industry and these applications need to deliver an unmatched experience to customers in terms of quality, performance, usability, reliability, security, etc.

Hence, banking systems should leverage quality assurance to ensure seamless banking apps are enabled for their customers to deliver a great customer experience. Therefore, banking systems require robust end-to-end digital testing of their systems by next-gen testing services provider to get high-quality banking applications to deliver a seamless user experience.

The post What Makes Quality Assurance Essential for Banking Systems? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Content 1. Big Data Analytics in Healthcare 2. 7 key benefits of using Big Data Analytics in Healthcare   2.1 Improves patient healthcare   2.2 Predicts patients at higher risk quickly & efficiently   2.3 Eases patient diagnostics with EHRs   2.4 Ensures to reduce overall healthcare costs   2.5. Delivers greater insights into patient cohorts   2.6 Enables improved healthcare with fitness devices   2.7 Generates real-time alerting 3. Conclusion

In today’s world, it is a fact that digitization has been adopted across industries such as telecom, banking, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, FinTech, EdTech, etc. The adaptation of digitization of healthcare has more significance than other sectors as it contains the medical data related to patients, their diagnosis, treatment schedules, imaging results etc. which generates huge volumes of data which has been collectively named as big data.

Big Data Analytics in Healthcare

Typically, this big data refers to the abundant health data amassed from numerous ways of electronic health records (EHRs), medical imaging, genomic sequencing, X-rays, and diagnostic reports, etc.

Importantly, big data has changed the way doctors and healthcare professional use, manage, and analyze this critical data to ensure better patient outcomes. Interestingly, to analyze these numerous amounts of big data, effective techniques of statistical analysis is required.

This statistical analysis or the big data analytics helps to predict hidden information and this healthcare analytics has the potential to deliver numerous advantages to patients.

Big data Analytics Stats

According to Allied Market Research, Big data analytics in healthcare is the complex process of examining big data to discover information including hidden patterns, market trends, unknown correlations, and customer preferences, which can help organizations to make informed clinical and business decisions.

The global big data analytics in healthcare market size was valued at $16.87 billion in 2017, and is projected to reach $67.82 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 19.1% from 2018 to 2025.

Hence, by using new technological improvements like Big data analytics, the enormous volumes of big data in healthcare are converted into useful, and actionable information that continues to deliver great insights to doctors, healthcare providers and patients in an effective way. The usage of big data analytics in healthcare brings about lot of positive and life-saving patient outcomes. Leveraging big data analytics in healthcare brings in many more benefits which have been detailed below.

7 key benefits of using Big Data Analytics in Healthcare

1. Improves patient healthcare:

The significant benefit from the knowledge derived from big data analytics delivers greater clinical insights to various healthcare providers. These cutting-edge analytics improves patient care in the healthcare system as this data facilitates doctors to prescribe effective treatment and make clinical decisions more accurate further eliminating any ambiguity involved in the treatment.

Big data analytics seems to bring in a change in healthcare which is moving towards bringing in better patient outcomes as the data is used to discover which practices are most effective for patients.

2. Predicts patients at higher risk quickly & efficiently:

While considering the population-wide data for a particular area, specifically predictive analytics pinpoints which segment of the patients are at higher risk for diseases and hints for early intervention to protect them. This sort of prediction is more suitable for depictions with respect to certain chronic diseases.

Predictive analytics is drawn by aggregating data that are related to a variety of factors which includes patient’s medical history, demographic area data, socio-economic profile data, patient’s comorbidities existing in the area, etc.

3. Eases patient diagnostics with EHRs:

This is the most widespread application of big data in enabling effective patient diagnostics with every patient having their own electronic health records (EHRs). This EHRs includes the demographics, medical history, allergies of patients, diagnostic test results of current and previous illnesses along with other details.

These EH records are shared through secured information systems and are easily accessible by doctors and other healthcare professionals. They can access these files and the personal data cannot be modified but the diagnostics and treatment can be updated by the doctors. The EHRs can also trigger notifications alerting the patients about their forthcoming doctors or diagnostic visits and even track their prescriptions.

4. Ensures to reduce overall healthcare costs:

Healthcare providers can leverage the electronic health records (EHRs) which significantly helps to identify large patterns that lead to a greater understanding of patient’s health patterns. This in turn can essentially help cut costs by reducing unnecessary care or hospitalization.

Typically, the greater insights this analytics data gives to physicians truly translates to better patient care. This data also pinpoints them for shorter hospital stays, and in some cases for fewer admissions or re-admissions. This further helps patients with healthcare cost reduction due to lesser hospitalizations.

Moreover, by using predictive analytics, the data helps to estimate individual patient costs and helps to maximize healthcare efficiency enormously by carefully planning the treatment.

5. Delivers greater insights into patient cohorts:

By analyzing healthcare big data, it draws a greater insight into patient cohorts that are at greatest risk for various illnesses, and in a way helps to take out some proactive prevention measures.

Interestingly, this sort of analytics data can effectively be used to educate, inform and carefully motivate patients to take the responsibility for their own wellbeing. Moreover, by bringing over the clinical data together, it helps to bring in more effectiveness into the patient treatment plans which ensures better patient outcomes.

6. Enables improved healthcare with fitness devices:

Today, many consumer fitness products are available like Fitbit, and Apple Watch, etc. which keep a track on the physical activity levels of the users. The data thus collected by numerous devices used by people is sent to cloud servers, which is categorically being used by physicians to know the overall health and can even accordingly plan for individual’s wellness programs.

This analytical fitness products user data is analyzed which can be accessed by physicians to know about their physical activity levels and the data can also be used to know about specific health-related trends.

7. Generates real-time alerting:

There are specific medical healthcare decision support software that analyzes medical data on the spot that deliver real-time alerting to help healthcare providers who in turn use that real-time data to deliver better prescriptive decisions.

Doctors, in order to reduce the patient visits to hospitals are insisting on patients to use wearables which will collect patient’s health data continuously and sends the data to cloud. This data is accessed by doctors to prescribe medicines based on the results and values.

Conclusion

In today’s competitive world, latest technologies like big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning are being used by healthcare organizations to gain real-time patient insights with huge data available in place.

Specifically, by using big data analytics in healthcare, it empowers with actionable insights on patient’s data and outcomes and ensures to reduce overall healthcare costs, predict high risk patients more quickly, generate real-time alerting and so on.

Healthcare solutions providers must ensure that their applications are high-performing and delivering great customer experience by enabling end-to-end digital testing of these healthcare solutions by leveraging next-gen testing services (www.testingxperts.com).

The post 7 Key Benefits of Big Data Analytics in Healthcare first appeared on TestingXperts.

In these unprecedented times with coronavirus targeting almost every country in the world, this is indeed a great disaster for the human race. The pandemic has been expanding its roots, and the devastating impact is not only on humans but also on every segment of the industry.

Content 1. Need of Remote Testing Services 2. Types of Remote Testing Services 3. Benefits of Remote Testing Services for Businesses 4. Conclusion

Need of Remote Testing Services

Enterprises across the globe are in need for faster delivery and at the same time require quality products but are unable to support their go-to-market timelines due to many challenging factors. Most of the businesses have been disrupted due to the current pandemic and continue to vouch for alternatives to uphold their upcoming product timelines with effective business strategies.

Some of these businesses face challenges with talent shortages, lack of domain experienced QA experts to support their ongoing IT delivery moves. Consequently, businesses are in a dire need for alternatives that might uphold their product delivery timelines to ensure quality products.

In a recent article by Everest Group,  it is mentioned that ‘Talent shortages will become acute. Increasing focus on automation and digital transformation will further widen the demand-supply gap for skills, making it difficult for organizations to source suitable skills internally or in the open market.’

Evidently, In the wake of the current pandemic, global enterprises are in need of suitable alternatives and can leverage Remote testing services to be ensured of their time-to-market timelines. They need remote testing services to plug critical gaps in their delivery, with special focus to be laid down on security monitoring, disaster recovery and performance monitoring.

Significantly, the needy enterprises can leverage a wide range of remote testing services listed below by software testing service providers to be ensured of faster quality releases and leverage benefits with nearshore and offshore testing services.

According to a recent article by Nearshore Americas which states that “This new way of working for some is what Nearshore has always done. Collaboration is crucial and is where nearshore excels. Collaboration means working together closely, and even if remotely.

Types of Remote Testing Services 

Remote Test Advisory:

Some businesses face challenges towards setting up the effective QA function across the enterprise. The right QA strategy can help you improve the overall product quality and reduce the release cycle time. It also enables faster time-to-market and helps reduce QA costs.

Remote Test Advisory services help to achieve the right QA strategy across the enterprise. This sort of remotely conducted test advisory service ensures the business moves to the next maturity level in QA and helps to effectively control the rising QA costs.

Crowdsourced Testing:

This type of testing is an emerging trend in software testing that exploits the benefits of crowdsourcing and cloud platforms. Essentially it differs from other traditional testing methods as it is carried out by different testers located at different locations across the globe.

The software is tested by different people under diverse realistic platforms which makes this testing process more reliable, fast, and cost-effective. Moreover, this process uses remote usability testing as specific target groups can be used to test the software. The testers involved belong to different workplaces.

Crowdsourced testing is best for both compatibility testing and usability testing, and specifically covers all possible issues to ensure quality software.

Performance Testing:

Performance or load testing is the process of determining the system’s speed, responsiveness, reliability, and stability under varying loads. There are various types of performance testing which include load testing, volume testing, stress testing, capacity testing, soak/endurance testing, and spike testing which combined fall under non-functional testing service segment.

The remote QA team performs the end-to-end testing of the web app or mobile app for its performance to ensure the stability under sudden spikes and deliver high-performing flawless applications.

Security Testing:

This is a unique and an important type of software testing that uncovers vulnerabilities, threats, and risks in a software application. This testing process prevents malicious attacks on applications from intruders and helps in detecting all possible security risks in the system. With a lot of cyber-attacks today both on applications and system infrastructure, it is necessary for businesses to leverage this form of testing.

Some of the important types of security testing include Static code analysis, Penetration testing, Ethical hacking, Security Auditing, etc.

Remote Usability Testing:

Specifically, Remote usability testing is a testing method that allows to conduct user research with various users in their natural environment. The testers record the screen and voice, depending on the software tested, as test participants interact with the product and experience it in their natural environment.

Specifically, Remote user testing is a form of usability testing wherein the QA tester moderates the testing process through phone, webcam, or an online tool and rarely will be available on-site with the user.

Further usability testing is suitable for typically validating concepts and also for gathering qualitative insights about the product. There are many automated usability testing tools that can be leveraged to deliver effective usability test results.

Accessibility Testing:

It is important and in some countries it is a mandate that all business applications should be accessible to differently-abled people with disabilities like motor, visual and other hearing impairments along with color blindness, deafness, etc. All business apps and websites should be compliant with accessibility regulations like W3C’s which include WCAG 1.0/WCAG 2.0, BITV 1.0, Section 508 & Stance Act, etc.

Effective remote accessibility testing with various accessibility testing tools ensures that your web apps and mobile apps are accessible to all types of people even with disabilities.

Mobile Testing:

With mobile apps running in millions, it becomes critical for businesses to ensure flawless and secure mobile apps that truly deliver a great customer experience (CX). Independent mobile testing services companies should be leveraged to ensure effective and flawless mobile apps that delivers great CX. Various open-source and commercial mobile automation testing tools can be used to deliver apps that make digital customers happy.

Automation Testing:

Enterprises across industries continue to demand faster releases and quality software to withstand market competition. With enterprises adopting agile and DevOps methodologies, software testing forms an integral part of it.

The earlier manual method of testing does not suffice completely the present-day complicated architecture applications with connected IoT devices in place. Hence, there is a critical need for businesses to adopt test automation that ensures faster and quality releases along with saving time and effort.

Software test automation is a method in software testing that effectively makes use of special test automation tools. These tools are used to control the execution of tests using well-crafted test cases for each of the user scenarios and compares the actual test results to the expected results.

Automated testing is the process that validates whether the software is functioning properly and effectively meets the given requirements using various test automation tools.

Cloud Testing:

The process of cloud testing involves monitoring and reporting on real-world user traffic conditions. Cloud-based platforms increase enterprise’s ability to reduce time-to-market drastically along with eliminating upfront costs. Further, an effective cloud testing strategy is essential for businesses to realize the complete benefits of from the cloud solution.

Data Migration Testing:

The process of Data migration deals with moving data from one system to another and though this process seems to be pretty straightforward, it involves a change in storage and database. Data migration testing ensures the data migrated from heterogeneous sources to the data warehouse occurs with no loss of information or data.

Businesses need to leverage data migration testing to ensure their data migration is effective and businesses should preferably leverage testing services providers to get the complete advantage with this form of software testing.

Benefits of Remote Testing Services for Businesses

a) Benefits with Professional QA teams

b) Economic benefits

Benefits with Professional QA Teams

1. Access to QA resources with required/specified domain expertise:

With the availability of domain-specific QA teams with the testing services providers, businesses can take complete advantage of the resources. Domain-specific teams have more knowledge about specific domains and are more helpful as they can better handle tasks and ensures better outcomes.

2. Eases team communication with Videoconferencing tools:

With the numerous video conferencing tools available such as Teams, Skype, Zoom, etc., it becomes easier than ever for various agile teams to connect with the stakeholders. Close collaboration between QA teams, developers and product owners ensure better outcomes as quality work is ensured.

3. Greater availability of professional QA teams as per time zones:

Professional testing teams are available with independent testing service providers. These QA teams are well experienced and perform effective testing practices to deliver quality at speed. These expert QA teams are available to serve clients according to their time zones across the globe.

4. Dedicated QA teams ensure faster speed of execution:

The availability of experienced QA resources along with clearly defined requirements helps for better framing of test suites. In projects where goals are well defined, it effectively helps the QA team to have a complete understanding of the project. This further ensures faster execution due to usage of test automation with various types of software automation testing tools.

Benefits – Economic Aspects

1. Ensures cost-effectiveness:

Today, businesses continue to feel the pressure of costs due to the unexpected pandemic. But, due to the nearshore and offshore testing services, they can be ensured of a reduction in total QA costs and be assured of faster releases with underlying quality software. Thus, remote testing services help to reduce total operating costs, and businesses can be assured of the quicker ROI.

2. Ensures effective SLAs:

The remote testing process becomes transparent and more effective as closely guided service level agreements with clients prove to be helpful and useful to businesses.

3. Facilitates to focus on business development:

As various dedicated teams perform the testing activities, the product owner can ease their efforts and concentrate on core business activities.

4. Delivers time-to-time comprehensive reporting:

The dedicated QA teams prove to be useful and deliver time-to-time reporting to the product owner and also to the stakeholders. The reports generated are comprehensive in nature and become visible to all teams to make them take appropriate actions correctly.

Conclusion

Businesses have been highly impacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to face the wrath of ups and downs in these difficult times.  They continue to struggle due to the lack of skilled and talented resources who provide effective services to enable them to stick to their go-to-market timelines.

In this uncontrolled situation with instability all around due to the pandemic, businesses can leverage nearshore and offshore remote testing services to be ensured of faster releases.  At the same time quality software is ensured and their time to market timelines are essentially met.

Last but not the least, businesses must leverage remote testing services by next-gen QA services providers that have professional QA teams to work remotely on projects to support their requirements during the current pandemic.

At TestingXperts, Our expert QA testers are available remotely to help your business with an agile, flexible and cost-effective way to build QA process. Talk to our experts today!.

The post Remote Testing Services – Its importance during Pandemic first appeared on TestingXperts.

Contents
1. What should Retail industry CEOs Look for in 2022?
2. What are the Generic Challenges Faced by Retail Businesses?
3. What are the Common Software (Application) Challenges Faced by Retailers?
4. Software Testing for Retail
5. What are the testing services required for Retail Apps?
6. What are the Benefits Retailers Get with Effective Software Testing?
7. Conclusion

In recent years with rapid digitalization across business sectors, the Retail industry has been the most impacted by these digitization moves. The Retail segment mainly delivers an omnichannel experience. This includes a user-friendly and stable customer experience at the front end and a load of transaction data at the back-end. The retail segment software includes inventory, CRM apps, data warehousing, e-commerce channels, supply chain management, and Point of sale (POS) systems, etc. Undoubtedly, the effective working of retail software drives the return on investment (ROI) for retailers.

Especially, for the retail industry, the customer experience is at the center of their business. A poor quality experience at the storefront or with mobile apps that process the payment transactions would greatly impact customer experience and affects their business bottom line!

Also, the retail marketplace centered over POS needs to satisfy customers by delivering effective user experience. This can be achieved by a specialized POS testing process, else it has a significant impact on overall retail business outcomes.

What should Retail industry CEOs Look for in 2022?

• Digital readiness to deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX)

• Deliver high-quality solutions to best meet consumer behavior with early-to-market

• Data and insights-driven approach to digital eCommerce and omnichannel presence

• Focus on products for better performance and sustainability by adopting proper market approaches to appeal to the audience (especially Millennials & Gen Z)

• Process automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics to help eCommerce & retail businesses achieve more by enhancing solutions with improved CX

• Introduce effective business models that drive higher ROI and, at the same time, innovate with new services and offerings to meet ever-growing customer demand

Today, the retail sector is constantly changing and there are new challenges faced by all players. The challenges are faced at both the business as well as application level. These challenges should be properly fixed to ensure retail business success.

Overview of Present Retail Sector

For today’s businesses, the online channel has evidently become the most effective platform to perform their business transactions. Every business domain continues to take the complete advantage of online marketing to enchant their customers. Evidently, internet retailing has become a modern pathway for shopping to many internet surfers and online users. The increase in the usage of mobile phones, e-commerce, and internet services has truly simplified shopping means and effectively multiplied the scope of online shopping.

Over the past few years, online retailing is trending and accounting to over 1.5% sales across the globe. This is because of the available easy shopping ways being enabled through mobile apps, online channels and the availability of umpteen online payment and transaction methods. Among the many industry types that are emerging today, retail is one of the finest and fastest-growing sectors. It is the industry where products or services are provided for consumers by following a set of selling methods or practices. Also, it is the sector that is experiencing year-over-year progress.

The main reason why the retail sector is receiving the prominence is due to the changing lifestyle of the people and the increased dependency on obtaining services and products with ease. The need for retail services is tremendously increasing and the statistical report prepared for the total worldwide retail sales is a clear example with a total number of retails estimated over trillion dollars for the coming years.

As per the Global Retail Industry Analysis, in 2017 the retail industry was valued at USD 23,460 billion, but this effective number has been gradually increasing and during the period 2018-2023, it is aimed to reach USD 31,880.8 billion. This is because the retail markets have become more competitive and are excelling to target many developed and small countries to expand their consumer base. Also, the retail giants are preferring the online mode to follow their consumers and provide them the best offers that can result in future sales and increase their brand reputation with the usage of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Internet channels help in increasing the production and as well introduce several other complications for the retail sector. It has become essential for the retail sector to choose mobile technology and leverage proper infrastructure to deliver the best customer experience.

Though the retail segment has been expanding in recent years, it continues to face certain challenges that have been categorized as generic challenges and application-level challenges.

What are the Generic Challenges Faced by Retail Businesses?

• Challenges faced while embracing in the facet of digital transformation across lines of business
• Maintaining customer loyalty continues to be an important challenge for the retailer's success
• Delivering a good customer experience is a major factor to uphold their brand and protect their business
• Keeping up with the ever-changing customer expectations is another critical factor of concern
• Seasonal trends influence customers, and retailers need to balance to upkeep their customer shopping experience both online and offline
• Adopting new technology solutions for the retail industry is an important challenge to deliver secure and safe transactions
• New innovation trends of Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) continue to have a great impact on the retail sector

What are the Common Software (Application) Challenges Faced by Retailers?

• App performance issues negatively affect customer experience and damages brand loyalty
• Security glitches while processing transactions across e-commerce channels also disengages customer from using them
• Customers continue to abandon apps due to payment processing delays
• Increased/Heavy app loading time also adversely affects customer experience
• App usability plays an important role, as complex navigation flows will refrain users from using i

Software Testing for Retail

Primarily, in e-commerce websites and apps, any sort of design issues can greatly hinder business growth. As customers demand the latest features, the online channels failing to deliver these, suffer from customers disengaging.

Any sort of performance and security issues prevailing in online shopping apps adversely affects the customer experience. Hence, in order to overcome these challenges, retailers must adopt effective software quality assurance. The Next-gen software testing services will ensure and deliver a great customer experience.

What are the testing services required for Retail Apps?

An Overview of the Retail App Features and the corresponding testing service required to achieve Quality at speed

• Retail apps are generally integrated with several external hardware and software peripherals. There is a need for thorough functional testing and non-functional testing services
• Retail apps user interface (UI) and business processes change frequently. Hence they need thorough testing with automated regression testing
• Retail apps are integrated with various payment systems which need payment gateway integration testing
• Security testing is essential as customers across their digital journey need fast, effective, safe and secure transactions
• Retail apps require a digital assurance and testing strategy which can be applied to ensure apps perform stably under varying loads
• E-commerce channels should deliver great user experience for which usability testing should be taken up
• Retail apps testing needs embracing Test automation frameworks to test various scenarios of the application with test automation tools
• Test automation helps to deliver faster releases within shorter timelines which helps software developers and QA teams to deliver faster.

What are the Benefits Retailers Get with Effective Software Testing?

Benefits to customers

• Improves customer experience across the e-commerce channel as the application becomes glitch-free
• Quicker development is ensured as defects are identified early in the SDLC
• Improves business outcomes as new features are thoroughly tested before go-to-market
• Enhances user experience with great UI and stable performance with load testing across the e-commerce channels
• The application becomes accessible to one and all and achieves accessibility norms

Benefits to Businesses

• Considerable cost savings assured as faster releases are ensured by embracing test automation
• Reduced time to market as faster releases are achieved with DevOps Continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD)
• Reduced human intervention as test automation is leveraged
• Efficient and comprehensive reports deliver quality insights
• Faster time to market results in a quicker return on investment (RoI)

Conclusion

Retail business use cases are not identical as the retail industry cannot be generalized, unlike other sectors. There is a huge challenge involved in combining retail software with wide integrations all through. This all requires attention to detail and an effective focus on quality.

Hence, testing e-commerce applications is critical to drive online sales and deliver a great user experience. It also makes sure the website or the apps on mobile devices are globally available and accessible to all. Therefore, an effective end-to-end digital testing is essential for retail software.

Leverage our experts with domain knowledge in digital testing to achieve quality retail software. Connect with our automated testing services team.

The post Why Software Testing is Critical for Retail Sector? first appeared on TestingXperts.

This is the second post in a series of posts about InsurTech and Artificial Intelligence. You can read the first post of the series here.

Contents 1. InsurTech and Artificial Intelligence 2. How AI Is Addressing The Industry’s Key Challenges 3. Conclusion

InsurTech and Artificial Intelligence

In the previous post we acknowledged that the insurance industry is traditional, complex and is being disrupted by AI. Because of the complex nature of its products / services, innovation through AI is often stifled, and customers find the products / services confusing which is often a root cause of poor customer experience. However, challenges like these shouldn’t stop AI to revolutionize the entire industry sector and deliver better customer experiences.

In this article, let’s take a look at some of the key challenges in the insurance sector, and how AI can help overcome these challenges.

How AI Is Addressing The Industry’s Key Challenges

Reaching Out to Prospect Customers at the Right Time

InsurTech companies that are aspiring to use digital channels to reach out to their prospects are uncertain about the user behaviour and the right time to establish contact. The data driven intelligence when combined with innovation can help these insurance companies successfully contact people who are most likely to buy their products at that time – allowing them to spend less energy, time and money in identifying their prospects.

Quicker Claims Processing

One of the biggest challenges that is hindering the complete digital implementation in the insurance industry is its tricky and manual claims business processes. Using AI for Quick Claims Support, especially for loyal customers, companies can reduce claims processing timelines and provide next-gen support to customers. Leveraging AI in the claims processing and Chatbots implementation can help insurers offer consistent customer experience, greater transparency and effectively reduce policies’ costs.

Overcoming Ineffective Fraud Detection

Securing customers’ information is crucial to curb increased frauds and risks. AI in insurance will ease out fraud detection by ensuring accurate and reliable customer information, helping companies to improve the overall quality of their service and reduce operational costs.

Applying AI to the Current Underwriting Process

Applying AI to the underwriting process can help them seamlessly evaluate and analyze the risks of insuring people and thereby reduce business risks.

Translating Customer Behavior Data into Actionable Business Data

Digital marketing analytics provide a wealth of deep insights enabling companies to track how individual prospects and leads interact at different stages in the buyer’s journey. When marketing analytics are combined with smart data-driven technologies like behaviour analytics and Big Data, it provides a strong base of decision making. Companies with AI based effective data analytics create targeted policies that meet customers’ specific needs.

Conclusion:

Insurance companies today need to focus on using the latest technologies, such as AI-powered solutions and Automation to improve customer experience, effectively respond to the market needs, enhance decision making process and increase productivity.

Comprehensive testing services provided by TestingXperts can help insurance companies validate complex AI based systems. Tx’s approach can automate various testing processes, business processes to achieve high code coverage and find new patterns of failure. Connect with our experts and check out how Tx is helping insurers to shift from an ‘identify and improve’ model to a ‘predict and prevent’ QA model.

The post INSURTECH: HOW AI IS ADDRESSING THE INDUSTRY’S KEY CHALLENGES first appeared on TestingXperts.

Earlier, the QA industry had a horizontal focus and was the same across various business domains. But, today the industry inclined towards specialization; to be precise the domain specialization has become a must. This verticalization of the QA industry is bridging the gap between business users and IT teams, thus, helping increase the significance of the work/product delivered to end-users. Therefore, it is important for QA teams to have a profound knowledge of their business domain before testing an application.

Ways How Domain Specialization Plays a Role in Evolving QA Practices

To consider QA teams as quality gatekeepers, their understanding of the domain must match the required industry standards. In this infographic, we will discuss the 7 major ways how the domain specialization plays a key role in evolving QA practices

The post 7 WAYS DOMAIN SPECIALIZATION PLAYS A KEY ROLE IN EVOLVING QA PRACTICES first appeared on TestingXperts.

The key business drivers behind moving workloads to the cloud vary from one organization to another. It might be an intention to improve scalability and performance or simply to reduce the organization’s upfront investment by assigning their IT infrastructure responsibilities to one of the trusted service providers, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon (AWS), IBM, Google or Oracle. Forbes explains some of the many reasons or business drivers for organizations moving to the cloud in this article

Contents 1. QA Focus Areas for Successful Cloud Migration 2. Conventional Testing Vs Cloud Testing 3. Addressing Key Challenges That Arise While Validating Applications 4. Functional Validation 6. Integration Testing (With Third-Party Applications) 7. Security Testing 8. Performance Testing 9. How TestingXperts Can Help You

Once you have decided to move your products or services to the cloud, testing is a crucial step in the cloud migration journey. It avoids cloud scalability issues, server breakdown issues such as application/website crash, database errors and more, which can be extremely risky in terms of brand’s reputation, time and resources.

With that in mind, business owners or IT decision makers should properly plan and perform their cloud migration journey while putting cloud Testing in top priority during cloud migration irrespective of environment.

QA Focus Areas for Successful Cloud Migration

Cloud migration requires key focus on certain areas of Application (product/service) Testing, such as: Functional Validation, Integration Testing, Security Testing, Scalability and Performance Testing.

However, cloud hosting adds new dimensions to application validation when it is compared to conventional testing. The table below depicts QA focus areas of application testing migrated to cloud, compared to conventional testing:

Conventional Testing Vs Cloud Testing

Addressing Key Challenges That Arise While Validating Applications

Cloud migration throws certain challenges in validating applications. Some of the instances and how to validate them at various aspects are discussed here.

Functional Validation

Functional validation or cloud-ready validation assesses production readiness of migrated applications. It is fundamental to verify if various aspects of the migrated applications are performing as per SLAs. For an effective cloud migration, validate SaaS/Cloud services functions and perform end-to-end application’s function validation. Check the following test cases to perform functional validation of an application for cloud testing:

• Automated test suite is compatible with the application over the cloud
• Whether a valid input gives the expected results
• Service integration with other applications
• Page layout and object references are working as expected
• Cross-platform compatibility is ensured

Integration Testing (With Third-Party Applications)

Cloud migration is not just moving data, but it is managing a range of variables – security, authentication, integration, compatibility, testing and monitoring over time. Among the above variables, integration with third-party tools plays a significant role. Because, today, there are many technology choices with cloud integration than ever before. But, the dependencies between systems and applications can complicate integration testing. If you are integrating a lot of services together that come with varying SLAs, testing in the cloud with a plethora of third-party tools, services and applications, represents a major challenge. To avoid such issues, ensure you go through the below checklist and validate them effectively:

• What interfaces and systems need to be covered while planning for integration testing?
• What resources you need to do the validation and integration testing?
• Have a plan to develop and execute tests in coordination with third-party components
• Perform Integration Testing early
• Detect coordination problems in cloud environment – this is to ensure the applications are well configured with cloud environment

If you don’t have in-house expertise, make sure to outsource validation for integration to your cloud provider or a managed service provider who fills the gap.

Security Testing

One of the main deterrents to migrating to the cloud is Security. Applications can be very secure in the cloud, but unlike conventional storage, you will not have any hardware. This means, you don’t have complete control over the data. To keep the data secure in the cloud requires a whole new level of security procedures and strategies. If you are planning for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) architecture, ensure you check whether your workloads can be migrated to the cloud; or will there be any significant difficulties after migration. Following checklist can be handy to crosscheck some cases:

• If you have legacy applications running on outdated platforms

• Proprietary software

• User validation – ensure the applications are accessible only by authorized users and are available only to them

• Protective measures against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks

• Validation of data security at rest, in use and during transit

• almost inevitably, the data is going to spread across multiple networks and devices after migration, with varying levels of risk and security. Before you can take an effective plan to avoid risk completely

here’s a checklist or questions you need to have answers:

• What type of sensitive data do you use, store or transfer?
• Who has access to this data?
• Why, when and where the users access this data?
• How is data stored when it is idle?
• How data access is controlled?
• What are the compliance requirements?

Various aspects of application Security Testing include: Data security and data privacy testing, application transaction security, business process security and user privacy security testing.

Performance Testing

Assessing performance and response time requirements of applications and workloads while migrating to the cloud is a significant factor determining cloud migration success.

There are areas that affect moving an application to a cloud service, some of them include response time implications and scalability factors. Check out the below steps to ensure workload performance and SLAs are met:

• Identify and document business transactions and application’s end-to-end flow
• Identify business SLAs for the business transactions
• Examine if your software comes with limited internet bandwidth or intensive CPU and input-output capacity requirements
• Address application’s architecture that is not appropriate with the cloud
• Identify monitoring requirements and setup tools
• Validate response times as per SLAs – perform Load Testing in parallel and validate whether applications or service performances under various loads are meeting the SLAs

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan

Be prepared for the worst-case scenarios in the cloud, from simple data recovery and disaster recovery practice to a plan addressing unique incidents of attack. Validate all your disaster recovery plans in the event of cloud outages.

• Test, measure and update business continuity processes periodically
• Perform tests to run simulations and evaluate team’s readiness
• Consider the test results to change or update your business continuity plan over time
• Validate application instances to restore automatically during hardware failures

How TestingXperts Can Help You

Moving to the cloud is a smarter way to get better and faster service at less price. And, this is only possible once all the boxes in the checklists mentioned in this article have been crossed and you follow the steps of each testing area correctly. Testing the objectives/validations and approaches that were mentioned in the above cloud assessment checklist could be quite tough. Our best bet is to work with a team that has done cloud migration testing before, many times.

TestingXperts helped hundreds of enterprises assess their cloud migration journey successfully by deploying validation checklists for each application to be migrated – avoiding problems and additional costs during IT migration.

The post QA Testing Checklists for Successful Cloud Migration first appeared on TestingXperts.