Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the lives of consumers at many levels. From smartwatches and fitness trackers to connected cars and homes, the market for wearable technology is expanding and finding new niches.

Contents 1. Role of Usability Testing 2. Why is Usability Testing Critical? 3. Reasons Why Usability Testing Cannot Be Ignored 4. Conclusion

Role of Usability Testing

According to a report by industry analyst firm CCS insights, there will be a growth of $25 billion by 2019 for the wearables market, and over 125 million units are expected to ship in 2019.

While the above statistics make a strong point that wearables and smart devices will be the future and the world will be using these devices to perform daily activities., there is an extensive need to double down testing efforts.

The race to become an ideal choice for customers is pressuring enterprises across all business domains. In particular, with user experience, every brand is building strategies to ensure better customer experience. Considering the focus that is on strengthening their digital impact, every brand/service/product is striving to come up with appealing website designs and mobile-based applications.

Those winning brands in the wearable tech ecosystem recognize the importance of customer experience for the growth of their product. Every day, there is a new competition in the wearables space. From watches to glasses, different challenges are involved with every technology. However, the main challenge faced by the wearables industry is to ensure the best user experience.

Why is Usability Testing Critical?

Usability Testing identifies crucial usability issues before the product is launched. It helps determine the usability standards for the target audience. It also helps to gather real-time feedback from the target audience using an application. Usability Testing has proven to decrease support costs, increase user satisfaction, and save big on development and redesign costs.

Reasons Why Usability Testing Cannot Be Ignored

1. Easy access to information

Wearables gather information such as the number of steps taken, miles covered, track heartbeat of a user and more. Usability Testing ensures the data captured by these devices is easily accessible and displayed to users clearly.

2. Ease of use

Wearable devices provide ease to people who want to track their movements. If the device is not easily accessible and is complex, it is obvious that its market would be limited after receiving initial feedback from the users. The device should be easy to use and should be aesthetically attractive. Usability Testing considers various aspects to check if the device is user-friendly and is appealing to the customers or not. Some aspects are:

– Screen Size

– Font Size

– Colors Used

– Touch Panel

– Easy Scroll

3. Gesture and voice feedback

Wearables are on the users’ body constantly, and people move in unanticipated ways. What happens when a hello wave interrupts tracking or switches a smart device from ambient to interactive mode? Device input discrepancies could be the make it or break it for a user. This is where Usability Testing comes into the picture as it checks the device for any struggle while registering the different tones of voice.

4. Call interruption and notifications

As wearables sync to mobile devices, but do not necessarily have all the functions of a mobile, disturbances like notifications and calls can interrupt or even ruin the user. Helped by Interrupt Testing (a part of usability testing), it can be validated that the calls or notifications do not interrupt the functioning of the device.

5. Connectivity issues

Most wearables connect to the phone via Bluetooth, which makes Bluetooth connectivity the most important thing to test as connectivity issues can annoy even the techiest of users. Usability Testing ensures that setting up wearable device connectivity with mobile is easy and doable without toiling much.

6. Feedback from user groups

Usability testing involves real-time usage of the device to get candid feedback of the users. It is essential to discover defects and errors that are unknown and can arise when a user is using the device.

Conclusion

Wearable technology market is emerging, and the demand is likely to rise in future. Therefore, to attract more consumers, smart technology is required. However, the interface being offered should be easy to use. To deliver a consistent, seamless and high-quality experience for users, wearables should be thoroughly tested.

To ensure Quality is no more a concern, outsourcing QA to a third-party organization with the right expertise can be your best choice. At TestingXperts, our focus is to keep your applications secure and achieve customers’ satisfaction. Connect with us today for more information on our Quality Assurance and Software Testing services.

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User acceptance testing (UAT) is the most crucial phase in the software development lifecycle. Uat testing ensures the new system or uat defect management process meets the user requirements. It is crucial to get the application through the user acceptance tests as it is the last quality gate validates product quality, accuracy, and compliance before its deployment into production.

Contents 1. Objectives of UAT testing 2. Role of QA Teams in User Acceptance Testing 3. What are the different types of User acceptance testing (UAT)? 4. Tasks Performed By the QA Team for a Successful UAT Process 5. What are the tips QA teams should follow while practicing UAT? 6. How is UAT different from other levels of testing? 7. Conclusion

A successful UAT is crucial for deploying systems with no errors and business risks. However, implementing UAT in an agile environment might lead to frequent and reduced cycles of testing. This mandates the testers to develop skills of optimized testing techniques, automation and work in collaboration with the development and QA teams.

Therefore, a user acceptance test is an important and final phase to test business processes executed in the application or software finally.

Objectives of UAT testing (User Acceptance Testing) :

• Verify system set-up for transactions and user access
• Confirm use of system in executing business processes
• Validate performance on business-critical functions
• Verify integrity of converted and additional data
• Evaluate and sign off go-live readiness

Each user acceptance test differs depending on which business process is being tested. At-large, however, UAT testing will involve these activities:

Role of QA Teams in UAT testing (User Acceptance Testing)

User Acceptance Testing is generally a “black box” testing. In other terms, the emphasis is on the functionality and the usability of the application rather than the technical aspects. The User Acceptance Testing is the last Quality Assurance effort before the release of the application. It is carried out in an environment that closely resembles the real world or production environment.

In most organizations, user acceptance testing is carried out by business users. It represents a cross-section of users to test the new application using real-world scenarios. As this testing is a fundamental check of software quality, special care must be given to establishing a proper UAT testing environment and approach.

Every organization yearns to deliver products and services that are of the best quality. To ensure that the product is of the best quality and meets customer standards, Quality Assurance (QA) function comes into perspective. Through the implementation of QA, review processes are organized and the best testing practices are applied for determining the quality of a product.

QA is a key function that helps organizations build better products. There are many organizations who are also interested to utilize the potential of User Acceptance Testing (UAT). This testing method is performed to get valuable feedback from the product owners and the customers, and this software testing method is performed to ensure that the functionality, scalability, quality and security of a particular product (or) service are in-line with the customer expectations.

The key question to ponder upon is why organizations want to leverage QA and invest their resources and time in UAT?

Before understanding the role of QA teams in UAT testing, let’s first understand the effective individual contribution that QA teams and UAT provide to an organization.

The significance of QA teams:

When an organization makes a strategic move by embracing the QA function, specific tools, processes, resources and controls are integrated to maximize their effectiveness. Through this integration, a thorough review check of a product or system is evaluated, which helps in finding defects, design and functionality issues.

The QA team prepares in-depth documentation that covers the specific tools, processes, structure and best practices for developing a product that is rich in quality. The QA manager steps in to track the progress of product development and then utilizes testing methods for resolving the functionality issues.

The necessity of UAT:

UAT method finds what exactly the customer expects from the product by taking their valuable feedback. Customers act like a feedback support group that provide their feedback for improving the functionality and user experience of the developed product. Typically, UAT is the last phase of software testing wherein the product owner or the customers test the developed product in real-time and provide their valuable suggestions to the teams. The teams in turn look at their feedback and take up actions accordingly.

The role of QA teams in UAT:

– UAT focuses on developing the best quality product by taking in constant feedbacks from the customers. QA teams must ensure that the testing methods are strategically executed to not only improve the quality and usability of the product but also to make it customer-friendly

– QA teams streamline the testing process in such a way that the outcome of UAT is much better, thereby leveraging the UAT implementation process effectively

– QA teams work on iterating the product functions in terms of improving the quality and efficiency of a product, through inspections and process checklists. Through this on-going activity, UAT can improvise its testing processes and thus contribute to developing a product of high quality.

If we talk about the bigger picture of quality initiatives, user acceptance testing is an important element in any Quality Assurance program. To get the optimum results from this type of testing process, it is advisable to designate the task to an experienced QA team.

What are the different types of User acceptance testing (UAT)?

Compliance/Regulation Acceptance Testing:

In this type of software testing, the developed software is tested against some regulations and rules to check whether the software is meeting the required requirements or not.

Alpha and Beta Testing:

Before the product or the software is planned for a release, the alpha testing and beta testing methods are taken up. Generally, alpha testing is performed in the development environment and beta testing is performed in the customer’s environment. Based on the feedback received, the development teams fix the issues to improve product usability with alpha testing; and the feedback from beta testing helps in overall product improvement.

Operational Acceptance Testing:

This testing practice is also known as production acceptance testing. It helps to verify whether the workflows that are used by the software system are maintained properly or not.

Contract Acceptance Testing:

This type of testing is performed on the developed software programs. It helps to check whether the developed software can meet the pre-defined criteria or the specifications that are agreed within the contract.

Black box Testing:

Tasks Performed By the QA Team for a Successful UAT Process

1. Setting up tools – Test data and defect management tools

2. Setting up roles and responsibilities of business users in the tools

3. Developing test cases and user acceptance testing Runbook

4. Setting up Test Data in the test environment

5. Training business users on how to execute Test Cases and log defects

6. Retesting and regression testing of defects found during UAT

What are the tips QA teams should follow while practicing UAT testing ?

Understand user expectations:

While performing this testing, it is essential to perform tests by considering multiple factors to meet and understand user expectations. Also, it is important to verify whether the product has met the requirements and expectations of the target audience.

Test on real-world connection factors:

During the practice of User acceptance testing, along with the practice of verifying user requirements, it is crucial to test user acceptance with the usage of real-world connections. Testing on real-world conditions will help to validate the product performance and enhances the test results by finding out the issues or errors. Hence, to meet the user standards, considering real-world scenarios is important.

Prepare to test in advance:

Usually, in the development cycle, User acceptance testing is considered to be conducted before the product is being launched. Planning the user-experience test at the end of the development cycle can create hurdles and may cost expensive to solve the errors. To avoid such scenarios, it is important to plan UAT in advance. This will help to make the process flow faster and helps to recreate a test plan another test plan if the earlier plan fails.

Setup testing throughout the project:

While practicing UAT for a product, it is very important to carry out user acceptance based testing throughout the cycle. When this testing is performed at the final stage, it will be difficult to find and fix the errors in a limited period. This will create a bad impact and adversely damage the overall user acceptance. Therefore, to avoid such situations, it is crucial for enterprises to adopt the practice of User acceptance based testing throughout the process. This will simplify the way to maintain quality apps from the initial stage itself.

Review the test plans regularly:

When practicing testing, along with UAT errors, it is even important to validate the user acceptance checklist by the user acceptance based testing team or from a knowledgeable QA team member. In order to achieve the best results from the testing plans, it is crucial to validate and review the test plans regularly. In addition to this, it is even essential to re-verify feedback and UX tools that are being used to >perform the tests.

Maintain a structured UAT management system:

To achieve the best results, enterprises should choose the right automation tools for achieving the perfect outcomes. Hence, while selecting a tool, enterprises have to look at various factors. The tool should be capable of team collaboration and have features such as tracking the bugs, efficient dashboards, filtering options, security, etc.

How is UAT testing different from other levels of testing?

-While performing this type of testing, instead of finding defects, the main focus should be on verifying whether the system or the software or the application is as per the specific user context or not

-In this testing, it is essential to involve users as they play a great role in UAT testing and designing. As they understand the real-world conditions, they are good to state where the app can excel and fail during the real usage

-For User acceptance testing, visual evaluation is a major need to evaluate a test case. This can be achieved when the tests are performed manually. Another benefit by including more number of manual UAT testing is that it can help in receiving more return on investment

Conclusion

An application is considered to be infallible once it passes the quality assurance test. However, User Acceptance Testing has an equal and major role to play. Quality assurance testing tests a software solution in a defined environment; which might catch any technical faults. This testing provides the beneficial role of certifying that the product actually works appropriately on the field. Hence, it often has a different focus from quality assurance, as the emphasis is more towards validating business requirements than technical implementation.

Generally, UAT testing is performed by business users who lack basic testing knowledge. Businesses that have suffered huge losses due to post-release issues, know the significance of successful User Acceptance Testing. The cost of fixing defects after its release is way greater than fixing it before. Hence, outsourcing this process to an experienced software testing provider can help organizations to release a foolproof application to the market.

TestingXperts, with its comprehensive QA and software testing experience, has domain SMEs capable of providing user acceptance testing solutions to the clients. Also, we have a specific training program for the business users for helping them in setting up the process efficiently. Connect with us to know more on how we can collaborate with your teams to help them build an efficient UAT testing process.

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GDPR compliance Testing

With the GDPR in force from 25 May 2018, companies must comply with new requirements for EU data protection. As digital business inflates and customers increase their online activities, privacy protection and security is more important than ever. Enterprises that can better respond to the requirements of GDPR, and can do this before their competitors, have an incredible opportunity to build more trust among customers and build a positive business reputation.

This new regulation also has a serious impact on the development and software testing of new systems, creating a roadblock in the process of digital transformation. Corresponding to this current situation, it is essential that software developers and testers have complete knowledge of what impact GDPR has on their business.

In this infographic, we have stated four key reasons why GDPR training is equally important for software developers and testers.

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The last few years have witnessed an insistent acceptance of new method named ‘Containers’ as organizations wish to deal with disruption at a faster pace. Containers have been around in the IT world for over a decade now, but the arrival of Docker made them more popular as it re-invented containers by adding a robust platform, integrated management tools, and code registry.

Contents 1. What are ‘Containers’ and why do we need them? 2. Containers and DevOps: What’s the connection? 3. Conclusion

What are ‘Containers’ and why do we need them?

Containers are the answer to the common problems faced by software to run consistently while moving from one computing environment to the other. This could be from a developer’s system to a test environment, or from a physical machine in the data center into a virtual machine in the cloud. Containers have become an integral part of the application development space, particularly in cloud computing. This is mainly because portability has been the biggest hitch in this space and given the proprietary nature of these public clouds, this method helps in abstracting applications into a virtual container that can be moved from one cloud to another.

The architecture of containers is an added advantage as it contains a standard method to divide applications into dispersed objects or also known as containers. This flexible approach offers more advantages around workload management and also offers the ability to make defect-tolerant systems. Containerizing the application platform can help in abstracting away the differences in the OS distribution. Another great benefit of containers is ‘modularity’ i.e., rather than running an entire application inside the container; the application can be split into different modules.

Containers and DevOps: What’s the connection?

You might have heard ‘DevOps’ and ‘Containers’ in the same sentence quite often Though, they are different concepts, but the effectiveness of containers makes it easier to enable DevOps workflows. Though DevOps is not tied to any particular technology; it can be implemented through any tool, it is convenient to implement DevOps with the help of containers.

-Containers have become an easy solution for the DevOps teams as it makes collaborating with various teams such as development, testing, and operation easier and convenient.

-Containers are able to support multiple frameworks, and it becomes easier to switch between different programming frameworks in DevOps.

-Rolling out application updates on a streamlined basis is required for a continuous delivery of software. When the application is distributed into multiple microservices, each one hosted in a separate container, you are able to update one part of the application by restarting the container without barging in the rest of the app.

While both containers and DevOps are helping improve software quality, the focus on automation and continuous delivery have been leading to various quality issues. Developers are often challenged with log files that are scattered in a variety of isolated containers each with its own log system dependencies. Continuous testing should be implemented to allow development teams to detect problems early on. If a continuous testing approach is not followed, fixing of errors will take much longer. TestingXperts’ intelligent continuous testing platform Tx-Automate has been enabling end-to-end automation of applications to enhance the quality of the software and increase speed to market. Connect with our Test Advisorsy services and allow us to help you build a defect-free and quality software/ application.

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At the face of it, automation of acceptance testing is a compelling idea but watch out for the caution-areas lying on some fringes

Contents 1. Automated Testing Importance 2. Challenges of Automated Testing 3. Conclusion

Automated Testing Importance

Automated tests have defined new frontiers of speed and velocity while bringing quality-related relief for software requirements. They are especially useful when the pace of development needs these aspects:

– Super-fast cycles – The GTM (Go-to-Market) window can be suitably reduced – Continuous delivery is relevant – Automation can eke out shrinkage of feedback loops – Impact of comprehensive-requirement-validation is high

Software release cycles assume a different momentum altogether when automated tests come into play. The ‘Acceptance’ component is a crucial one in testing so automating that transpires into a new level of speed and traction for quick apps that an organization wants to dish out in today’s dynamic business environments. That comes in very handy when an enterprise is keen and hungry enough to quickly deliver a good idea to its users. More so, as testing has ceased to be a time-guzzler in Agile SDLC and DevOps environments. Automated testing enables simultaneous development, integration, testing and deployment of code.

But such gains are not directly amenable here as some pitfalls have to be taken into account before it’s too late:

Challenges of Automated Testing

1. Precision of test goals and test target can never be footnotes for any test, and that applies all the more for automated tests.

The capacity of testing environments available is quite crucial in determining the success of these tests, so too many of these tests where the environment is not sufficient or not provisioned smartly, would be a no-go zone. Do ensure that test-results analysis catches up in time with the pace of the rapid continuous test. No matter how much an automated test serves your thrill, intention and time-crunch; make sure that real and rigorous testing is not sidelined in this choice. And that these brilliant time-saving tests are not brittle when they run. Leverage automated software testing services to ensure that your web applications works effectively without any security issues .

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