Link Real User Journeys and AI-Assisted Techniques to Improve Quality

To keep up with DevOps, testing and QA teams typically adopt a shift-up approach to move quality further up the software development lifecycle. The goal is to complete system testing, integration testing, and user acceptance testing (UAT) to ensure a bug-free release. While product quality has a direct correlation to increased revenue and positive business outcomes, this isn’t enough in the 21st-century marketplace. QA’s job isn’t just to de-risk applications by finding defects earlier but to help de-risk business strategy and potential problems with your user base by reporting customer experience defects.

To date, most QA teams have done this via field testing where customers test your application post-UAT and pre-release; it can also happen by looking at user sentiment from the application marketplace. But there are two major issues with these approaches: field testing takes too long and is very expensive, and measuring user sentiment, post-release, is too late. The damage to your brand and bottom line can already be done.

So, the question is, in effect, the same one that management had to answer when making the case to shift to DevOps, “How can I incorporate the benefits of field testing and user sentiment into my DevOps lifecycle without experiencing any of the time, cost, and branding problems?” The answer lies in the Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) and Customer Experience Insights (CXI) suites.

By leveraging intelligent automation solutions from Eggplant, your organization can create a digital twin of your application, generate automated test cases from that digital twin, and execute many more permutations and combinations than your existing QA teams can. Because the AI engine within the Eggplant DAI suite runs more tests, it focuses on where testing needs to happen via coverage analysis, bug analysis, user weights, and important journeys.

Eggplant CXI solutions use performance analysis and advanced algorithms to capture user journeys as they happen in production. So, you can determine where in the world the most usage happens, how it happens, when it happens, and the revenue impact to your business. This is different than typical application monitoring because of the direct correlation to real-time revenue capture and the ability to take the captured user journeys and turn them into test cases that can be executed by the Eggplant DAI suite.

The user journeys captured by Eggplant CXI solutions become important journeys that the Eggplant DAI suite can execute within your current sprint. Instead of waiting weeks or months for reports on how your customer is using your application, you get them within minutes and hours. The net effect is that you save revenue, have the analytics to make smarter decisions, and can more quickly meet your company’s strategic objectives.

By investing in Eggplant, your organization eliminates costly, time-consuming field testing and user sentiment analysis, and can more quickly see impacts on revenue. Just as important, you can test your application on how your customers are actually using it — not how you think they are.

Learn more about how Eggplant DAI and Eggplant CXI can help you improve your business outcomes.

Topics: DevOpsQA testingUser ExperienceUser experience testingtesting best practicesartificial intelligencedigital automation intelligenceQAAI-assisted testingCustomer Experience Insights,user acceptance testing

 


 

Author Bio:

Written by Michael Giacometti

Michael Giacometti is the director of technical services at Eggplant. With more than 20 years of experience, he is an internationally recognized leader in QA. Michael was a co-founder of Class I.Q. (now part of IBM Greenhat), has designed features for HP ALM, and developed licensed QA products for Cognizant. In addition to speaking at several conferences, Michael has published white papers on the future of QA, and has led several, large-scale QA and digital assurance transformations within the Fortune 100.

About the Author

Nicola

Hi All, I'm Nicola and I am part of the EuroSTAR team. I enjoy outdoor activities and martial arts, it's fun! I joined EuroSTAR in 2018 and am excited to meet new people every year during the conferences. Tester Friends are for life :)
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