Introduction

Retail industry is always the booming sector because of the increasing power of the consumers. Growing technology trends have taken customer experience to a different level due to which consumer expectations have changed. Also, there are several online startups that offer innovative and personalized services. In order to stay competitive, retailers need to know what strategies to focus on in 2019.

What Is That We Need?

Retailers need to scale their solutions by being able to constantly mine consumer data intelligently and deliver an exceptional experiences to consumers. With several solutions in place to offer different kinds of experiences to the same consumer, the systems must be able to perform at great speed and accuracy.  With the advent of omnichannel solutions and multiple devices, the performance of every solution needs to be tested.  As a result, there is a constant increase in the number of test cases. Hence, without a sound testing strategy in place, retailers cannot achieve the desired results.  This testing strategy not only needs to be agile and flexible to accommodate application changes but also needs to yield fast and continuous results. Eventually, Test automation is the need of the hour.

Challenges

Though test automation is highly benevolent, there are few challenges that occur while deciding to take this leap. According to World Quality Report 2018-2019, the level of automation is still very low in many enterprises with one of the main reasons being the application changes too much with every release.  Some of the other reasons are:

  • Select the Right Automation Tool – Evaluating a plethora of available tools in the market that provides the same benefit of automating manual tests is really a cumbersome task. In addition, it is crucial to address the major challenge of integrating different automation tools.
  • Find the Right Test Automation Expertise – Automation testers need to play a diversified role, as they need to interact with various stakeholders like developers, operations teams, and customers. Having skilled and experienced test automation experts is very important to achieve continuous delivery, which is the goal of automation.
  • Come up with the Right Testing Strategy –It is very important to identify and categorize the test cases for manual and automated testing before selecting the right automation tool since not all the tools focus on the same areas.
  • Finally, The Risk of Involving a Huge Investment – Whether a retailer chooses an open-source tool or a licensed one, huge efforts are required for analyzing each tool, identifying the right team, training them, and then planning the implementation.

The Right Testing Approach

It is evident from the above challenges that automation is going to cost a bomb for retailers. However, by adopting the right testing approach retailers can achieve high ROI within 12 months. This approach involves three factors, which are adopting incremental test automation and moving to cloud using a digital commerce automation framework that will help retailers save time and money.

Incremental Test Automation and Digital Commerce quality automation framework (DCqaf)

Cost of testing retail solutions is mainly composed of appraisal costs. Retailers are trying to reduce the appraisal costs as much as possible to generate ROI without compromise in quality. Incrementing the amount of automation test cases helps in reducing appraisal costs over a period.  To successfully architect this incremental test automation, retailers need to go through a phase-by-phase automation process. There is no better way than implementing this using a Digital Commerce quality automation framework (DCqaf).  This framework should be comprehensive and enable seamless testing across multiple environments. To ensure continuous delivery, it must integrate with intelligent open-source tools like Jenkins.  It should also have the capability for seamless integration with cloud platforms and other third-party digital commerce tools offering fraud management, taxation calculation, and so on.

A Session on “How Incremental Test Automation Helps Retailers Save Money”

Aspire Systems is conducting a webinar that is aimed at helping retailers on how to implement selective and incremental test automation and improve their ROI by driving the automation development based on not only the test coverage but also the business needs.

This session will help retailers understand how they can gain the best out of Test Automation using a Digital Commerce quality automation framework. Some of the key takeaways are:

  • How to handle the proliferating test coverage with the advent of multiple devices such as online shopping platforms?
  • Cloud platform as a solution to address this growing coverage
  • Walk-through of Digital Commerce quality automation framework (DCqaf)
  • Recommended tools and methodologies
  • Sample use case showing the reduction in cost

Register now for the webinar

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