In the last decade, Digital has become the new normal way for businesses to interact with their customers. This has led to a significant change in how software is designed, developed, and evaluated. There are now multiple channels for businesses to interact with their customers.  These include traditional methods such as in-person or via phone as well as more modern digital channels including web browsers (from multiple browser vendors), mobile browsers, native mobile apps, chatbots, progressive web apps, and many others. Testing all of these interaction channels/platforms has become incredibly complex and requires a proper strategy and approach.

What is Omni-channel Testing?

Omni-Channel Testing revolves around evaluating an application or product across various devices and platforms. The aim is to ensure that the user experience is seamless and consistent across all platforms. The focus here is to evaluate the user experience of a product or application across various channels/devices to measure how effective the user finds the product. All this needs to be done repeatedly and is impossible to accomplish manually. Proper tools and techniques are required to automate the multiple processes in which customers digitally interact and then integrate that automation into upstream and downstream systems (shift-left, shift-right).

Types of Testing in Omni-Channel Testing

If we look deeper into Omni-Channel Testing, this includes diverse types of testing (functional and non-functional) to be done

1. Functional Testing
2. Security Testing
3. Performance Testing
4. Compatibility Testing

Functional testing involves checking the functionality of each part of the application across multiple viable channels. 

Security involves checking for vulnerabilities in the application that could become problematic in the future. 

Performance Testing is where we find out whether the application performs as it was designed to or not and uncover how reliable (responsive, speed, stability) it is even when used on several different devices. 

Compatibility Testing focuses on checking if the application can run smoothly across different hardware and software. The biggest challenge is to address mobile device fragmentation which involves testing whether the application is compatible with all versions of an OS.

Choose Omni-channel Testing Tools

Persistent Testing COE looks at these various aspects of testing to provide the best user experience for their customers and clients who will use these applications. ExtenSURE framework which was created over the last 2 years covers the breadth of software engineering right from the time a developer starts writing the code to monitor the application's post-production deployments. The framework uses a modular approach to bring together these different areas of testing and provides flexibility to customers to choose what they need based on what they already have.

Persistent Testing leverages the best of open-source technologies and frameworks, builds its own accelerators, and leverages strategic partnerships to deliver this value. 
 

Katalon - The Ultimate Solution for Omni-channel Testing

Katalon is one such partnership that Persistent has been leveraging for more than a year now. Katalon provides an end-to-end automation platform to test applications across web, mobile, API, and desktop. It provides AI-based visual testing capabilities to check for even the minutest pixel changes against the baseline version. Katalon TestCloud provides the ability to assess native or hybrid mobile apps across a range of real devices with different configurations for compatibility testing. The record and playback capabilities help author test cases quickly for either web applications or mobile applications. APIs are exposed to different channels and need to be assessed with proper assertions and schema validations and Katalon offers excellent capabilities in this space.

Testers and Developers need easy-to-read reports with screenshots, and videos that can clearly show what was evaluated, what passed, and what failed without having to go through technical logs to figure this out. Katalon TestOps offers a rich set of capabilities in reporting and analytics and provides incredibly detailed reporting and integration capabilities.

As mentioned earlier, customers do not just need testing in silos. This needs to be done as part of the DevSecOps pipelines with seamless integration into tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or any others. Katalon provides native integrations with these leading products and provides webhooks / API-based integration wherever required.

To learn more about the Persistent ExtenSURE framework, please visit  https://www.persistent.com/services/software-product-engineering/product-modernization/extensure/

To learn more about Katalon end to end automation platform and its offerings in detail, please visit  https://katalon.com/