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JULY 2019 SEPTEMBER 2018
THE FUTURE OF RETAIL
EXPLORATORY TESTING
MOBILE APP
TESTING
NEW
PAGE 49
3X INDUSTRY LEADER INTERVIEWS
FULL LIFECYCLE TESTING
froglogic Squish GUI Test Automation Code Coverage Analysis
cross platform. multi language. cross design. Learn more and get in touch: www.froglogic.com T E S T M a g a z i n e | J ul y 2 019
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C O N T E N T S
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TEST TEAM MANAGEMENT
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THE FUTURE OF RETAIL EXPERIENCE
SMART CITY SOFTWARE
FULL LIFECYCLE TESTING
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CONTENTS
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16
ADOPTING FUNCTIONAL TESTING
EXPLORATORY TESTING
Chatbots & APIs for better customer experience
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Test leadership values & how to achieve them
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Talking to developers about exploratory testing
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Adopting functional testing for ERP
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INTERVIEW: Smart cities & software challenges
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INTERVIEW: The benefits of full lifecycle testing
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Applying data analytics on test automation
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10 things to avoid in mobile app testing
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Barriers to machine learning adoption
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Dev & IT Sec: Can IDAAS heal the rift?
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INTERVIEW: The future is in collaboration
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DevTEST Conference North PREVIEW
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UPCOMING INDUSTRY EVENTS 24-25
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September
October
October
The DevTEST Conference North is a UKbased conference that provides the software testing community with invaluable content from revered industry speakers; practical presentations from the winners and finalists of The European Software Testing Awards; Executive Workshops, facilitated and led by key figures; as well as a market leading exhibition, which will enable delegates to view the latest products and services.
The DevOps Industry Awards celebrate companies and individuals who have accomplished significant achievements when incorporating and adopting DevOps practices. The Awards have been launched to recognise the tremendous efforts of individuals and teams when undergoing digital transformation projects – whether they are small and bespoke, or large complex initiatives.
The Canadian Software Testing & QE Awards celebrate companies and individuals who have accomplished significant achievements in the software testing and quality engineering market. So why not enter the Canadian Software Testing & QE Awards and start on a journey of anticipation and excitement leading up to the awards night? It could be you and your team collecting one of the highly coveted awards!
devtestconference.com
devopsindustryawards.com
softwaretestingawards.ca
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THE EUROPEAN SOFTWARE TESTING
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November
November
The European Software Testing Summit is a one-day event, which will be held on the 12th November 2019 at Park Plaza Waterloo, London. The European Software Testing summit will consist of up to 100 senior software testing and QA professionals, are eager to network and participate in targeted workshops. Delegates will receive research literature, have the chance to interact with The European Software Testing Awards’ experienced Judging Panel, as well receive practical advice and actionable intelligence from dedicated workshops. softwaretestingsummit.com
Now in its sixth year The European Software Testing Awards celebrate companies and individuals who have accomplished significant achievements in the software testing and quality assurance market. Enter The European Software Testing Awards and start on a journey of anticipation and excitement leading up to the awards night – it could be you and your team collecting one of the highly coveted awards.
T E S T M a g a z i n e | J ul y 2 019
softwaretestingawards.com
Click here to read the full issue E D I T O R 'S
SHOP 'TIL YOU DROP BARNABY DRACUP EDITOR
ECOMMERCE & RETAIL ith ecommerce and digital retail sales growing at an exponential rate, it is easy to see why software testing and in particluar, mobile application testing, is now more important than ever. Cybersecurity concerns aside for one moment, the world as a whole is experience unyeilding demand for quicker, more efficient digital transaction processes – and user experience, reliabilty and problem-solving interactions are at the forefront of this. A recent report from global digital marketing insights comany, eMarketer (emarketer.com), includes a summary of projected sales that reveals retail ecommerce sales will increase to $4.058 trillion (£3.23trn) in 2020, making up 14.6% of total retail spending. And, with customers increasingly becoming users (online shopfronts, apps etc.), it is vital that retail companies keep apace with software developments and customer expectations. In Chatbots & APIs for better customer experience (p.4), CPO, Kelly Goetsch, discusses how, to meet growing consumer demand, retailers will need to take advantage of application programming interfaces to integrate more intelligent and powerful chatbots into their platforms. All this, of course, needs testing and customer experience is key, so he discusses the challenges with serving customers with richer, more dynamic experiences, while ensuring flawless delivery and bulletproof software to ensure no 'Black Friday' moments. When it comes to managing these largescale retail teams, then good test team managment is a vital component of any business. In Test leadership values and how to achieve them (p.8), Camelot's Simon Prior
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discusses the importance of values in test leadership and how they can be achieved to better and further your team work. With testing seeing changes like never before, it's important to maintain an objective overview. To augment their new automation skills, a tester must now be able to manually explore a system in order to uncover and share information that’s useful to the team. In Why I'm talking to testers about exploratory testing (p.12), senior test engineer, Callum Akehurst, discusses the need for exploratory testing and that manual testing and the benefits it brings must not die out and continue to flourish. In terms of ecommerce, the shift to mobile is now fully embraced by both customers and businesses alike. The need to deliver fast, effective and streamlined software, is now greater than ever before. In 10 things to avoid in mobile app testing (p.32), digital test hub manager, Nicholas Sullivan, discusses how keeping on top of the varied and fast-moving mobile market is a full-time job and easily underestimated. When it comes to offering a seamless customer experience, software requires a seamless testing workflow and development process. Andrew Filev is the founder of task management software platform, Wrike. In The future is in collaboration (p.46), TEST Magazine caught up with him in London to talk about his passion for agile and applying philosophy and the scientific method to testing, productivity, and more. No matter what your position in the software testing lifecycle, the growing demands from the customer experience, ecommerce and retail, are increasing the pressure on testers everywhere. BD
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Do you want to write for TEST Magazine? Email barnaby. dracup@31media. co.uk
JULY 2019 | VOLUME 12 | ISSUE 3 © 2019 31 Media Limited. All rights reserved. TEST Magazine is edited, designed, and published by 31 Media Limited. No part of TEST Magazine may be reproduced, transmitted, stored electronically, distributed, or copied, in whole or part without the prior written consent of the publisher. A reprint service is available. Opinions expressed in this journal do not necessarily reflect those of the editor of TEST Magazine or its publisher, 31 Media Limited. ISSN 2040‑01‑60 EDITOR Barnaby Dracup editor@31media.co.uk +44 (0)203 056 4599 JOURNALIST Grace Barnott Palin grace.barnott@31media.co.uk +44 (0)203 056 4948 ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES Moeez Ali moeez.ali@31media.co.uk +44 (0)203 668 6940 PRODUCTION & DESIGN MANAGER Ivan Boyanov ivan.boyanov@31media.co.uk 31 Media Ltd 41‑42 Daisy Business Park 19‑35 Sylvan Grove London, SE15 1PD +44 (0)870 863 6930 info@31media.co.uk testingmagazine.com
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CHATBOTS & APIs FOR BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE To meet growing consumer demand, how will retailers take advantage of application programming interfaces to integrate more intelligent and powerful chatbots into their ecommerce systems and platforms? hatbots are really taking off in retail as customers become more familiar and happier to interact with automated assistants. Indeed, nearly half of consumers say they prefer chatbots as the primary form of communication with brands (Source: Grand View Research). This acceptance, plus how chatbots can bring down operating costs, are among several factors that will make the global chatbot market worth $1.23 billion by 2025. So, how will retailers integrate increasingly more intelligent and powerful chatbots into their ecommerce systems and platforms? The key is how they take advantage of application programming interfaces (APIs) alongside other key modern computing
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technologies like microservices, 'headless' and cloud-native computing. APIs help to simplify and streamline processes and exploit third party technologies, avoiding the need to create a chatbot from scratch.
THE RISE OF CHATBOTS
First, what are chatbots? Chatbots are automated text-based assistants that replicate the experience of chatting with another person. They look like normal apps with an application layer, a database, APIs and a chat interface. Voice-based assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri and Microsoft Cortana are just chatbots that transcribe spoken word into text and translate text responses back into spoken word.
KELLY GOETSCH CPO COMMERCETOOLS Kelly has authoured three books and is a commerce, microservices, and distributed computing expert, having spoken and published extensively on these topics
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Chatbots are not a new computing phenomenon and have been around for over half a century. Back in the 1960s, chatbots were developed to fool people into thinking you were conversing with a human. In fact, the most famous, Eliza, appeared in 1964. It was really in the 2000s that the chatbots we know today first became more widespread. Several organisations introduced 'virtual assistants' to save labour costs around simple repetitive tasks. These first chatbots weren’t very intelligent. They worked by matching simple phrases like "How do I reset my password?" to a set of templated responses like, "Hi {customer_name}. You may reset your password by following the instructions found on https://link.to/canned/ response." If the phrase wasn’t listed or understood, the customer would be transferred to a real human, but only after a lot of frustration. The recent revolution in chatbots has come as artificial intelligence has made these assistants a lot smarter and more conversational. Unlike simple pattern matching, artificial intelligence
does a far better job of understanding what the customer wants, often through a conversation using natural language understanding technology. The customer can then be supported most appropriately, through an ongoing discussion that includes making more accurate suggestions, and can be more personalised in how the chatbot autonomously knows to suggest special offers. With chatbots becoming more intelligent and capable of conversing autonomously, they are being used more extensively in commerce to improve customer experience, drive revenues and reduce operating costs. The extent to which chatbots drive ecommerce is most remarkable in China where Tencent’s WeChat claims a billion daily users, who browse and discover products, learn more about those products, and then actually complete the purchase all without ever having to leave the chat app on a smartphone. The customer experience is like chatting with a live person. It has been estimated that close to a third of WeChat users start a purchase entirely via chatbots (Source: McKinsey)
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The trend for chatbots in commerce isn’t limited to China, of course. Retail brands as varied as Lidl, H&M, Burberry and Shop Direct are deploying smart chatbots to do everything from simple to more complex tasks. For example, Burberry’s bot helps customers discover more about its bag collection. By contrast, Lidl created a bot called Margot that uses natural language processing to interact with customers about helping them choose the right wine, including suggesting food pairings. Many of these bots are using Facebook Messenger to create chatbot apps. Last year, Facebook’s VP of messaging confirmed there were 300,000 monthly active bots interacting with customers on Messenger. This includes online office supplier, Staples, which uses chatbots to make product suggestions to customers based on past purchases, as well as guide a customer through a purchase. Other technology providers are also helping organisations to build chatbots – for example Amazon’s Lex shares the same deep learning technology used by Alexa to allow companies to build their own chatbots within Amazon Webservices.
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CHANGING TRENDS & CHALLENGES
The overall trend for how people interact with brands and retailers commercially is towards greater use of chatbots. As long ago as 2015, monthly active users of the four big messaging apps exceeded the top four social media apps. This willingness to use messaging apps is creating fertile ground for chatbot deployment to blossom and expand dramatically. While they appear intuitive and simple to interact with for customers, how chatbots interact with critical retail systems and processes is complex and challenging. Chatbots can take in text or voice, understand the context, and perform some action. In the case of commerce, that action may be to place an order, check the status of an order, or retrieve some details about a product. While chatbots can understand language, they do not have access to any of the commerce-related data (e.g. orders, products) or functionality (place an order, check the status of an order, etc). For commerce, any use of chatbots beyond simple pattern matching requires calling the application program interfaces
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(APIs) that the commerce platform exposes. Actions such as searching for products, viewing product details, adding to the shopping cart, and checking out, all require calling potentially dozens of different APIs. To do this effectively, a commerce platform must expose 100% of its functionality and data through APIs. Each API can be optionally wrapped around with the software development kit for a chatbot’s programming language. The other route that you could take is to use GraphQL, which is a query language that enables data retrieval and can initiate actions across many APIs with a single command.
DEVELOPMENT ISSUES
A prime goal in developing chatbots is to avoid having too much business logic in the chatbot itself. Difficulties arise when, while the APIs used by the chatbot need to be easy to call, the developer wants to program the interaction with the APIs. This means that too often the APIs are hard to call because they must be invoked in a very specific programmed order.
Another issue is a lack of idempotency, which forces developers to call an API exactly once and take precautions to prevent duplicate calls. There are inconsistencies in how dates, currencies, number formats, and other requirements are formatted, which causes too much business logic to be contained in the chatbot. Finally, there are inconsistencies about how to authorise/authenticate APIs. Retailers should start by developing APIs first, then writing the code that backs the implementation. They must ensure they have 100% API coverage and that APIs are the only means of accessing data functionality in the platform. A good solution here is to adopt a formal API specification standard like RAML or OpenAPI and use a single API gateway to secure APIs. For the chatbots to use APIs to fully function, the choice of commerce platform is key. The problem for many retailers is they are using legacy commerce platforms often built in the 1990s without support for APIs. The importance of APIs to modern ecommerce cannot be minimised. It is
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worth recalling how Amazon’s Jeff Bezos told his engineers to use internal APIs or get another job in his famous 2002 memo that started with the words: "All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces". Indeed, open APIs are credited as one of the reasons Amazon has become a retail juggernaut. When an organisation retroactively adds APIs to an existing commerce platform, there is inevitably a loss of some functionality and data. How this slows down or interrupts ecommerce processes and does not deliver an optimum digital customer experience can be damaging when competition is so intense, and margins for online retailers, razor thin. Developers can also run into oddities, such as having to maintain session state, non-standard security mechanisms or other issues that occur when you’re not calling an API-first platform. To best integrate with chatbots, a retailer’s commerce platform must have been built API-first from the very beginning, with all functionality and data exposed over APIs. This enables the
streamlined and structured code-to-code communications essential to the success of chatbots handling retail processes. Other aspects of a modern commerce platform are important to how chatbots are integrated into ecommerce applications. For example, a headless ecommerce solution comes without a graphical user interface (GUI) such as a standard shop front-end. It focuses purely on background processes and making data available to separate front-end applications like chatbots.
CONCLUSION
With these simple steps, retailers can access the power of chatbots and be well on their way to serving customers with richer, more dynamic experiences they bring to the commerce journey, from purchase to post-sale customer care and support. These benefits for retailers and customers are enabled by how APIs can be used to implement new ways of communicating with customers or incorporate new purchasing capability via new generations of ever smarter chatbots interacting with customers.
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"When an organisation retroactively adds APIs to an existing commerce platform, there is inevitably a loss of some functionality and data. How this slows down or interrupts ecommerce processes and does not deliver an optimum digital customer experience can be damaging when competition is so intense, and margins for online retailers razor thin. Developers can also run into oddities such as having to maintain session state, nonstandard security mechanisms or other issues that occur when you’re not calling an API-first platform" T E S T M a g a z i n e | J ul y 2 019
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