Christmas is upon us and software testing related tasks are on the top according to annual surveys, more consumers than ever are ready to shop online because of retailers bringing sales deals to their websites. It’s vital that online retailers ready themselves for a heavy influx of online shoppers.
As a result, QA needs to verify all test scenarios related to the user’s journey from selection to check-out for functional, performance and security testing.
Keeping these scenarios in mind to avoid software or website failures on Christmas.
Try Not to Leave Performance Tests Prior To Going into Production
You are advised not to abandon performance testing in two cases:
- Only a week before stepping into production
- When your site has previously suffered serious technical issues
This is because solving such issues require a lot of time. You should not plan your tests just as a check. You must plan them, taking into consideration that fixing problems take time.
Test for cross-platform compatibility
Mobile shoppers have increased tenfold in the past years and the sales are at their highest during holiday seasons. E-commerce sites and web applications should be tested across different platforms such as mobile phones, tablets, phablets etc.
Test Performance on Infrastructure of Your Choice
You are advised to test performance on your choice of infrastructure or the one that is in the production and select the best time to run them. You must keep in mind that sometimes test try to look for the breaking point of the system and you don’t want to look for them when the user is the middle of the transaction. Ideally, you must run these tests at late hours and take benefit of having a team of performance engineers in an un-similar time zone. 4 to 5 hours of difference is more than usual.
Select Functionalities That You Want to Be Tested
Since Christmas begin in a week, you may have no time to test all the functionalities of your system. therefore, you will have to choose the functionalities or functionality that according to you will be visited more, such as product checkout and links to the articles. You can use access logs and google analytics to see which of your pages attract most of the traffic.
Security should be your highest priority
For safe data transmission and transaction make sure that your SSL is up-to-date and not close to expiry. Remember to add an extra layer of security on to your e-commerce website, it makes harder for hackers to penetrate your site infrastructure.
Adopt A Good Test Management Tool
All this testing requires that you have covered all your scenarios and management of data that is produced as a result of this testing. With the introductions of new features, deals come new test scenarios and test cases which often change the original requirements. A good tool provides traceability of execution results to the underlying requirement enabling managers to figure out their next steps quickly.
