Is Cyber Monday Turning into a Software Release for Testers?
With every passing year, Cyber Monday continues to grow in prominence as one of the busiest online shopping days, not only in the US but also in several international locations. In fact, starting on Cyber Monday, the online shopping season continues to be busy through the holiday season.
While this trend impacts every software discipline in different ways, what does it entail for the testing discipline?
Here are some critical test areas to prepare for the holiday season’s user transactions:
Functionality—While the application might have been thoroughly tested for core functionality, typically some minor yet timely functionality is added around this time that needs to be tested for correctness and to eliminate regressions, such as free shipping or storewide discounts. Although small changes, these need to be smoke tested thoroughly as any defects herein affect the retailer’s reputation and margins.
Performance—This is one of the important areas to test and prepare given the peak loads the systems will need to handle during this period. Specific performance tuning, capacity planning, and system scaling are typically implemented a few months before the holiday season in anticipation of the expected volume. Cloud solutions have been a boon in the last few years to help companies scale. Testing around load, stress, and overhaul become supercritical.
Security—This tends to be another vital area around online shopping in the holiday season. With the increase in transaction volumes, deals through various external links, and promotions advertised on third party sites, timing cannot be better for hackers to exploit existing and new vulnerabilities, which in the interest of time may not have been tested thoroughly. Companies should take extra care in on-boarding new partners and integrating with external content and back-links, making security and user privacy of utmost importance. While Cyber Monday security best practices are becoming more prevalent among users, this testing cannot be ignored.
Content and Live Feeds—Content ingestion peaks around the holiday season with new deals and email promotions flowing in almost every day. In addition to smoke testing to ensure the right feeds are picked up, displayed, or sent out at the appropriate times, it is also important to test deals against specifications. Herein, functionality, UI, and database-level testing become important.
Integration—With the growth in social shopping, integration checkpoints need to be thoroughly tested. The social shopping phenomena are amplified during the holiday season, making integration testing one of the top priorities for companies leading into this busy transaction period.
Accessibility—This is an area that might easily be neglected given the time constraints the product companies operate within. However, since some 10 percent of the world’s population live with some form of disability, making applications fully accessible for such people cannot be underestimated regardless of time constraints. To ensure they are accessible to one and all, this should be planned upfront and included as a checklist item in all areas discussed above, including new partner on-boarding, third party integrations, and new content ingested.
