Making a List, Checking It Twice: A Testing Strategy for the Holidays
Along with the festivities of the holiday season is the joy of shopping. We have so many options today with online, mobile, and in-store shopping. Changing consumer behavior and demographics mandates that retail technology must continuously evolve at a very fast rate.
This poses immense challenges for the testers in this industry who have to ensure that all channels offer a custom experience with high performance and quality in a very short time. Testing the right systems and integrated touch points, optimizing test coverage, using the right tools, benchmarking user performance, and ensuring multichannel scalability and security are core components of a holiday testing strategy.
Below are some key business and technology testing imperatives.
Financial systems testing: Test scenarios include ensuring sufficient cash flows are available for business and identifying the most profitable items. In particular, understanding scenarios relating to real-time sales performance by channel, store, geography, demographics, and inventory is critical. This is the most complex piece for testing because it necessitates significant domain knowledge.
Retail analytics systems testing: This includes functional and real-time performance scenarios of "big data," combining data from web browsing patterns, social media, industry forecasts, existing customer records, etc., to predict trends, pinpoint customers, and optimize pricing and promotions. Creating real-time data with the right set of tools and a team who understands analytics are essential for this type of testing.
Supply chain systems testing: Effective supply chain management (SCM) is the key element for a retailer to maintain profitability. Testing of the SCM IT systems in a real-time, production-like environment is crucial. Any error in order management or merchandise tracking has huge potential to bring the business down in minutes.
Online channels testing: In 2013, consumers spent $1.198 billion in desktop online sales on Black Friday. Testing all online channels for user experience, be it webpages or mobile, for functional and real-time performance is important. This is also the area that offers the most scope for automated testing, including functional, mobile, security, compatibility, and performance testing.
Merchandizing software testing: This includes test scenarios for forecasting and auto-replenishment of stores.
In-store testing: This primarily involves regression testing of point-of-sale systems and the connectivity to payment systems, inventory, and logistics, particularly for performance and security.
Testing the right elements by understanding the ever-changing consumer and mastering the integrations of all the technology components is the key to building a successful testing strategy for the holiday season.
