Over the previous two decades, digital disruption has profoundly altered the business software landscape. The trend has intensified in ways that few could have imagined last year, making existing digital transformation plans critical. Enterprises are speeding up preparations for cloud migration, DevOps transformation, and business application modernization to meet the growth in digital demand.
Most enterprise apps are deeply integrated, which makes things much more difficult. Business software products employ a multitude of applications and services, and a single business workflow may touch dozens of these via microservices and APIs. There are plenty of businesses seeking to transform brilliant ideas into profitable products in today’s consumer-driven, tech-based society, but really succeeding is a different story.
The Value of QA for Business Software
A B2B product’s success depends heavily on product quality. Business audiences have a low tolerance for poor quality software that might prevent them from being productive and making the workflow process frustrating.
As a result, developers and testers need to optimize their testing strategy to meet and exceed user base demand. An enterprise application delivery needs to be aligned with both innovation and testing to bring software updates and new features to market and shorten the time it takes to thoroughly test new code. The faster delivery teams can release changes, the faster the company can innovate, streamlining business processes and generating new revenue sources.
The Testing Process
To ensure that business software continues to function, testers must duplicate work across many applications and check that none of the workflows are affected when any of the applications or features are altered. That implies tests must function across numerous apps, architectures, and user interfaces without fail.
While it is common to use a “dogfooding” approach i.e., use the product internally as a means to test, it is not sufficient. However, the advantages of dogfooding are that it puts the product into the hands of internal users. They can discover problems before the release and build confidence among the development team while everyone gets an early look at problems up-close and personal.
Conversely, it is not a good predictor of software success. It only entrenches bad product design. Developers and users get acclimated to faults and provide too much temptation to use fixes and find workarounds that drive acceptance with negative impacts.
Inadequate testing and quality assurance controls can create a treacherous path that leads to silos and a waste of time, money, and effort. A decentralized testing approach produces inconsistencies that can build over time resulting in costs of thousands of dollars. Organizations without an enterprise testing strategy find they are paying a hefty long-term price for even the most minor inefficiencies, which is where outsourced software testing can play an integral role.
Niche-Specific Aspects of Business Software Testing
What makes B2B software unique is that it needs to be tested in a multi-vendor, multi-technology, complex business process landscape. It needs an enterprise testing strategy to establish a vision, policy, and general testing principles. It also standardizes test operations and establishes shared goals and success criteria in line with best practices. Organizations frequently overlook the importance of an enterprise-level strategy. And in many cases, they reluctantly or impulsively embrace an ill-fitting plan that fails to meet their goals.
Types of Testing Essential for a B2B Product
In a B2B testing environment, skilled testing services are required to combine the following:
- Thorough defect tracking
- Efficient testing tools
- Mobile testing
- Test automation
- Functional testing
- Performance testing
- UI/UX testing
- Database testing
- Security testing
- API testing
Although the above could be said for most types of software applications, we will explore the most critical testing areas for business applications and platforms.
Consistent Mobile Experience
Most end-users rely on mobile devices for exploring products and pricing, doing comparisons, and placing orders. Mobile-friendly design also enables flexibility and easy access to the system in emergency situations. In other words, without a seamless mobile experience, you risk losing customers. Mobile app testing is imperative to ensure a B2B application is mobile-responsive to satisfy their needs. If you don’t plan to offer an app, at least make sure that a website is accessible through mobile web. Examine and test your software on every possible device that your customers might utilize.
API Testing
This is the big one. API testing in B2B platforms needs to be thoroughly tested. This includes testing every part of an API to ensure that it satisfies all of the criteria. There are several categories of API testing to include in an enterprise testing strategy that should also be combined with automation to speed up the testing process and eliminate human error.
- Integration testing validates the integration of third-party applications to reveal vulnerabilities and defects while interacting with other applications.
- Functional testing checks core functions and features in different scenarios to ensure the API works as expected.
- Performance testing establishes how many endpoint requests can successfully execute along with the response time. It should consider every aspect to validate the API’s overall performance.
- Security testing involves checking that both the implementation and integration of the APIs is protected from external attacks while assessing session management to locate weaknesses.
B2B companies must implement efficient API testing techniques in order to achieve growth and build important business alliances. When testing APIs, they should concentrate on the business logic layer. This ensures that enterprises can deliver scalable, secure, and dependable connections and transactions between various apps.
Usability Testing
B2B companies don’t usually target novice users because the target audience is well-informed. And B2B means that each enterprise customer’s software platforms and services are sometimes substantially tailored to fit into a certain workflow. You can see why usability testing is really important, so the key metrics to keep in mind are:
- effectiveness in the application to execute core tasks;
- efficiency of how long it takes to execute these tasks, and
- user satisfaction in the user experience in utilizing the service or product.
Conclusion
Both internal and customer-facing innovation rely on business software applications. Enterprises can build a solid foundation for digital transformation by modernizing their infrastructure, but only if they can do so without adding business risk. Because of the complexity of these applications, as well as misunderstandings about the extent of testing necessary, many businesses are fighting an uphill quality battle that might stymie transformation initiatives.
QA Madness is a software testing company that recognizes the importance of an enterprise testing approach aligned to business objectives and measured risk with the ability to scale upwards to make significant business gains. With expert software testing services that apply harmonized and defined testing goals, businesses are able to reap the benefits of comprehensive B2B, realizing new value that satisfies customer requirements.