Why Multi-experience App Development cannot thrive without Test Automation?

Test automation enables organizations to rapidly generate and execute test cases, reduces the time and complexities of the development cycle, continuously improves app quality, allows testers to work hand-in-hand with multi-disciplinary development teams.

Today, organizations are feverishly modernizing, centralizing, and consolidating their application infrastructure to match the rapid pace of technological change. Delivering optimum digital user experiences has become a critical part of the digital transformation equation. In this context, the modern-day digital user experience covers a multi-experience journey spanning across multi-device, multi-touchpoint, and multi-modal interactions. Multi-experience app development enables organizations to design and develop apps that deliver a seamless user experience across various modalities, digital touchpoints, and devices.

Gartner mentioned Multi-experience as a top technology trend for 2020. As per the analysts, “the multi-experience trend will replace technology-literate people with people-literate technology.” It will reverse the equation, wherein rather than people getting accustomed to new technologies, it will be technology that will evolve to manage the people’s preferences better.

How Multi-experience App Development Redefines Digital User Experiences?

Gartner predicts that by 2023, more than 25% of the mobile apps, progressive web apps, and conversational apps at large enterprises will be built and/or run through a multi-experience development platform.

Indeed, multi-experience development allows organizations to take their digital user experiences to the next level and stay ahead in a competitive market. It involves the engineering of fit-for-purpose applications that deliver an immersive digital user experience across several modalities like voice, touch, gesture, audio, video, text across devices, applications, wearables, AR, VR, etc.

Multi-experience apps can have a huge impact on the revenues of the B2C segment. Already industry biggies — Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Nintendo, etc. — are utilizing multi-experience apps to serve a lot of digital experience flavors to users. Gartner predicts, through 2024, organizations with an established multi-experience strategy will outperform competitors in customer experience employee experience satisfaction metrics.

What are Multi-experience Development Platforms (MXDPs)?

Multi-experience development platforms (MXDPs) enable developers to easily build apps based on various touchpoint-specific modalities, while at the same time allowing a consistent user experience across web, mobile, wearable, conversational and immersive touchpoints. Apps developed with an MXDP can provide different experiences according to the device that the user might be using to connect. A typical MXDP offers at least two different touch-point experiences to its users. The emergence of such platforms has enabled organizations to research and develop more innovative ways of engaging with the end-users by creating new frontiers of interaction. It has allowed brands to personalize and customize user experiences for each user and device.

Testing of Multi-experience Apps

Since MXDPs significantly reduce the time and effort it takes to write fit-for-purpose multi-experience apps, many might be tempted to think it also reduces the time needed for testing such applications. This is a wrong conception. Every multi-experience app needs to be rigorously tested and vetted for quality before release.

The unique characteristics of multi-experience apps present the QA and testing teams with a unique set of challenges. As the app experience spans multiple devices and interaction modalities, it is crucial to ensure the accuracy of all possible versions and environments the app will run on. It is also essential to check for integration barriers, responsiveness to API and cloud-hosted AI services.

Why Multi-experience App Development cannot thrive without Test Automation?

Test automation enables organizations to tackle most of the abovementioned multi-experience app testing challenges. It allows teams to rapidly generate and execute test cases, reduces the time and complexities of the development cycle, continuously improves app quality, allows testers to work hand-in-hand with multi-disciplinary development teams, and ensures top-notch app quality. There are many more reasons which make test automation an inseparable part of multi-experience development.

#1: Simplifies Cross-Platform Testing at Scale

Leading end-to-end test automation solutions, such as BeatBlip, enable organizations to seamlessly test multi-experience apps across multiple devices and platforms. Such solutions allow teams to test an app across mobiles, tablets, smartwatches, and the web. With API test automation, teams can quickly validate the correctness in responses and data once the logic is designed. While web test automation enables teams to perform tests across different browsers running different versions of IE, Edge, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

#2: Removes Complexities & Streamlines Development

Multi-experience app development project involves a mesh of concurrent activities. Test automation removes some complexities and streamlines the process. It empowers testing and QA teams to continuously test at every stage of the app development lifecycle. Thereby, it allows the detection and fixing of bugs during the initial stages of app development. The code is verified on the go, and this capability accelerates the testing process. Additionally, leading-edge test automation solutions such as BeatBlip seamlessly integrate with CI/CD DevOps tools to enable testers to engage in every step of the delivery pipeline, from inception and design to delivery.

#3: Allows Visual Validation

While it is essential to test a multi-experience app’s functional aspect, visual validation of elements also needs to be provided due attention. Visual bugs can be annoying to users, but their impact can go beyond an inconvenience. Visual inconsistencies can make it difficult or at times even impossible to complete an intended action, thereby affecting the user’s journey. Automated visual testing evaluates the visible output of an app and compares it with the expected output results. It automates the process of comparing visual elements across various screen combinations and uncovers visual defects more efficiently. Automated visual testing liberates the testers from writing assertions to check the properties of each visual element. In so doing, it slashes time and effort that would otherwise go into visual testing.

#4: Incorporates Advanced Testing Capabilities

With more and more apps incorporating chatbots and voice features, software testing solutions with advanced capabilities that support voice, touch, and gesture have become the need of the hour. Many test automation solutions are already working towards adding such features into their already extensive features stack.

Multi-experience is the Future, Are you Ready?

It is of no doubt that multi-experience app development transforms the digital user journey. While mobile apps are still leading the race, multi-experience app development will become an industry-standard in the very near future. With the rising demand for multi-experience apps, organizations are on the lookout for solutions that can enable teams to release such apps confidently and quickly. If you are searching for such a solution to power your multi-experience app development endeavors then let us introduce you to BeatBlip.

BeatBlip is an AI, RPA, and DevOps powered codeless continuous test and process automation solution. It empowers test teams with a complete toolset for end-to-end testing of UI, APIs, Batch Processes, and Databases. BeatBlip is a technology agnostic solution that supports test automation of modern applications in Agile and DevOps environments. It supports integration with popular ALM tools such as Jira, Bugzilla, Microsoft TFS, GitLabs for auto bug tracking. And for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, it integrates with tools such as AWS, Jenkins, Bamboo, Microsoft TFS, and Azure DevOps