Why Companies Switch to testRigor for E-Commerce Testing

Artem Golubev

E-Commerce Testing

An e-commerce company cannot afford any downtime or major functional issues on its platform. Which is why most, even relatively small and new to market e-commerce companies nowadays, choose to have extensive testing on multiple fronts. On the other hand, only the larger businesses typically succeed in having extensive automated end-to-end test coverage. Why is that?

The answer lies in the complexity of this particular type of test automation. E-commerce platforms often include many third-party integrations, as well as a lot of dynamic content. Some teams end up testing most of the functionality manually, albeit being a laborious, inefficient, and prone to human error process. We’re not saying every single test should be automated (since it’s likely not the best strategy either), but ideally – at least tedious regression tests should be.

• Functional testing
• UI and usability testing
• End-to-end testing
• Mobile apps testing
• API testing
• Load/performance testing

Depending on what the company’s goals and expectations are, these can be covered by one or multiple automation tools. When searching for the best tool, always make sure that it supports the platforms you need, otherwise it might not be the best choice. Many tools will support just one platform, for example only web, or only mobile apps.

Challenges in E-Commerce Testing

1. Complexity of technical functionality. With most test automation tools, handling dynamic web page content – such as shadow DOMs or hidden divs – is very challenging and time-consuming. It also involves experienced QA engineers, which smaller companies simply cannot afford.
2. Constantly changing and evolving website content requires rapid test creation. In many cases, QA teams just aren’t able to create automated tests fast enough to keep up with new feature developments. Traditional test automation with tools like Selenium is too slow – both in terms of test development and test maintenance. There are a lot of cases that by the time the whole feature is covered by automated tests, they are already bound to become obsolete with the next release.
3. The complexity of end-to-end test coverage. It’s extremely hard for many traditional test automation tools to support an end-to-end test that will cover the whole user flow. Such tests are often extremely fragile since they involve a lot of dependencies on external integrations.

How testRigor Transforms E-Commerce Testing

Luckily, testRigor is one of the best tools currently available on the market, drastically simplifying all main aspects of e-commerce website and app testing. Let us explain why, and we’ll let you decide for yourself.

The fundamental idea behind testRigor was to make automated tests both reliable and accessible to virtually anybody, not just engineers. This became possible with the use of the newest technology, such as an AI engine and extensive algorithms that testRigor uses for all test creation and execution.

So how exactly is testRigor different? Here’re the main aspects:

1. Forget about coding.

   Create end-to-end tests in plain English, no programming skills are needed. And not just that, tests are created from an actual human’s perspective, not from the developer’s perspective as they traditionally are. The person building such tests doesn’t need to bother with underlying site structure or, say, element locators. Our users simply refer to elements as they are displayed on the screen.

2. Test maintenance.

   Everyone who has ever worked in test automation knows that test maintenance frequently takes a good chunk of the day. Not anymore, though. With testRigor, errors are conveniently grouped by the key elements, and by utilizing find and replace feature, users spend on average 95% less time than they do with other traditional tools.

3. Test reliability and stability.

   You cannot rely on your automated tests if they’re not 100% reliable. You also cannot include them as a gate into your pipeline either. Therefore, testRigor has many mechanisms in place to support test robustness and reliability. Even if the underlying browser or a server crashes while your tests are running – testRigor would automatically catch it in the background, and the test will re-run from the beginning.

4. Team efficiency.

   How do QA teams organize their work? In many companies with both manual and automation testers, manual test cases are being created first – to be converted into automated tests in the next step. This is essentially doing double work. Not with testRigor – your manual testers will develop tests that are both test cases and automated tests. This simplification improves team productivity and well-being, since no one feels like they’re doing superfluous work.

5. Everything in one place.

   testRigor is much more than just a website testing tool. Instead, it’s a whole system that includes web, desktop, mobile, and API testing. There is a record-and-playback feature for even the most inexperienced testers. Want to access your website performance? Simply enable load testing. testRigor has integrations with the most popular issue and bug tracking systems (such as Jira or TestRail), CI/CD tools (such as Spinnaker or CircleCI), databases (MySQL or Oracle), etc.