How a customer sentiment analyzer can help deliver better experiences

People take purchase decisions based on their perception about a product, service, individual, or entity irrespective of its source, validity, and authenticity. Perception is often born out of a sentiment and can have consequences on a product’s or brand’s credibility and reputation. Thanks to this predominant attribute that drives customer behavior, even a superior quality product can bite the dust in the sweepstakes of business. Moreover, in today’s omnichannel business landscape, sentiment-driven brand perception plays a significant role in achieving business objectives.

Since customer sentiment can either make a product or service acceptable or disowned by its end-users, analyzing the same can accrue key insights for the marketers and help them deliver positive outcomes. Customer sentiment analysis can be made a part of quality assurance process wherein automated tools are used to mine emotions from the text and other channels.

What is customer sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a process in which opinions of the end-users of a brand, business, product, or service are mined to obtain business-critical feedback. Here, the emotions and attitudes of the end-users are analyzed through their conversations, voice inflections, and language. It is a highly useful tool that can be used in numerous areas, such as on social media platforms to understand customer sentiments on a product campaign.

How does customer sentiment analysis work?

Driven by an algorithm, customer sentiment analysis or customer experience testing strategy measures factors like the level of stress in the voice of a customer and his or her rate of speech to determine his or her sentiment, attitude, and opinion about a product, brand, service, topic, organization, event or individual. It can be used to refine processes and deliver better personalized experiences across channels leading to loyalty, retention, and new customer acquisition.

How customer sentiment analysis can address the customer needs

Testing customer experience is important to enhance the quality of a product or service according to the actual needs of the customer. In today’s competitive business environment where customer experience has become the ultimate determining factor to make a product or service successful, customer sentiment analysis as part of quality assurance cannot be overlooked. The benefits derived from this exercise are as follows:

# Provides customer insight: Businesses need to study the customer experiences to know how their products or services fare in the market. They can do so by employing tools for CX testing and gain insights into what customers think about their products or services. If the sentiments are negative, businesses can identify the reasons or factors behind them and work towards mitigating them. The knowledge of customer sentiments can help businesses to add new features and/or functionalities to their products or services and curate better plans to conduct future campaigns.

# Offers proactive business solutions: Customer sentiment analysis as a part of quality assurance and testing can help businesses to make informed decisions, draw better strategies, and set up realistic targets. Specific tools can offer proactive business solutions in the form of automatic reports, event analysis, etc. These can help businesses to understand the emotions behind positive, negative, or neutral opinions about specific products or services. Furthermore, it can help marketers to evaluate the impact of launch campaigns on customers and identify the specific demographic segment(s) where the interest or awareness about the product or service is the highest.

# Measures the success of any marketing campaign: The measure of any marketing campaign is not limited to the number of likes, followers, or comments alone. It also encompasses the number of discussions (positive or otherwise) elicited by customers about the brand, product, or service. By combining the numerical and non-numerical data generated through customer sentiment analysis, businesses can measure the ROI of their marketing campaign.

# Eliminates gaps in customer experience: Customer sentiments need to be measured holistically and not pigeonholed into multichannel like phone, email, chatbot, social media, etc. In other words, data for customer experience need to be collected holistically for the entire customer journey - initial awareness to repeat purchases. This will help to analyze the data more accurately and aid businesses to remove the gaps in customer experience.

Conclusion

Software quality assurance is not only about enhancing the quality of a product or service during the SDLC. It is also about obtaining data on customer experience by using specific tools for customer sentiment analysis. By determining the customer sentiment about a brand, product or service, businesses can improve their processes, delivery mechanism, not to speak of the quality of products or services. Although it is still an emerging area, businesses should utilize it to know more about their customers and to derive better success with their deliverables.

Author Bio

Oliver has been associated with Cigniti Technologies Ltd as an Associate Manager - Content Marketing, with over 10 years of industry experience as a Content Writer in Software Testing & Quality Assurance industry. Cigniti is a Global Leader in Independent Quality Engineering & Software Testing Services with CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5.

This article is originally published on medium.com.

Bridging new and old features through Regression Testing

Regression Testing

To remain competitive, companies need to reinvent their products with new features and functionalities from time to time. It is observed that the end consumers are wont to change their preferences for products based on factors like new features, faster loading, cost, and seamless functioning. Hence, the incorporation of the above-mentioned factors can increase the adaptability of the software applications to their end customers. However, the newly added features or changes can trigger changes in the old features, which if not addressed, can impact the user experience adversely. This is where regression testing comes into play, wherein the functioning of the existing or old features is tested. It ensures that the new code additions do not render the existing functions infructuous. A well-planned regression testing strategy investigates the bugs that might creep into any new build inadvertently, while making sure that the previous ones are eliminated.

Remember, any change in a software application can cause unforeseen consequences, thus, adversely affecting the user experience. These unforeseen consequences or side-effects aka regressions can appear in components, features, functionalities, and systems that are not part of the software changes.

 A regression testing exercise flags such regressions or changes and helps the QA team to:

·         Identify and fix the inherent or newly-introduced glitches into the existing system because of the new build.

·         Boost the performance of the software application.

·         Look into any changes to the hosting environment. 

Regression testing can be executed during any of the below mentioned QA tests –

·         Unit Test: In this type of QA testing, the smallest testable components of any application aka units are tested to check if they are performing as expected. Any glitch in the individual components can have a cascading effect on the whole software when the same gets integrated.

·         Integration test: This is unlike the unit test where the integrated groups (a combination of units) or modules of an application are tested in various ways.

·         System test: This follows up from integration testing where the performance and functioning of various components are tested to check how they interact with each other as part of an integrated system.

·         Acceptance test: Since every application needs validation on the litmus test of user acceptability, the acceptance test finds out the degree to which the application addresses the user requirements and gets their approval. This type of testing is named as beta testing, field testing, end-user testing, or application testing. 

Therefore, regression testing in software testing usually takes place at the end of each test cycle. Importantly, it includes unit regression testing where each unit code is validated by rerunning the unit tests. Since regression testing can be repetitive and time consuming, it is often automated to reduce the execution time and free up the testers for other important tasks. 

When do you execute a regression testing strategy?

Whenever a software application is modified by adding, changing, or removing features or functionalities, regression testing is needed to be carried out. Let us understand the same with the following examples. 

Addition of new functionalities:  A software application allows a user to login using their email credentials. However, a new functionality is added wherein the login can be executed using Facebook as well. Here, regression testing would check if the old functionality of logging in with email is working or not.

Any Change Requirement (CR) is implemented: The password option is removed from the login page to facilitate quicker login.

Fixing a defect: In case the login button develops a glitch and is fixed by the developers, the QA team should perform an automated regression testing to check the fixed login button and other associated functionalities are performing as expected.

Fixing a performance issue: In case a slow loading software application is fixed, reducing the load speed from, say, 5 seconds to 2 seconds. So, when the code changes are made to reduce the loading speed, some glitches may enter or old functionalities might get affected. This is where regression testing services can execute the test and pre-empt any glitch from affecting the performance of the application.

Change in the framework or environment: If the database is updated from MySQL to Oracle, the resultant code changes need to be validated to prevent any unforeseen consequences. 

How to go about executing regression testing – manual or automation?

Given the tedium and complexity of such tests, they need to be automated. Since these tests are needed to be executed after every build or deployment, they should be automated to save time and effort. Moreover, running thousands of test cases manually would be practically impossible and can lead to several glitches remaining unchecked. 

 

How to strategize a sound regression testing methodology

The success of any product change depends on the success of its regression testing. Let us find out the steps that QA experts should take in executing a sound regression testing strategy.

·         Monitor any changes in the test cases, which are based on the modifications done on the software application.

·         Analyze the changes (if any) and their impact on the components.

·         Identify the risk prone areas in the test cases.

·         Set priority for the test cases. Select the right automation tool and test environment.

·         Automate test cases and set them for testing.

·         Keep the test suite with the latest test cases. Remove the redundant ones.

·         Execute the tests for different scenarios and dependencies.

Conclusion

Any successful regression testing ensures a software application runs all guns blazing, especially on parameters like speed, accuracy, security, efficiency, and performance. The testing should not be an afterthought but put into practice the moment any new build is initiated.

Check out this case study to find out how Automated Regression Testing helps in the healthcare sector to reduce its Maintenance Costs significantly.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Quality Engineering & Software Testing Services to be appraised at CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also ISO 9001:2015 & ISO 27001:2013 certified.

How does Interactive Application Security Testing improve your software

The spectre of cybercrime is spreading thick and fast with companies and individuals being defrauded of sensitive personal and business information and money on a humongous scale. It is estimated that by 2020, the world shall witness an annual outgo of $5 trillion because of cybercrime (Source: www.cyberdefensemagazine.com). Strands of malware, ransomware, viruses, and trojans are wreaking havoc worldwide with around 31% of organizations having experienced cyber-attacks on their IT architecture and IoT facing attacks to the tune of 600% in 2017 alone (Source: Symantec.)

The only way to address the alarming situation is by increasing the security budget and adopting the best cyber security practices. First and foremost, businesses should ensure their software architecture conforms to the regulatory protocols such as PCI DSS, GLBA, SOX, and HIPPA among others. Furthermore, they should ensure any software application being developed to undergo rigorous application security testing. To ensure the same, it is about time businesses embraced Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) instead of the dated Static and Dynamic Analysis (SAST and DAST).

IAST is being hailed as the next big thing in the arsenal of cyber security testing for its plethora of benefits including an expansive test coverage. It has emerged as a potent disrupter in the world of application security testing with an innate capability to elicit information from an application undergoing QA. The information may comprise data flow, stack trace, libraries, runtime requests, and control flow among others. Let us understand IAST better in the following segment.

What is IAST?

As the code of an application is run by an automated test tool or human tester (manual testing) to test its functionality, the IAST or Interactive Application Security Testing analyzes the code for any built-in security vulnerability by using agents or sensors. IAST doesn’t include testing the entire software application but only the codes that are being part of the functional test. Needless to state, IAST is best leveraged when the QA environment encompasses an automated functional test. In addition to monitoring the existing security vulnerabilities in an application, IAST can verify them and declare them as potential threats. Thereupon, IAST can produce a vulnerability test report with the suggested course of action needed to fix the same. The report and its attendant guidelines enable the development team to fix the issues on priority. Typically, IAST is implemented shift-left in the SDLC resulting in early identification of runtime vulnerabilities. This pre-empts delays and mitigates the risk of breaches leading to cost savings.

What are the benefits of IAST?

IAST offers a host of benefits as listed below to identify vulnerabilities and strengthen the security framework of applications.

• There is no process disruption in executing IAST as it can run concurrently (and transparently) with existing software security testing. Since there is a premium on testing time due to a business’s obsession with time-to-market, IAST offers no disruptions or checkpoints. This is due to the fact that an IAST technique executes application security testing by leveraging activities that are already running.

• There is no need to rewrite the test scripts as IAST can be run by reusing the existing ones. This results in savings on time, effort, and money.

• Provides integration with analytics tools such as Software Composition Analysis (SCA) to scan open source components in third party applications or binary files.

• Since static and dynamic analysis does not include the testing of frameworks or libraries, a vast section of the application remains unchecked of vulnerabilities. On the other hand, since IAST validates the entire application from inside while the same is being run, there is better test coverage of the entire codebase.

• IAST does not need customization, finetuning, or configuration during its implementation. It simply runs alongside the software application security testing process automatically and on a continuous basis.

• IAST offers instant feedback assuring developers that the code being developed is clean. This can eliminate procedural delays in validating glitches thus saving time and money.

• Security tools can generate false error reports, which can engage the attention of testers and lead to the stretching of their workload. Moreover, this increased workload can let testers spend less time in identifying the critical flaws. However, with IAST, there is more access to data resulting in better error findings.

Conclusion

Web applications are increasingly being threatened by hackers to steal sensitive personal data, critical intellectual property, and other info. The existing methods or techniques for security vulnerability testing are not uniform and differ in the way they scan and test. Since not all tools are similar in their effectiveness, businesses have their task cut out while choosing the best one. However, the shift-left testing in IAST helps to identify and address the vulnerabilities early and prevents delays and cost overruns.

This article is originally published at

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