The number of Magento-based online stores is growing rapidly, but not each of them manages to stay competitive on the market and create a favorable user experience. What is the secret behind a positive shopping experience? Recently, QATestLab held a webinar where Anna Kravchenko, QATestLab Program Manager of the e-commerce team with more than 5 years of experience, answered this question.
Here are suggestions on how you can test your online store build on top of Magento. The full record of the webinar can be found here.
How to Win Customers’ Hearts, or When Magento Testing Is Done Right
An online business powered by Magento is growing, and growing fast. However, it does not mean that there is no room for a new online store that can bring something new and improved to this market. If you want to create an effective and convenient online store or boost the existing one, software testing can be the key to success. But how to conduct testing Magento correctly and win your customers’ hearts?
“The tricky thing is that Magento has a lot of its own peculiarities that you need to know in order to accurately and efficiently test it, it is just extremely difficult to perform testing for Magento online stores only with the help of just Adhoc testing. It’s not enough.”
– commented Anna.
What is the right approach for testing Magento? For every product owner who is interested in the quality, first of all, it is essential to clarify what and how to test online store. Just like with any other direction, with Magento testing, we at QATestLab, we usually go to a meeting with the client, provide complete information, consult and choose together the necessary techniques that would ensure the desired result while spending a minimum amount of effort.
Here are some of the cases when Magento stores should be testing:
- Testing a new online store from A to Z before its release. It is the case when online stores can be already released for a long time but the testing has not been carried out and store owners want to check the quality of their store. These variants are classical.
- Online store migration from the Magento 1 platform to Magento. Store owners commonly engage the software testing team in order to verify that all the data qualitatively migrated to another version and that all the technical features that used to be in the store operate correctly on the second version.
- Testing the part of Magento store (during integration). This is testing of the integration process of Magento stores data with third-party data storage and processing systems like CRM, ERP. Often the stock updates all the information inside their system, but then all this data should be correctly integrated into the Magento admin panel and displayed correctly on the website. Usually, in such cases, QA engineers apply integration, API, security testing.
- Testing of Magento extensions. If a client wants his store to have additional promotions, push alerts, filters etc, he can purchase a ready-made extension, and not ask their developers to create it from scratch. That’s why some companies are creating such extensions by uploading them to the Magento marketplace. For such an extension to be accepted, it must also be of appropriate quality, and therefore, in such cases, a testing team is also involved.
As you can see there a variety of cases when Magento software testing and quality assurance are required.
Step-by-step guide on testing Magento-powered stores
After the stage of setting goals for testing between QA engineers and product owners completed, there can be several options for testing. Over the years, our company has gathered many scenarios and methodologies on how to test a particular product. Here are the secrets revealed by Anna:
Option when there is (no) technical documentation
The client can provide the QA team with all requirements needed or prepared test scenarios. There is also an option when the QA team can prepare all testing documentation for a client. The client decides whether he needs some test scripts, checklists, whether he needs any kind of test documentation on the test results in order to use it in the future, or provide it to another tester team.
What if the client doesn’t provide any documentation?
“It is the most common option when the client does not have any test documentation. Using the Adhoc method, QA engineers test the product on the basis of their knowledge, experience of testing similar products, they recognize the system and the logic of such a store, and actually conduct testing.”
– commented Anna.
Choosing the type of testing (Functional, UI testing, Usability, Load testing, and etc.)
To the greatest extent, the success of Magento testing depends on choosing the right type of testing. Of course, there are many options that you can opt for, as well as combine several at once. But to get the most effective results from testing, you need to know information about each of them.
Functional testing
Functional testing is needed to check the functionality of the site, whether everything works correctly, whether everything is clicked, switched, added, etc. In such cases, while testing the Magento store, QA engineers go through the usual default user flow and focus on places where some custom functionality was added, wherever the default development of the Magento changed, that is, the client wanted to redo the functionality for themselves: for example, adding new buttons, new fields, new logic
User interface testing
UI testing aims to check the site’s adaptability to mobile platforms, cross-browser checking so that no browser features affect the site’s performance. For example, sometimes it happens that in Internet Explorer it is not possible to click any buttons. It happens that on a PC the site looks good and everything works, but on mobile devices, everything crashes and breaks, and it becomes not usable. Plus, mobile adaptability is very important.
Sometimes functional and UI testing will be not enough. That’s why there are several types of testing for Magento that are optional but useful and performed at the request of the client:
Usability testing
We can conduct usability testing, it is important if the client has added a lot of their features to the site, f.e. the designers have drawn beautiful things, but it is absolutely inconvenient for the customer. In this case, our team from the point of view of the potential customer is testing all this functionality, whether it is convenient, whether it will influence the conversion later. As a result of this testing, the team gives recommendations on how to improve the website.
Load testing
The next one is load testing — if the store owner expects that in the future the store will develop and customer’s flow will arrive on the site, because of some promo campaigns or especially if it’s some kind of seasonal sales, holidays, Black Friday. To prevent the site from falling you need to conduct load testing and analyze how many users can be on the site at the same time.
Final Word: What’s the most important thing in testing Magento?
To sum it up, Magento testing is a complex task requiring not only robust QA expertise but also background on Magneto itself. QA engineers who are familiar with the platform, work more efficiently, much faster, they have no questions on the logic of working with Magento. Therefore, you can engage a team of testers so that they check where in your e-store is the bottleneck in the sales funnel, where it happens so that the customer falls off, where is the problem.
Originally published at https://blog.qatestlab.com on July 14, 2020.
