When it comes to designing and maintaining quality CX pathways that are sure to meet your customers’ expectations, it’s critical to perform frequent, thorough tests on each facet of your infrastructure. By taking proactive steps to identify and mitigate the issues that create CX errors, you’re able to maximize your CX potential.
Learn how Cyara’s automated regression testing solution helps companies reduce testing costs by up to 80%, compared to manual processes.
However, while many companies understand the importance of running tests to gain key insights and reduce CX defects escaping into production, these tests can also become repetitive and tedious. Issues can arise from any point of your CX design during the development lifecycle, so it’s essential to remain agile and flexible when running continuous tests.
Exploratory regression testing breaks the pattern of other continuous tests and allows you to review areas of your CX that may be neglected by regular tests. Let’s take a deeper look at exactly what exploratory testing is, and how you can leverage exploratory regression testing to expand your testing capabilities and identify errors that may have gone unnoticed in the past.
What is Exploratory Testing?
We all know how it feels to get stuck in a routine. You wake up at the same time every morning, clock in for work, and then head home once again. A few times a week, you’ll stop at the store to pick up groceries. You may eat leftovers a few times a week and share similar conversations with your co-workers and family during the day.
While these routines are necessary for most people to be successful in their day-to-day life, it may sometimes feel as though you’re neglecting other areas of your life. During these times, it’s possible that you’ve forgotten to catch up with a friend or failed to finish the latest home improvement plan that you swore you’d finally get around to.
For many organizations, this is the risk that arises when you fall into a routine of continuous testing. It’s easy to test the same communication channels over and over again. And, while it’s incredibly important to test these areas in case an issue arises, you may be neglecting other layers of your CX infrastructure.
Simply put, exploratory tests are unstructured or random tests that allow your team to explore edge cases. Without any pre-planned structure for the tests, your team can verify the performance of new scenarios and gain a user-oriented perspective with a focus on experimentation and discovery.
The fact of the matter is that your structured performance tests can’t crawl each and every inch of your CX, so exploratory testing encourages your team to try out new pathways and discover the defects that may be hiding behind the usual workflow.
Leveraging Exploratory Regression Testing
Regression tests are designed to confirm that your CX quality remained the same following a system update or code change. During these tests, your team searches to verify that defects haven’t been introduced or re-introduced by the changes. Regression tests should be run on a regular basis, or whenever the code has been altered.
While regression tests are often planned to occur after an update and are focused on the areas that underwent the change, exploratory regression tests allow teams to divert from structured plans. Often, companies perform regression tests by creating test cases that will test what has been designed during the update. However, these test cases aren’t all-encompassing, and defects may still be present. By leveraging exploratory regression testing, however, you can ensure that your team has searched all facets of your CX infrastructure and have been able to identify any hidden issues.
In addition, exploratory regression tests allow your team to create a feedback loop by experiencing your CX in a new way, from the customer perspective. Compared to repetitive, standardized tests, exploratory regression testing empowers your tests to collaborate and adapt to changes quickly and efficiently. In this way, your testers can understand the CX infrastructure even better than before, identify hidden issues that appeared after a change, and assure quality more than ever before.
An Innovative Addition
While exploratory regression testing is a beneficial addition to any existing procedures, it’s also important to strike a balance between exploratory and scripted tests. Just as structured tests neglect edge test cases and can fail to identify defects that are hidden behind the usual workflows, exploratory tests alone cannot offer full test coverage.
Continuous, automated testing and monitoring solutions are key to assuring CX quality at scale, through every stage of the development lifecycle. However, exploratory regression tests provide an innovative approach to testing your CX infrastructure by providing new insights and empowering your team to break out of the usual routine. In turn, your CX channels will benefit from more agile workflows, and you can be confident that an update hasn’t produced a hidden defect.
Your day-to-day routines are critical to ensuring your long-term success, but there is also value in exploring beyond your normal boundaries. Facilitate more thorough issue identification and a deeper understanding of your infrastructure with exploratory regression testing.
