Part Two of the Humanizing Software Quality Series from Intellyx, for Apica. Read part 1 here.
In our previous post, we established user journeys as the essential goal of software testing efforts.
If you were on a desert island and forced to bring only one service level objective of a successful application, you would absolutely want to keep tracking user journeys, leaving the rest of the metrics behind.
If that is true, what is stopping organizations from truly testing user journeys?
Variability and complexity
User journeys encompass every sequence of actions users take within an application. Any application with a high degree of interactivity and utility – meaning it’s not a simple single-path or low value app like a multiple-choice survey – can have an astronomical number of complex and variable user journeys available to test.
But let’s not just concede failure to complexity again. Let’s move past it.
Throughout history, whenever a particularly difficult task is put in front of humans, we have looked to achieve a state of mastery and flow to get around it. Ancient warriors could even practice and learn something as difficult as horseback archery.
Hitting a moving target from a moving platform requires a Zen-like state of detachment from the archer’s thought and emotion, where the state of the horse, hands, bow, arrows and target are all combined into a flowing action that can only be mastered in the moment.
This state of mastery and flow is definitely relevant to how we build and test modern applications, which involve interconnected movements of front-end design processes, distributed services, and back-end data repositories, all orchestrated to meet customer requirements at scale.
Putting the user at the center instead of the software
Most software delivery teams are already adopting automated tools and DevOps methodologies for shifting unit, functional, regression and performance testing left as far as they can in the software pipeline…
