BrainBlog for Apica by Jason Bloomberg
Part Three of the Humanizing Software Quality Series from Intellyx, for Apica
In part 1 of this series, Jason English established user journeys as the essential goal of software testing efforts. Then in part 2, he explained why user journeys are so difficult to test.
The fundamental lesson across both articles is that the software quality buck stops with the user. It doesn’t matter how well the infrastructure or applications or middleware or other components of a software offering work if the user experience at the interface doesn’t meet expectations – or even more so, delight the user.
User journeys are in reality digital journeys, mapping user interactions from one piece of software to another. Never forget, however, that such journeys aren’t about the software. They are always about the user and their experience.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that software testing practices and tools have focused on the user experience (UX). Real user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, load testing, and other modern testing technologies all center on UX.
From the user’s perspective, a seamless UX masks the underlying complexity of the software – even though in today’s digital, cloud native world, such complexity is exploding.
Behind the scenes, each component must deliver on its requirements, and thus engineering teams must test each component – from database to cloud service to middleware to front-end – in order to ensure the UX is up to snuff.
Such component-level testing takes place at each component’s interfaces: the APIs that represent each component’s functionality to the rest of the digital landscape. However, API testing has never focused on the UX, instead focusing on the technical specifications of the API itself.
The resulting disconnect between APIs and UX threatens the success of the digital effort overall. To solve this problem, we must bring APIs into the human equation – rethinking API testing in the context of the user journey.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
