Over the years, I have observed that testers often tend to focus on testing the application without understanding the business of the application. To ensure that you are conducting comprehensive testing, testers should first understand and test the business of the application. If you are covering business level scenarios in your test coverage then you will have more confidence in your test coverage.

For testing the business, a good approach is to put yourself in place of the actual users. At vTEST, we simulate actual business scenarios by assigning different types of roles to different testers. Let’s say for testing an e-commerce application, you could assign 1 Tester as the Buyer and 1 Tester as the Seller. Now, try to simulate the actions that a Buyer and Seller would perform in an actual business transaction. Simple tests are like (sample list only) –

1. What is the Seller selling and how?

2. What is the Buyer buying and how?

3. Can Buyer and Seller perform the business transaction by violating any of the set processes?

4. Is Buyer satisfied with the user experience while performing the purchase?

5. Is Seller receiving all the monetary benefits once the transaction is successful?

6. In the next round of testing, swap the roles of Tester 1, Tester 2 and their different experiences will lead to additional defects/ improvements/suggestions.

Overall emphasis should be on testing the business by utilizing the application under test as a media for it. Remember that application under test is only an enabler to get the business done and is trying to replace the existing manual or otherwise activities. If any business activity is being performed offline then intention should be to include that in the application itself.

As always, happy testing and let the quality improve day by day!