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Intense competition means that businesses need to ensure the quality of their products and achieve a faster time to market at the same time. This has brought about the concept of Agile testing services wherein testing and development processes are carried out concurrently. However, in this setup, it is the usability testing that has been relatively ignored.

A product has to meet the rigours of user expectations to achieve customer satisfaction. This calls for the integration of a customer feedback mechanism within Agile testing services. And once the customers’ feedback is taken into consideration, the product features can be duly enhanced based on the feedback. These will have a serious effect on pre-empting the inherent quality challenges and gaining user acceptance. To enhance the user experience of the products and services, Agile testing specialists should undertake the following steps.

Best practices for Agile UX testing

It has been observed that Agile testing specialists are not always on the same page as far as taking the customer feedback is concerned. This has given rise to the need for usability testing in the Agile enabled development sprint.

The best techniques and practices to achieve the same are given below.

Plan a thorough research: Carrying out a comprehensive research by involving the real users can be a costly and time consuming proposition, which has resulted in running UX scripts. The prevalent approach is of doing the usability testing at the end of the product development phase, which is often rushed or not taken to its logical conclusion. This is due to the fact that businesses keep a close watch on the turnaround time where usability testing does not account for much.

However, to gain a better user response to the products, the Agile testing approach should incorporate the conduct of a thorough research. The research should identify the specific user segment (read high priority users) that is likely to use the product more, and create suitable UX scripts. The Agile testers should obtain user responses through webcam/audio enabled recording of user experience.

In fact, the UX script can be made a part of each and every design and development iteration. This Agile testing approach, apart from fleshing out the inherent glitches in the code, can identify the features or functionalities that users find difficult to navigate at an early stage. This precludes the need for finding glitches post creation of the product prototype, thus resulting in time and cost effectiveness.

Coordinate with stakeholders: To realize the Agile application testing outcomes quickly, it is better to involve the stakeholders during the planning stage. If a common vision is set up, the developers and Agile testers can work in tandem in every possible way, including the writing and testing of UX scripts by high priority users.

Run small tests but recurrently: Testing the product by using a large user base can be a complex and time consuming exercise. Try the industry average of using a maximum of five users to validate the product. This way, around 80% of the usability issues can be sorted out before deploying the product. Importantly, even though the sample size is small Agile software testing should be carried out recurrently for each and every piece of the code.

Webcam enabled Agile software testing: Online remote tests conducted through screen and audio recording often run the risk of not targeting the desired user. On the other hand, a webcam enabled Agile application testing can give the testers better insights into the exercise. The insights can be in terms of understanding the UI, functionalities and test scenarios in real time. Also, QA testers can study the visual cues of actual users and figure out their reactions to the product. The ultimate aim is to test the products by high priority users and not just any user.

Conclusion

Carrying out usability testing in the Agile framework results in better understanding of the user expectations and perceptions about the product. This is a crucial cog in the wheel of the entire end to end SDLC that can deliver positive business outcomes.

 This Article is originally published at Medium.com, Check out these best practices for Agile UX Testing.