As digital transformation grows across all industries, modern contact centres face increasing pressure to innovate at an unprecedented pace. Businesses must adapt and upgrade their existing customer experience (CX) tools, and – regression testing stands out as perhaps the most important way of ensuring customers have a positive experience with your business.
What Exactly is Regression Testing?
‘Regression’ means to look back at a previous or former state, so regression testing might initially be perceived as being backwards-looking instead of future-focused. However, contrary to its name, it’s a proactive testing approach that organizations utilize to shield customers from any adverse impacts resulting from code changes or modifications.
Regression testing is essential to analyze and understand the impact of each software update. This means comparing the new code to the preexisting code and ensuring that any defects are spotted at an early stage and before release.
Regression testing is an umbrella term, which includes multiple forms of testing – from functional tests to real-time CX monitoring. Regardless of which test types you choose to use and exactly where in the cycle they occur – a universal truth remains – it’s essential to test continuously. Regression testing solutions ensure your updates aren’t introducing any new problems into the system or breaking any existing code.
Benefits of Regression Testing
1. Enhanced code quality
One of the greatest advantages of implementing regression testing is its ability to elevate the overall quality and stability of your software products. It plays a pivotal role in upholding code integrity throughout every stage of the development lifecycle. With each code change, regression tests should be swiftly executed, enabling immediate feedback. This iterative process not only identifies potential defects but also compels developers to adhere to robust coding practices and standards, thereby fostering a quality-conscious programming culture within your team.
2. Elevated customer experience and brand reputation
Regression testing ensures optimal functionality, usability, and reliability of your software across various platforms and devices, ensuring an elevated CX. By systematically running tests on diverse scenarios and user interfaces, it guarantees minimal disruptions or issues for end customers interacting with your software.
Promptly identifying and rectifying potential bugs or glitches, contributes to a more seamless and trouble-free customer experience. This proactive approach instils confidence in your customers, fostering trust and loyalty towards your brand. Consistently reliable software also leads to greater repeat usage and more positive word-of-mouth referrals.
3. Reduced downtime and cost savings
Conducting ongoing regression testing leads to reduced costs by minimizing your downtime, a factor known to significantly damage reputation, CX, and revenue opportunities. Crucially, it is also much cheaper for organizations such as yours to identify and rectify any bugs in the system as early as possible. The later in the development cycle they are discovered, the more complex, costly and time-consuming they tend to be to resolve.
Additionally, regression testing solutions typically offer automated testing scheduling based on intervals or triggers. This reduces the resources that your organization requires to conduct testing and allows your team to allocate more time and efforts towards improving CX in other ways and achieving the organization’s objectives.
4. Quicker time to market
Despite the initial perception of testing before releases slowing down your development cycles, it, expedites the process and facilitates rapid innovation. This is because regression testing aligns seamlessly within an integrated DevOps framework. With continuous iteration and development (CI/CD), there’s no longer a need to wait for prolonged development cycles to conclude before testing code updates.
This allows for earlier testing of IVRs and other CX systems, mitigating potential issues that could affect other code in your system. As such, your updates and new releases will be ready for release much quicker.
Challenges of Regression Testing
Despite the potential for high success and a strong return on investment, improper implementation and maintenance of regression testing can lead to significant costs and potential damage to operations. Here are some drawbacks to consider when introducing regression testing into your business:
- Initial setup costs: One of the main challenges in implementing regression testing – especially from a senior leadership standpoint – is the potentially high setup and infrastructure costs involved. Establishing a robust testing environment integrated with necessary tools and frameworks demands considerable time, resources, and expertise. This initial investment may pose logistical challenges, particularly for smaller teams or organizations with limited budgets. However, the eventual return on investment usually far exceeds these costs.
- Resource consumption: While regression testing is very beneficial in the long run, it can consume a significant amount of time and resources at the beginning. The continuous execution of tests across multiple environments and configurations also demands substantial, secure and reliable infrastructure. Additionally, dedicating the labor resources needed for test case creation, maintenance, and analysis adds to the overall resource consumption, and may impact on development timelines and project costs.
- False results: Another common challenge encountered in regression testing is false results, be that positive or negative. False positives refer to instances where the test incorrectly identifies an issue that doesn’t exist. This may lead to unnecessary investigations and delays. Conversely, false negatives occur when a test fails to detect an actual problem, potentially allowing bugs to slip through the testing phase unnoticed. Managing and minimizing these false results requires careful creation and fine-tuning of your test scripts and associated frameworks, which can often be time-consuming and costly.
Automation to The Rescue
Many of these challenges can be efficiently addressed by leveraging automated regression testing services. The core benefits of automating your regression testing include:
- Increased speed: Automation accelerates testing by quickly executing large volumes of tests across various platforms, ensuring prompt bug identification and quicker issue resolution. This fosters agility in implementing software updates.
- Improved cost savings: Despite the initial setup costs, automated testing ensures long-term savings by reducing the dependence on manual testing and expediting release cycles, while also minimizing issues. These measures significantly reduce organizational costs, especially those related to project expenses and defect resolution.
- Greater scalability: As your business scales and expands its software offerings, maintaining consistent quality across different versions and updates becomes paramount. Automated regression testing offers better scalability by efficiently handling increased test volumes without compromising on quality.
- Elevated product quality: Consistently conducting comprehensive regression testing ensures a much higher level of product quality and reliability. It validates your software against your predefined criteria, thus significantly reducing the likelihood of regression errors or any defects.
- Enhanced market agility: Automation empowers your business to be more agile by enabling faster release cycles and quicker adaptation to market demands. Rapid and reliable testing cycles allow you to respond promptly to customer feedback, introduce new features, and address issues swiftly, thus gaining a competitive edge within your industry.
Conclusion
The need for innovation and rapid adaptation and evolution in modern contact centers has become increasingly important. Regression testing stands out as a critical proactive measure in preserving your customer’s positive experiences amid such change.
Continuous regression testing ensures software reliability, minimizes downtime, and facilitates quicker adaptation to market demands. Automating this not only accelerates testing processes but also amplifies cost savings, scalability, and overall product quality. Embracing automation empowers businesses like yours to navigate challenges more effectively, ensuring not just efficient testing but also fostering heightened market agility and sustained competitiveness.
Cyara revolutionizes the way businesses transform and optimize their customer experiences. Cyara’s AI-based CX Assurance Platform empowers enterprises to deliver flawless interactions across voice, video, digital, and chatbot experiences. With Cyara, businesses improve customer journeys through continuous innovation while reducing costs and minimizing risk. With a 96% customer retention rate and world-class Net Promoter Score (NPS), today’s leading global brands trust Cyara every day to deliver customer smiles at scale.
