This article is published in collaboration with the AI Awards & Summit. Enter the awards by March 16, 2025 –Â click here to submit your entry. In this article, Rob Mason, CTO of Applause explores how of software testing has evolved over the years and about adopting process frameworks to eliminate experience issues.
Assuring digital quality is crucial for delivering the best customer experience. It’s important to focus on creating systems and processes at all stages of development to prevent issues rather than just finding and fixing them.
Applause recently published a report based on a comprehensive examination of a representative sample of real-world testing data collected last year, spanning 748,000 test runs in 70 industries and 156 countries. The report identifies the common flaws in digital experiences – digital banking, streaming media services, wearable devices, online shopping, voice-activated devices, enterprise software and more – and provides pathways for improvement.
It found that only a quarter of organisations build quality into their products and experiences from end to end. Additionally, European companies lack formal systems, processes and documentation for assessing digital quality, and there is no consistent approach to UX testing. To eliminate customer experience issues, organisations should consider adopting more formalised frameworks to help them assess their progress toward achieving digital quality.
Documentation and reporting
Despite recognising the value of well-defined methodologies, accurate documentation, and continuous testing and feedback, these strategic imperatives are often overlooked due to tight deadlines.
For example, although testing throughout the SDLC is considered a best practice, few European organisations do so. Only 16.6 percent of organisations test at the planning stage, 12.3 percent at the defining requirements stage, and 12.5 percent at the design stage. By delaying testing in the SDLC, companies risk encountering expensive and time-consuming issues, and missing out on valuable early customer feedback.
The report reveals that European companies use test reporting and metrics less than the global average to guide their product roadmap. For instance, 40.3 percent use it to guide development strategy compared to 48.1 percent globally, while 50.2 percent use it to analyse trends and identify areas for improvement compared to 60.4 percent globally.
Additionally, less than a quarter of European companies have comprehensive documentation in place for test cases and test plans. Organisations with clear, documented procedures are better equipped to respond quickly to emerging issues, minimising damage and disruption to the customer experience.
Beyond bug fixes
There’s more to ensuring digital quality than basic bug fixes. More successful companies will also focus on addressing the complexities of specialised testing areas, such as emerging payment methods, accessibility laws, and assistive devices, helping to ensure apps, devices and experiences not only work but work well for all users.
Identifying and fixing a single critical payment issue before it goes live can have a significant impact on usability, as well as on an organisation’s bottom line. If a company can’t accept payment, it can’t make money. Despite this, less than a third (29.7%) of companies conduct payment testing. Even those that do, often only partially test different payment instruments or types of transactions.
Accessibility is also increasingly important. With the EU Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect in June 2025, organisations are focusing more on creating accessible and inclusive designs. 42 percent of respondents indicated that accessibility is a top priority for their business. However, according to the report, only 17.9 percent of companies conduct accessibility testing, making it the least common type of test. It’s crucial, therefore, that organisations invest in ongoing accessibility testing to reduce risk and ensure they’re prepared to comply with applicable laws, like the EAA.
User-centric testing
Websites and apps must function in ways that users expect and enjoy. With many users willing to abandon an app at the first sign of friction, there is no replacement for manual function testing – executing test cases to verify that digital experiences deliver the best possible UX for the largest possible pool of users.
But this isn’t always the case. Nearly a third (29.9%) of organisations don’t conduct exploratory testing as part of every release. Some companies still rely on dogfooding – six percent ask friends and family to test products, and 16.6 percent use external colleagues. Furthermore, with less than half measuring customer-centric KPIs (47.1 percent do customer satisfaction research and 44.9 percent measure customer sentiment), metrics aren’t often in place to gauge the effect of testing. Austrian social gaming company Funstage, for instance, relied on qualitative user surveys to gather UX feedback. But this approach gave only a vague idea of user sentiment and did little to answer business-critical questions, like why users always dropped out of a game at a specific point.Â
Testing times
The fast pace and constant changes in the development environment make it difficult to assess the quality of apps and websites. Organisations need to ‘shift left to get it right’ and use digital quality frameworks for areas like payments, accessibility, and UX to establish achievable goals for excellence. At a minimum, they should incorporate functional testing into their QA process. By excelling in digital quality, organisations can ensure digital experiences not only work but work well for users.
The benefits of this to the business itself should be self-evident. In markets like e-commerce – a trillion-dollar industry – if organisations aren’t embedding quality throughout the SDLC, they’re leaving money on the table.
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