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6 Magento Testing Types You Should Use for Bug-Free Sales
Editor’s note: ScienceSoft provides end-to-end Magento services and has gained substantial domain experience that we find important to share. Today, we asked Max, our Magento team lead, to explain how his team tests a Magento website to ensure its seamless operation and stability.
Poor code and flawed interactive features, conflicting extensions and crashed APIs – in my practice, I’ve often seen these results of substandard testing of Magento applications. In ScienceSoft, we don’t let such a carefree attitude off. Keep reading to know what Magento testing types we use to audit each component of a web store and guarantee it meets quality expectations.
How we ensure website quality
Functional testing
With functional tests, we simulate customer behavior on an ecommerce website and check if everything works flawlessly on the front end. Test steps interact directly with page objects and trigger possible actions such as clicking Home or getting guest order ID. Here is how it happens in practice. As one of test scenarios, we imitate the actions of a customer placing an order on the website and check how successful and unsuccessful payments unfold from a customer’s perspective.
At ScienceSoft, we believe that quality assurance should start as early as development. So, we use functional testing at each stage of the Magento store life cycle. Once a store is configured, we check its overall performance before the launch. If the development team changes or adds some functionality later, testing ensures the changes don’t interfere with the daily operation of the store. When our team takes on long-term projects, which imply the ongoing evolution of the Magento instance, we make periodic regression testing a part of Magento maintenance activities.
For 10 years that ScienceSoft has been working with Magento, we have witnessed how digital transformation has altered ecommerce. When mature companies choose to digitize their business workflows, we integrate Magento with supporting technologies such as CRM, ERP or PIM. Integration testing comes to help to ensure seamless interaction between them. It checks if data flows correctly between store parts and updates get reflected in all the systems involved. Our previous example with order placement is relevant for integration testing as well. But this time, we test if the order gets added to a customer’s CRM account to make sure data synchronization functions well.
My colleague Tatsiana Bessonova, a test manager and QA consultant, shares a piece of advice:
Don’t risk your business data (products, orders, customers, etc.) and set up a separate test database for integration testing.
Integration testing makes an important part of projects with multi-component IT infrastructures and requires a good understanding of interconnections and dependencies between the ecosystem constituents. Our team mastered integration testing through collaboration with an omnichannel retailer – we built a complex IT environment with a Magento application connected to a number of business-critical systems and internal tools.
Web API functional testing
The goal we pursue with Web API functional testing is to check the operation of Magento Web APIs and reveal any deviations from the expected performance. Magento 2 supports both web service communication protocols – REST (Representational State Transfer) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). Magento REST API integration is widely used to connect an ecommerce part to other back-office systems and automate the management of product information, orders, customer data, sales and more.
Being invisible for customers, multiple Web APIs on ecommerce websites act as connectors to third-party servers. Let’s take social marketing as an example. In our experience, this marketing technique has proved to be effective for customer acquisition. As ecommerce consultants, we encourage the very idea to reinforce the brand identity with social presence. As Magento practitioners, we integrate social media into the website. For that, we connect Magento to the accounts via social Web APIs and synchronize the updates.
JavaScript testing
One of the three pillars of web development, JavaScript is responsible for creating a dynamic and interactive experience for users. As a rule, much of the functionality on ecommerce websites is JavaScript-powered including dropdown lists, videos, animated page elements like resizing or relocating and more. Aiming at enhancing customer experience, these features can have precisely the opposite effect if crash. Having stumbled upon a single malfunction, customers will naturally question the website quality on the whole. Meanwhile, customers’ trust is one of the foundations for their loyalty. Targeted testing ensures that all JavaScript elements in a Magento-based web store function as expected.
How we ensure Magento code quality
Static testing
At ScienceSoft, we make it a rule to start with the Magento code audit when landing a new project to detect bugs and vulnerabilities before they lead to website malfunctions and security breaches. The primary purpose is to check if PHP and JavaScript code corresponds to Magento 2 coding standards and best practices. Conveniently, static tests allow us to analyze code without running it. When developers extend the functionality of Magento websites, they initiate static tests to detect code quality issues as early as possible.
Static testing in Magento contains a number of tests to ensure the code stability and quality. Along with simple standard tests for JavaScript and PHP, more complicated integrity tests target complex scenarios like circular dependency or exception hierarchy.
Unit testing
While conducting unit testing, our developers focus on a single unit of PHP code to check a particular function or module. Let’s say, you have customized the checkout page and launched it untested. In the worst-case scenario, customers may run into issues while completing the purchase and abandon the process. To prevent this, we recommend testing each unit of the code during the development stage.
Why and how we automate Magento testing
In general, we at ScienceSoft are big fans of test automation. As its main benefit for all domains, we see reduced testing time and, as such, faster software releases. If we relate this benefit to ecommerce specifically, we see how it translates into a possibility to launch a web store and start getting ROI earlier.
Conveniently, Magento provides a proprietary tool for test automation – Magento Functional Testing Framework. We use out-of-the-box tests for the basic functionality and create custom tests for extended functionality. For as much as 30 years in software testing services, our team has agreed on the best testing automation workflow that we employ successfully for Magento projects.
- We decide on a strategy for Magento testing automation. We define the overall testing scope and decide what part of it can be safely automated.
- We set up and configure the testing environment to comply with following prerequisites (we regularly check them in the Magento official guide):
- PHP version supported by the Magento instance under test.
- Composer 1.3 or later.
- Java 1.8 or later.
- Selenium Server Standalone 3.1 or later and ChromeDriver 2.33 or later or other webdriver in the same directory.
- We create and execute test scripts.
- Upon completion, we process test results.
- We review and update automation tests for each new release.
Don’t underestimate Magento testing
There are three aspects directly affecting the customer experience you provide – functioning, performance and security of your Magento website. And timely and thorough testing will ensure nothing prevents you from doing business well. If you feel the approach we take in ScienceSoft is trustworthy, reach out to learn more about our services.