Chatbots are growing in popularity with each passing day. The rise in chatbots over the past few years has been due to increasing competition. Brands and companies are integrating chatbots on their websites to perform myriad of tasks including personal assistance 24/7.
The rise of chatbots has also come with a set of challenges for testers and developers. One of the major problems in developing a bot is not to make it as human as possible but must be comprehensive and smart to meet the required level of expectations.
When it comes to customer experience, it can prove to be a misery or meet the level of expectation. However, to avoid any discrepancies and turning down the customer, chatbot testing must be a top priority for developers and of course testers.
When testing a chatbot, it should include every element including input, intelligence and reasoning and the knowledge base along with infrastructure where it is hosted and premises like connectivity and voice communication.
On the other hand, if you want to test usability, make a list of possible user inputs and the expected answers. Moreover, the problems like misspelling and alternative spellings should also be taken into consideration to ensure correct answer outcome.
How can you test chatbot and what type of software testing practices you can incorporate to test it? Have a look at it.
Developer Testing
Developers need to test the software or app after developing it, to find and eliminate any errors or bugs. The same goes for chatbots, which needs to be tested while developing. You do not need to worry as testing a chatbot does not require any complex process.
Chatbot works in a very simple way. The user has to answer certain questions asked by the chatbot. With the help of NLP module, the chatbot processes the response given by the user, followed by a reply. It is, therefore, developer’s responsibility to define these answers authentically. The testing phase usually comprises of validation and verification. To define it in simple words, the testing phase just needs to verify whether the bot provides the authentic answer to the relevant question.
Related Post: 5 Chatbot Platforms to Develop Your Own Bot in 2018
Functional Testing
Chatbots are dedicated to a specific function. It is, therefore, necessary to carry out the test optimally. Functional testing can be conducted by using common mechanisms like equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis.
The free-form input can be a major hurdle involved in chatbots. Take an example of PulseBot where customers require entering dates to schedule a test drive. However, no one can assume what date format the customer will enter.
For this purpose, chatbot can answer a question in different ways like, not responding at all, invalid response, the valid response to the valid question and invalid response to a valid question.
User Testing
Before releasing a chatbot, it is important to do user testing. You can assign alpha and beta users to do so. However, some free testers are also available for this purpose. The responses can be utilized to make your chatbot seamless and free of bugs.
Moreover, you can also test the chatbot in term of precision, security, and load. Some of the features that need to be tested are
- Conversational Flow
- Understanding
- Error Management
- Bot Speed
- Bot Accuracy
Conclusion
A chatbot is disrupting the world more than ever. The way brands offered customer support in the past are now obsolete. If you haven’t planned to accept technology, think again. You might lose your business and customer base. Make sure to keep following the latest technology and incorporate chatbots into your business, after testing to ensure seamless communication.
