Importance of Chatbot Application Testing | QAble

The progressive digital world has made life automatic and the technologies driven by Artificial Intelligence plays an important role here. The era is completely indulged into automation and with the growth of technology, technical methods are getting improvised day by day. Previously manual supports are provided that take time in troubleshooting the issues and now we have “Chatbots”. Yeah, they interact in the same way as a human does and assist all the users superbly.

Chatbots are important in today’s scenario and in order to offer the best service, the chatbot should be smart enough in order to generate the correct response. Hence, we will discuss the methods and importance of chatbot application testing.

To ease the challenges of industries, chatbots are introduced and their intent is to maintain the performance and scalability of the businesses. Chatbots entertain the customers’ queries and guide them properly. There are some set answers that are being fetched by the bot to offer suitable support as a customer care unit. As the chatbots are an interface through which the audiences are getting connected and hence their testing becomes mandatory.

Why Chatbots Are Needed?

Chatbots are used almost by all the businesses in order to showcase their presence over the web. Chatbots help the businesses in the following mentioned ways:

• Chatbot saves time and human effort
• Maintains professionalism of the business
• Chatbot attends client queries on priority and instantly
• Chatbot increases the trust of end-users by offering quick assistance
• Businesses get more engagements than normal

Hence these are the reasons that make chatbot much important in order to scale the business. Being in the era of automation where things are maintained by chatbots, the testing should definitely be carried out in order to maintain the reputation of the product.

Chatbots are easy to create or integrate, but whether it offers a good user experience or not, is a challenging thing. Hence a chatbot is productive if it offers consistent support at the user’s level. There are some specific procedures that should be followed during the testing of any chatbot application, so let’s elaborate the same.

Scenarios Of Chatbot Testing

Before going to the detailed section of chatbot testing, here are the most important conditions that must be followed by the team of quality assurance while testing a chatbot application. The mentioned scenario helps in building and testing the bot:

• The valid response of chatbot towards a valid question of the user
• The invalid response of chatbot towards a valid question of the user
• No response from the chatbot

How Testing Of Chatbot Application Is Performed?

A tester always ensures the required elements must be integrated into the bot. The development and testing of any chatbot application take place by assuming all possible and unexpected scenarios.

Basically, there are criteria through which testing is done in order to ensure the smooth performance of the chatbot. These 4 areas are as:

1. Testing of conversational flow

As we all know, chatbots are all about conversing with the end-users, and hence the conversational flow of a bot should be solid. There are various aspects through which the conversational flow is tested. There may be a possibility that end users raise a concern to change the scheduled date of appointment and if the bot is unable to process the request, it will not be counted as the right chatbot.

The user should be comfortable while chatting with a bot and it is only possible if the bot responds all the requests in the proper manner. Hence the conversational flow needs to be tested by assuming all the possible circumstances. Always maintain the length of the texts because no one likes lengthy lines.

2. Understanding and Entities Testing

The chatbot application is driven by the concept of Artificial Intelligence and developed in NLP i.e. Natural Language Processing. The system has to process the entities entered by the users and generate its response correspondingly. The bots are developed by keeping the word knowledge in mind so that they could understand some specific and emphasizing words that are commonly being spoken. Hence during this stage, testers check out the performance of the system by inputting various words from the perspective of an end-user. No one knows about the mindset of the end-user but it is tested to the maximum possible accuracy.

3. Exception handling Testing

Another most important aspect on which testing is done is the module of Exception handling. This phase of testing demands lots of efforts and intelligence. This is tested in order to handle exceptional conditions because no one knows, what goes in the user’s mind. The replies given by the bot should make sense. Developers should always keep the conditions in mind and throw exceptions in such a way so that the bot could give a relevant response towards the queries of the end-user. This is the most preferred as well crucial area of testing and hence the whole team should collaborate for the same in order to generate a productive chatbot application

4. Accuracy and Speed Testing of Chatbot Application

The basic agenda behind the foundation of the chatbot system is to give quick assistance to the end-user and if its speed or accuracy is compromised then there is no benefit of integrating chatbot application. People would prefer emails rather than waiting on chat.

Hence during testing, the team should always analyze the response time of the chatbot. Users become fed up when replies are delayed so one should maintain the optimum speed of replies. Furthermore, the accuracy of a chatbot is equally important. If your chatbot replies too fast but with misspelled or wrong information, there is no use of it. Make sure the response rate should be good along with maximum possible accuracy.

Hence these are the most required format to test the working functionality of the chatbot application. Always follow the mentioned testing methods and offer the best user experience to your clients. We all are willing to offer better out of best and hence make your product interactive, engaging and free from bugs. Keep browsing!!!

Originally published at https://www.qable.io on September 29, 2020.