The importance of UI testing

Let's imagine you have a business. You have a website, a platform, or an online marketplace for your customers. It's all going great, until one day, your orders significantly drop. Your registrations are half of what they were last week. Or even worse. The counter shows zero. You give it a day, check statistics, but nothing worthwhile happens.

Clearly, there is something wrong. But where do you even start? You hopefully have a development team. You are reasonably frustrated and yell at them a bit. (PRO tip: Don't yell at your developers! You will lose both software and trust.) They check some code and state that everything is functioning as intended.

If you are lucky enough, you have a QA team. You yell at them a bit too. (PRO tip: Don't yell at your QA engineers. You will lose both quality and trust.) They check. They double-check. But they don't check out. Because the checkout button is not working. Or the form submission button is broken. Or the (insert issue here) is not functioning properly.

Back to reality.

This short and far from extensive story lists some common issues with websites and web platforms. Issues that we, as developers, QA engineers, and business owners faced more than a few times. Issues that a ton of businesses face in one way or another.

The common theme amongst them is "We use only functional testing", "We test manually", or "We don't test at all". The theme rarely is "We employ testing tools and techniques to ensure that our clients can actually use our products". So even if a company employs some form of UI testing, in most cases it's because testing is "cool" and you should do it or it goes with some paid service package you have. Rarely directly oriented towards the real users and their experience.

And that is the actual problem.

If your UI is not working properly, how am I (your customer) supposed to use it? How can I use it to reach your fancy back-end functionalities or shiny database?

A lot of businesses state that they don't have the resources to afford UI and visual testing. It either takes too long for a manual tester to go through everything, or way too expensive to automate it.

And that is the complete truth. We faced those issues first-hand. We've been working in a team of 5 devs and 2 QA engineers. This is still better than the recommended 3 to 1 ratio and way better than most cases where one QA engineer has to cover for over a dozen developers. And that is the main reason Buglab exists in the first place.

Experiencing all of the pain points in software testing first-hand enabled us to create a tool that solves the most common and widely spread UI issues for businesses like: Errors in responsive design; Unresponsive and unreachable interactive elements; Broken form submissions; Missing fonts; We even managed to recover client data after a complete server wipe.

All in all, Buglab will ensure the longevity of your client-facing software without the manual labour and the complex integrations. Writing tests with Buglab is done without writing at all. Our no-code interface employs simple dropdowns and inputs. Try it. Tell us what you think.

In conclusion:

Every type of testing is important. Every type of testing serves a different purpose and shines in different stages of development. Can you do it without testing? Probably yes. Should you do it? Preferably no.

Here is another read on the subject by Resonio.