Love it or hate it, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay and is becoming more sophisticated every day. Different industries are finding new and innovative ways to incorporate AI into their workflow, minimising errors, adding personalisation to consumer platforms, and increasing levels of customer service with round-the-clock AI bot support. One area that AI is revolutionising is website testing. This is a crucial phase where companies analyse just how effectively their product or service works, and the software application’s functionality, performance, and overall quality. AI is being used in this manner industry-wide, and that’s what we’re going to delve into today.
What is AI in Website Testing?
AI enables machines to imitate human behaviour. When used in website/software testing, it can take on those manual, tedious, and time-consuming tasks, minimizing human intervention and using data-driven insights, all informed by advanced algorithms and machine learning. It’s being used by tech giants such as Microsoft and Google, who are not only using AI in their workflows but are also substantially investing in the evolution and development of the technology.
Benefits of using AI in Website Testing
There are myriad benefits to using the technology to test websites, from fraud detection and customer safety to personalization and the advancement of the end user experience (UI & UX).
Enhanced Test Coverage and Efficiency
The expansion of test coverage by generating diverse test case scenarios is a big benefit to companies. It means the release of higher-quality software in a shorter space of time, broadening test coverage without increasing workload. This enables QA teams to focus on more complex case scenarios, while AI can be left to more routine tests that would usually take up valuable time. This means faster identification of critical software bugs and greater overall team efficiency.
Overall User Experience
Modern consumers are more demanding of their UI than ever before, and AI is an important and valuable tool for the increased personalization of website content, as well as being a crucial component of customer safety online. A good example of this is in the online casino industry, where much sensitive data and financial information are needed for the industry to function. Operators such as SkyCity online casino are using AI to detect and combat fraud, further personalise their recommendations and content, and even identify problem gambling in individuals. Software developers are factoring these kinds of issues into their testing protocols, too.
Complementing Manual Testing
No matter how skilled your team is, human testing has its limitations, and mistakes can be made or slip through the net. AI is a powerful tool to catch these mistakes in the testing phase, and can handle huge volumes of data at a time to analyse, identify, or correct errors in coding. Combining human skills with the power of AI leads to a more rigorous testing process and cuts down on delivery times and workload. And with AI covering more mundane tasks, your developers can work on more exploratory and complex areas of the website or software.
Real Time Monitoring
Self-improvement and real-time monitoring are two more benefits of using AI to develop websites. It means that AI can immediately identify, flag, and rectify errors before they become a larger problem, which can affect UI and ultimately the profitability of a company. AI can monitor clicks, navigation paths, dwell time, bounce rates, and even cursor movement to detect engagement patterns. It can also check page load times, error rates, API response times, and downtime in real time, as well as detect spikes and unusual behavior. Real-time monitoring represents the “eyes and ears” that continuously observe users and system health.
Time to Market
Time to market is obviously a very important part of website development, as it increases the speed a website can turn a profit via its product or service. AI is becoming a big accelerator for website development, and one of the main business benefits is reducing time to market, that is, getting a site or new feature(s) implemented faster. Once again, AI reduces the time that your developers have to spend sifting through monotonous, straightforward tasks. It takes them out of their hands, enabling the relevant individuals to tackle the more complex issues at play. AI also catches bugs early in the development process, which reduces the need for back-and-forth solutions, freeing up more time to get the website online and functioning as intended.
Greater Accuracy
Once again, automation comes to the rescue when it comes to testing the simpler aspects of a website’s coding. In combination with manual testing, AI leads, ultimately, to greater accuracy and reduces the need for updates and bug fixes once the website goes live. This drives efficiency and, ultimately, the bottom line as well.
AI is a powerful tool in general, but it is of immense relevance for website developers. It has a wide range of uses within the process of creating a functional and bug-free website, and is helping developers across all industries create smarter, faster, and more secure sites with the best UI/UX.
