6 software testing types that are a must for business e-learning

StaA few years ago, London’s Bloomberg terminal crashed due to a software glitch, wreaking havoc in the financial market and postponing a £3 billion debt sale. While it seems odd that a software fault with consequences that terrible could go unnoticed nowadays, the fact is no software is impermeable to bugs. Because of that, a thorough software testing, in-house or with the help of QA outsourcing services is needed to spot any problems before deployment.

Despite being less glamorous and exciting than other phases, the testing phase of any software project is arguably the most important one because it’s during this stage that potential obstacles to the software’s smooth functioning (internal or external) are identified and eliminated.
As the financial fiasco showed, not dedicating enough time and care to quality assurance in general means throwing a wrench into one’s own business and achieving the worst possible outcome: letting the software fail during its use. When e-learning is involved, failing means harming training or even leaking sensitive data. The inevitable loss in productivity looks especially annoying considering the $1000+ training cost per employee.
While software testing is an ample field with a plethora of types to be considered, some are more relevant depending on what the software’s purpose is. Regarding e-learning, for example, the Moodle must be able to function smoothly, support many different learners at the same time, while being impenetrable and reliable.

1. Performance testing

As the name indicates, it serves to assess whether or not the application lives up to what is expected of it, which is carried out through different approaches.
Load testing, for instance, is the name given to measuring, among others, the system’s throughput, that is, how many transactions it can handle at the same time. By loading it with queries, it is possible to observe its response and how it performs.
Considering businesses require and encourage its employees to engage with the application for training purposes, the software must accommodate such users simultaneously without delayed response times and crashes. Nearly 90% of businesses suffer from downtime every month, with roughly 60% of them becoming unable to access crucial systems for at least 1.6 hours every week. While it’s troubling enough to calculate revenue loss, and unexpected training platform suspension is unfortunately added to make the situation even more damaging.
Stress testing shows how the application reacts to being put under challenging conditions such as more users than it is expected to handle. The idea is finding out how many simultaneous users can be logged in under optimal conditions and then what happens when that capacity is exceeded.
Does it become sluggish and unstable to the point where frustrated users are left with no choice but log out without being able to study? The consequences of not planning ahead can cause user disengagement and loss in productivity as well, which can cause learners to regard the platform as thoroughly unreliable and burdensome.

2. Scalability testing

Scaling a business entails enough challenges. The last thing any business needs is to struggle with a no-longer-functional LMS that requires expensive maintenance. The purpose of testing scalability—which can be conflated with testing performance—is finding out what prevents optimal operation once the limit of simultaneous users is exceeded (assuming we found that through performance testing) and remove it.
While load testing helps find the limit, scalability helps increase it by spotting bottlenecks, or where/why data is processed more slowly. Then comes removing these bottlenecks so that the limit can be increased and the application can handle more users and larger amounts of data. Easily scalable means adapted to growth.

3. Accessibility testing

At a time when diversity is acknowledged as a necessity for businesses, the concept of accessibility becomes increasingly prevalent. It’s in every party’s interests to invest in that area, so the top software testing companies are increasingly including accessibility testing in their offering. In the US, a special policy requires businesses to make their applications usable by employees with disabilities. This means more than simply adding wheelchair ramps, but ensuring every stage of the business’s routine is more accessible to employees with different disabilities; something as crucial as their training couldn’t be an exception.
While it may be hard to predict which disabilities to cover and how to bring that about, some of the most common ones, such as vision impairment, can be approached in effective ways. Some questions that point to potential obstacles might help:

Is any activity or stage in the learning process entirely dependent on color-coding?
Can users navigate by using either the keyboard or mouse only?
Are tabs and information logically arranged?
Does the non-text content contain text that aids comprehension?
Is the page’s response time-indicated?

Bringing accessibility to training is a challenging but necessary endeavor. A key factor to consider is that because disabilities vary substantially and it can be hard to predict how such employees might struggle with the platform, businesses need to be open to further testing and improvement.

4. Ad hoc testing

Despite the fancy Latin name, this one is the least formal type of testing, as it involves unplanned testing to find bugs and undesirable reactions that would not be found through other testing types. In fact, laypeople can help in this one precisely because of its uninformed nature. The purpose of this unstructured type of testing is to answer the question: “what happens if I do this?”
What happens when users refresh the page during a certain stage of activity, say after a popup message appears? And what if learners enter misspelled words or invalid characters in a text box? In short, it is about finding hidden “gems” that can cause the platform to crash or behave undesirably.

5. Security testing

As is the case all over the internet, malevolent individuals target any domain with sensitive information. When you add that with the possible flaws and weak security measures that make it prone to unintentional failures, it is easy to see how an unreliable system can compromise the business’s entire LMS and damage the brand in the aftermath.
Penetration testing and vulnerability scanning are standard practices to detect potential ways to break into the system. This can be especially relevant when data indicates an astounding 90% of applications show security-related vulnerabilities, such as failures in encryption and access.

6. Acceptance testing

The last stage of testing measures whether the application is worth the buy—from the users’ perspective. Pre-release versions of software are usually made available with the word “beta” on it. Field testing, as it’s also called, allows testers to try it and be sure it’s ready for use.
Does it perform smoothly? Can many different employees log in at the same time and still use the platform? Real feedback is crucial to identify all the possible bugs that might have crept in the software. That way they can be dealt with before they will make their way into the business’s routine and hinder productivity.

Final thoughts

As beneficial as an e-learning application can be, it will only reach its real potential if proper testing is conducted. Otherwise, it might be an extra obstacle for the business. Due to their very nature and goals, e-learning platforms must be reliable—above-average reliable. While that is challenging to deliver, it’s most definitely worth the budget allocation and bringing the software as close as it can be to ideal before it’s deployed.