Challenges faced by Test Engineering team in E-Commerce companies

India has approximately 1.22 billion population and which makes a lucrative market for e-commerce companies. Diversify culture & social status of Indian society gives a platform to companies to expand their horizon in various domain and products line. In recent years e-commerce has been one of the fastest growing sector in India. According to study, estimated size of India’s ecommerce market will be $22bn by 2015 with 56 % compound annual growth rate.

IT/software plays a crucial role to support high growth sector. It’s not possible to meet user expectations without state of art backend systems. Software systems architecture should be scale enough to support huge diversification in product portfolio/inventory & user base. To design such a scalable solution/architecture Test & Performance Engineering teams play crucial role.  Any failure can be immediately expensive in terms of lost revenue and even more expensive in the longer term if dissatisfied users seek alternative sites.  

Following are most common challenges faced by Test Engineering team in Indian e-commerce companies:

• Domain Knowledge: E-Commerce is recent trend in India and IT Industry is facing challenges in having domain & process understanding. Complete end to end process comprise systems like Order Management, Payment, Warehouse Management, Logistic, Payment gateways & Governance. A tester must understand all areas to provide a good quality solutions.
• Lack of Process: Let’s accept that most of e-commerce companies are started/managed or funded by young promoters and they are not much experience/fond of the processes and testing is the lowest priority item in their bucket. At a time Test Engineering team has to support lot of adhoc request and continuous changing requirements & demands from business.
• Non Functional Aspects: E-Commerce business is running from website, Mobile & Backend systems so QA team must ensure architecture is scalable enough to support huge traffic and unexpected growth during promotions & festive seasons. Well planned performance engineering is required because all systems or pages won’t attract same number of traffic. Team must ensure ROI on Non-functional areas of applications. E-Commerce systems interact with lots of third party systems like Logistics, Warehouse, payment gateways so QA team needs to ensure the performance, security, availability of those systems for business continuity. Team should identify pages or scenarios with the most expensive traffic so they run as per expectations.
• Interoperability: E-Commerce business is supported from website & mobile applications. Testing team should ensure availability of functionality on various operating systems & browsers. Team should ensure universal user experience irrespective of platforms & browsers. Test team must ensure corresponding APIs/MicroServices are exposed for available functionalities and those services are used across the platform.
• Data Analysis: Indian e-commerce companies are serving customers from various demography which provides lots of challenges to QA team in data creation for effective testing. Team should develop test case/scenarios to help business in identifying in revenue leakage areas like fraud management, effectiveness of cash on delivery (COD) and product return management.