Chatbots & it's testing techniques: Part 1

In today’s era of the digital revolution, Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven technologies such as Chatbots have a significant role to play which has taken the human-computer interaction and experience to a new level.

Chatbots are driven by NLP, including both auditory and text designed conversations to perform a pre-defined task. The challenge in building a chatbot is not too technical but more an issue of user experience. There are lots of articles about how to develop a simple chatbot, the technical basics are rather simple, and well documented, even beginners will be able to launch a chatbot within the short time span. But the most successful bots will be the ones that provide consistent value to the user’s requirement.

Chatbot testing is crucial in the success of an effective and efficient chatbot, where we as testers actually analyze if all the required features are correctly incorporated into the bot and if it is responding appropriately to the user queries. However, the chatbot testing is quite different from traditional software application testing. Unlike other web and mobile applications where the application runs in a predefined way of interaction, the chatbot applications run without any restriction. Depends on our business needs and the technological landscape we can choose any of the bot development frameworks to develop. And it would be difficult, or rather unfair to comment on which one is the best. As a result, it should be tested with all unexpected scenarios to ensure quality.

Sharing my knowledge

During the testing, my knowledge about the chatbots increased. Having this knowledge is nice, but why not share this knowledge? Sharing is caring! So I would like to share my experience and knowledge on how to test a chatbot. I used to test a bot developed using Microsoft LUIS bot framework, Manually testing it is arduous and takes a lot of time. So I started investigating more on how to automate the bot. Are there any chatbot test automation tools? Yes, let's meet Botium.

To improve the test coverage and to solve the problems with manually testing a chatbot, Botium was created. One of Botium's goal as a company is to contribute to the open-source software developing community. So the botium core will always be open source and it is also called as “Selenium for Chatbots”. Botium allows testers to automate the testing of chatbot behavior using APIs. Tests can be executed in seconds, and they are easily repeatable with every software update.

Botium even provides a total management toolbox with predefined test environments and test sets with thousands of instant runnable tests.Botium is the first tool I used for automating my chatbot tests and it is becoming an important member of my software testing tool stack.

Want to know more?

I will explain more on how to test a chatbot using Botium in my upcoming articles, especially using botium bindings for testing a bot developed using LUIS framework.