OTT Testing: A Holistic Testing approach for Streaming Quality Content

The changing trends of the media landscape

Did you know that half a second delay can cause you a 20% drop in traffic? That’s what Google found out about the importance of speed, the user experience, and user satisfaction. This is the New Media Age. A world without Netflix is similar to a world without electricity — The stone age in a digital world. Traditional media is transforming and we are stepping into a world of OTT.

What is Media Testing and why is it so Important

An over-the-top OTT media testing service is a streaming media service offered directly to digital viewers via the internet bypassing traditional platforms of cable, broadcast, and satellite television.

Users want access to high-quality streaming at any device, any place, any time, and any location. Your service/product is judged by the user. OTT takes the user-centric approach by ensuring a seamless viewing experience through multi-device, multi-browser capability leading to an awesome user experience.

According to a report by Allied Market Research, the global OTT market size was valued at $121.61 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $1,039.03 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 29.4% from 2020 to 2027

Challenges of Media Testing

In today’s digitized world, there is content on streaming devices. One major challenge of testing the streaming applications is creating an automated and scalable testing platform that includes a holistic approach due to the multiple stakeholders that are involved: broadcasters, content providers, and service providers.

Based on the preference, the user can view and also download the content that includes movies and TV services, and is delivered directly over the internet to connected devices such as PCs, tablets, smartphones, and consoles. These multimedia devices contain several technologies like audio, video, and wireless protocols. Various factors like Streaming statistics, buffering, latency, Network, etc. also need to be considered to create a flawless streaming experience.

Netflix, Youtube, Amazon, etc provide seamless streaming of many web series, movies, etc. However, it is dependent on factors like:

1. Where the content is running (region)
2. What STB (Set-Top Box) setup is available

If the STB is of good quality, then whether it supports the right streaming settings (Video and Audio) that it can stream quality media i.e. (all quality video with proper Audio). In case the streaming settings are not good, there will be Audio and Video Packet loss, giving a bad experience to a user who is using the application.

TV devices that include but are not limited to Roku, FireTV stick, Xbox, Android, and Apple TV create additional testing complexity like:

• Cross-platform, cross-browser Compatibility issues: Different platforms and browsers can bring in different design issues. You need to ensure flawless content steaming across all platforms and browsers.
• Resolution issues: Users can use the streaming platform from any kind of device. TV has a particular resolution and freezes while Smart TVs do not support pixel CSS. Hence, you need to ensure there are no resolution issues.
• Network Issues involving freezing app issues, etc.
• Some platforms like Roku do not provide emulators and some existing emulators of platforms do not support testing of all necessary functionalities such as video streaming or network checking

A Holistic Approach to Media Testing

With such a steep increase in the production and consumption of streaming content, various issues walk hand-in-hand while working on an OTT platform.

Hence, it is of utmost importance to have an effective QA testing strategy for your OTT platform that covers various scenarios and major functionalities across the network, infrastructure, and application components including:

1. Application basic functionality working like launching, search, menu options, links verification, recommendations, etc.
2. Playback scenarios like Play, Pause, Forward, etc.
3. Audio, Video performance metrics scenarios like lip sync, Buffering, Latency, Resolution (high definition, Standard definition, low, etc.) for different categories like Audio, Video, News, Gaming, Lifestyle applications.

Media Testing KPIs/Real video performance metrics

With radical shifts in the media and communications industry and this being a highly-fragmented market, organizations need to focus on the three important indicators that elevate customer experience to another level.

Webomates cloud-based Testing Strategy: Putting your OTT platform to the Test

Webomates cloud-based QA strategy ensures test coverage for the entire OTT pipeline. The state-of-the-art Media Testing services span Audio Testing, Video Testing, Over the Top (OTT), and STB testing.

Apart from the conventional feature/functional testing for OTT services, these 7 focus areas are considered while devising a comprehensive OTT Testing strategy. Each area enhances user experience with our intelligent automation and Next-Gen Media testing solutions.

What do we Test?

1. Graphics, UI, and UX testing — Is the User Interface simple and consistent across devices?
2. Usability Testing — Is the app experience flawless from the end-user perspective
3. Stream Testing — Is the content that is being delivered robust enough?
4. Interoperability — Is the content multi-browser, multi Platform, and multi-device compatible?
5. Security — Is the content secure to stream on different devices with security and DRM flags enabled?
6. Network — How does the service behave in low bandwidth, high bandwidth, network latency conditions?
7. Load and Performance Testing — How does your OTT network server react when it takes the load of millions of stream requests from around the globe?

Key advantages

Conclusion

With upcoming technological advancements in achieving higher bandwidth networks like 4G and 5G, one can only expect the OTT Video streaming world to explode with on-demand video consumption.

Howard Homonoff said in Forbes: “To succeed in this brave new video world, you need an alchemy of attractive content, an appealing user experience, the opportunity for personalization, and integration of data and technology, and some early credibility in the existing business ecosystem.”

Considering these challenges and user expectations, Webomates provides an end-to-end streaming platform to test all your streaming needs. When defects are identified at an earlier stage, there is reduced development and issue resolution overhead resulting in faster time-to-market and quality content delivery.

We believe in delivering the streaming products with care and in being a trusted partner in transforming the digital experience and giving users a great escapade experience.

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9 Reasons why Requirements traceability is important in Agile

 

Requirements traceability is the ability to describe and follow the life of a business/technical requirement in both, forward and backward, directions (i.e., from its origins, through its development and specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through periods of ongoing refinement and iteration in any of these phases) – Source Wikipedia

Requirements traceability provides a context to the development team and sets expectations & goals for the testing team.

Requirements tracing is bi-directional. 

• Forward tracing: Requirements are traced forward to test cases, test execution, and test results
• Back tracing: Features/functions are traced back to their source, typically a business requirement

What is the need for Requirements traceability?

Why	Description
To ensure compliance	All specified requirements have been met and final deliverables can be traced back to a business need. It also makes sure that every requirement is accounted for.
Helpful in analysis and design	Requirements traceability ensures that each business need has been translated to a requirement, which further transforms into technical specifications, and then resulting in a deliverable.
Change impact analysis	In case of any requirement changes, traceability helps in finding the affected workflow, design, and impacted test cases.
Ensures comprehensive test coverage	Requirement traceability ensures that the right test cases, which are mapped to the requirement under test, are executed. This further improves the test coverage since all the test cases are accounted for.
Helps in optimizing the testing process	Not all test cases that have been generated need to be executed in case there are any changes. Traceability aids in identifying impacted parts and relevant test cases can then be executed, thus resulting in an optimal test process.
Aids in keeping track of project progress	Analysis of the requirements and the test results, and tracing it back to origins, helps in keeping track of how far the project has progressed. It also helps in keeping tabs on reality check whether the timelines will be practically met or not.
Decision making and analysis	Any changes in the business need have a direct impact on requirements, which further propagates to the development and testing process. Requirement traceability helps in isolating the impacted requirements, thus identifying and updating the test cases associated with them. It makes it easier for the teams to analyze the impact of the change across the board.
Faster time to market	Requirements traceability accelerates the overall development process, thus speeding up the release cycles. The number of defects is inversely proportional to requirements traceability. As the traceability increases, the defect rate goes down, simply because it becomes easier for the development team to understand and relate, and for the testing team to understand the context and scope of testing.
Increased customer confidence	Requirements traceability helps in gaining and maintaining customer’s trust and confidence by increased transparency. Customers can be assured in the knowledge that all their business needs have been accounted for and are traceable to a fully functional and high-quality end product

What is a typical Requirements traceability life cycle?

What is the Requirements Traceability Matrix?

Requirement traceability matrix tools is a testing artifact that keeps track of all the user requirements and the details of the test cases mapped to each of those requirements. It serves as a documented proof that all the requirements have been accounted for and validated to achieve their end purpose.

Contents of a typical RTM are

Requirements Traceability in DevOps and its challenges

It is quite evident from the previous sections that requirements tracing has a plethora of benefits, but does it work perfectly in the DevOps scenario?

In agile environments, keeping track of the requirements for every sprint and release can be a herculean task since the requirements keep evolving. One may tend to think whether all these efforts are worth it, without compromising on the release timeline and overall quality. 

Two common challenges faced while striving for end-to-end requirements traceability are collaboration and maintenance.

Collaboration: Many cross-functional teams are involved when it comes to development and testing in DevOps. It calls for better collaboration for ensuring that all the requirements are effectively realized, without compromising on quality. Requirements keep evolving with every sprint and keeping traceability up to date in synchronization with various teams is a daunting task.

Maintenance: With the frequent changes of software artifacts in a DevOps environment, managing traceability for those artifacts consistently throughout the software development is extremely difficult. Therefore, traceability maintenance to cope with the continuous artifact changes becomes tough. The next section will explore how the benefits of traceability can be integrated into DevOps to handle the above-mentioned issues in order to maximize the benefits.

Achieving Requirements tracing and validation intelligently with Webomates

Faster time to market a quality product is the essence of DevOps, hence it calls for adopting an approach that does not create testing bottlenecks in order to incorporate traceability. 

Automation and Shift-Left approach are two pillars of many which render support to DevOps setup. Both of these can also be leveraged upon to incorporate traceability effectively, at the same time addressing the challenge of collaboration and traceability maintenance.

Automation: In case of the projects that are large in size, keeping track of requirements and their realization is a colossal task. That’s when automation helps by having an integrated requirements traceability and management system for end-to-end tracking. 

Continuous testing and Continuous integration call for automated traceability checks. Every time, there is a change, the concerned stakeholders should be notified about it so that the change can be traced to the requirement and appropriate action can be taken. 

Automation also helps in 

• Change and version management of requirements
• Status tracking of requirements

Shift-Left Approach: It is a good idea to introduce traceability as early as possible, instead of waiting for testing results. The developer and the designing team should be notified on a priority basis, as soon as a code check-in triggers the continuous integration process.

Organizations can reap maximum benefits from traceability by integrating it within existing tools to leverage the power of automated checks.

Webomates provides services to this effect. It addresses the following areas:

• Comprehensive test case coverage for an epic/story
• Is coverage level suitable as per the complexity of requirement under test?
• Audits the coverage level for new stories 
• Keeps track of most affected features: either due to requirement changes or defect rectifications.
• Analyzes the reasons for defects
• Checks why a requirement/feature is breaking – Is it due to outdated test cases?

Our tool provides a continuous feedback loop which ensures that requirement changes are traced at every level and updated accordingly.

If this has piqued your interest and you want to know more, then please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com. We have more exciting articles coming up in the next few days about requirement traceability. Stay tuned and like/follow us Webomates or Aseem.

Performance Testing Vs Functional Testing

An Ideal Software testing process has to be a holistic approach that involves combination of various testing techniques to achieve a high quality software. Broadly speaking, testing of any application can be broken down on the basis of two premises – “Operability” and “Efficiency”. “Operability” is taken care of by functional testing and “Efficiency” is taken care of by performance testing.

Functional Testing evaluates individual and cohesive behaviour functions of a software system to verify that they adhere to pre-defined specifications. It tests the functional accuracy, interoperability of subsystems and compliance with pre-defined standards in the context of functional and business requirements.

Performance testing is a non-functional testing technique that exercises a system and then, measures, validates and verifies the response time, stability, scalability, speed and reliability of the system in production-like environment. 

In this article, we will assess the differences between Performance and Functional testing.

Conclusion

On close observation of the above table, it can be noticed that both the testing types complement each other. Performance testing validates that  application software can handle real time scenarios and address issues, if any, to deliver a robust and efficient product to the end users. Functional testing company on the other hand ensures the validity of software as per the functional and business requirements.

To have a win-win situation at hand, where resources and efforts are optimized and a comprehensive testing is performed, it is imperative to combine both functional and performance testing. This will ensure that a stable, reliable and functionally robust software is delivered to the customer.

Webomates has optimized testing by combining our patented multi channel functional testing with performance testing where the same functional tests can be used for load testing. Our regression testing service not only guarantees full regression of every test case (even modified ones) within 24 Hours but also provides triaged defects with video, screenshots and log artifacts. 

If you are interested in learning more about the services offered by Webomates then please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com

Functional Testing

Among the various types of testing that can be carried out today the overwhelming majority are focused in an area called Unified functional testing.

. At its core, functional testing is a reliable, repeatable method to validate that a piece of software continues to carry out certain documented functions. Functional testing has been propelled to the forefront of testing due to a  sub-technique called Automation testing.

At the same time, software applications usage has continued to grow across all major fields like business, education, defense, research, medicine, energy, utilities, etc. The list is long. Software systems are evolving to become more sophisticated to handle more complex functionalities. Faulty software can cause minor inconveniences like browser incompatibility for websites or they can cause major catastrophes like losing a spacecraft, causing pipeline explosions, or banking failures and impacting economies. That’s why rigorous procedures have to be defined to test the software before it can be released to the end user. In addition, the software is nowadays being released at far greater frequencies. A decade back it was normal to release software in production once a year whereas nowadays companies like Facebook and Google release software multiple times a day! Functional testing is a critical component in ensuring that software works well in production environments.

What is Functional Testing?

Functional Testing, also known as Specification-based testing, evaluates individual functions of a software system to verify that they adhere to pre-defined specifications. It tests the functional accuracy, interoperability of subsystems and compliance with pre-defined standards in the context of functional and business requirements.

The primary focus of this type of testing is validating the results of processing, not “how” the processing is done. It can also be termed as a form of Black Box testing.

There are two key approaches to performing this type of testing.

• Testing based on requirement specifications: This is focused on testing all possible scenarios based on requirements aligning to the functionality that the software system is expected to perform.
• Testing based on Business Scenarios: This is focused on end users’ requirements pertaining to business objectives that a software system is designed to achieve.

The primary objective of functional testing is to verify and validate the functionalities of individual subsystems and then testing the functionality of the system as a whole.

Functional Testing is applicable at any level of granularity, be it at individual module levels or overall system levels. Depending on the level of granularity and interdependence, appropriate test cases are designed.

Any software system also has certain functions or plugins that can be tested independent of other functionalities. Such features are known as Independently Testable features. Such features either take inputs from modules of software under test or provide inputs to them.

Types of Functional Testing

Functional testing is normally performed during the System and Acceptance Testing. Additionally, it may involve testing User Interface, APIs, Database and client/ server applications.

Unit Testing: Unit testing is performed to test the functionality of an individual unit, which is essentially the smallest testable component of a software system.  This kind of testing requires to perform tests which would provide input parameters to a unit and validate the outputs against the specifications.

Smoke Testing: Smoke Testing is done to test the stability of a build after each release. It ensures that major critical functions of build under test are working as per the expectations. It is also referred as Build Verification testing. This testing is done before software goes for regression testing.

Integration Testing:  Integration Testing is the phase where individual software units/modules are combined together and tested as a synergistic unit. The idea is to look for any interfacing issues that might crop up due to integration. The whole unit’s functioning is dependent on individual unit’s functionalities, that’s why Integration testing is done after successful unit testing of modules.

Regression Testing: Regression testing is performed to check the impact of changes made to an already functioning and tested code. It may involve complete or partial execution of functional test cases depending on the quantum of code change. This is to ensure that the functionalities are in sync with their specifications.

User Acceptance Testing: The software is tested to check the usability from an end user’s perspective in a real-world scenario. This is a key step in verifying end to end business flow in the context of the requirements specified. A software is released for UAT only when it has successfully passed functional and non-functional testing phases.

Localization Testing: Localization testing checks the functionalities are in adherence to local criteria like language settings, geographical requirements etc. Localization testing is a non-critical type of functional testing. But in some cases, it may prove important especially when it comes to customizing the language preferences.

Globalization Testing: This type of testing ensures that the software functionalities are ready for worldwide audiences. It ensures that the software does not break down when provided with different global parameters and has proper routines to provide international support.

Functional testing broadly focuses on the following aspects of a software system/subsystem under test:

• Main functioning tests: Testing functionality of the features defined in Design documents and specifications given in Business documents.
• Usability Tests: Testing the ease of use of the features.
• Error condition handling: Testing the system’s ability to handle errors and its robustness and ease of recovery.

The following steps are involved in a typical Functional testing process:

• Analyze the Software and/or Business Requirements
• Design test cases as per the requirements
• Identify test input data and prepare a sample set for the test
• Compute the expected outcomes with the selected test input values
• Execute the test cases
• Compare the test results with expected results
• Record test case success or failure

Functional testing can be executed manually, with crowdsourcing or through automation.  Webomates offers 24 hours testing as a service, as well as QA tools to automate the testing process, thus saving precious man-hours.

• Functional testing is conducted in conditions close to the customer and end user environment ensuring that the software meets all the specified criteria. It provides a guarantee of what works and what does not work.
• The defects or deviations related to expected functionalities are significantly handled during this type of testing, leading to a high-quality product.
• Functional testing ensures high customer satisfaction by delivering a high-quality product encompassing the business and functional requirements.
• It addresses the functional gaps that may crop up due to changing requirements.
• Since it does not focus on the internal structure of the code segment or module, it turns out to be less expensive in terms of man-hours and resources.

• It does not factor in any critical performance criteria like response time, throughput etc.
• There are chances of missing logical errors during functional testing, especially, if an erroneous code branch is not executed at all and the functionality appears correct on face value.
• Functional testing relies heavily on requirement specification documents. In case a requirement is not clearly specified or is defined incorrectly, then it may lead to wrong results. The process of revisiting the requirements and making corrections is time-consuming.

Conclusion

Functional testing is an integral testing process in itself, but it is imperative to combine both functional and non-functional testing techniques for robust well-functioning software.

Webomates offers solutions which help companies integrate their white box testing and black box testing to run comprehensive tests within a matter of minutes and can be set up in weeks. We have optimized testing by combining our patented Selenium based Automation and Artificial Intelligence with crowdsource and manual testing. We provide peace of mind during deployment at significantly lower total costs.

If you are interested in learning more about the services offered by Webomates then please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com