How to Test POS Terminals through Automation
Even though online shopping seems to be the buzzword and e-commerce websites are winning the popularity contest thanks to the digitization of the retail industry, a bulk of the sales still take place in brick and mortar stores. According to Forbes, approximately 90 percent of sales are store- bound. However, it has been found that the satisfaction levels among customers visiting retail stores are declining. Great shopping experiences that engage customers are experiencing churn as a result of changing customer preferences for transaction speed and service quality. And to ensure the same, elements such as payment processing, coupons and store sales, and loyalty management, among others, should be tightly integrated and allowed to work seamlessly with the back-end systems.
These systems may include warehouse, inventory, order management, supply chain, purchase orders, merchandise planning, marketing, and others. Large retail conglomerates have adopted omnichannel sales strategies, including online advertising, e-commerce, and digital product information. But the ubiquitous POS, or Point of Sales, terminal remains the tour-de-force for the retail industry, even when there is a drive to marry the traditional POS terminal with mobile POS.
For the retail industry, a POS can be the key differentiator to increasing efficiency and customer loyalty by getting rid of queues. With so much riding on the proper functioning of these devices, it is important to ensure their safety and integration with other back-end systems, namely, CRM, e-commerce, merchandising, and finance. Further, since customer data security has become a critical criteria for the industry to uphold, the POS systems should be made compliant with PCI regulations. The fact that POS systems have interfaces with a host of devices such as receipt printers, debit card readers, bar-code scanners, scanner scales, handheld scanners, and display screens. This makes them difficult candidates for POS automation testing.
Why POS terminal testing?
POS terminals have become the backbone of the retail industry and help it achieve a multitude of objectives. These include executing seamless and accurate transactions, ensuring integration with several peripheral devices and back-end systems, offering secure platforms, and providing superior customer experiences, among others. However, with cybercrime spreading its tentacles far and wide, keeping POS devices safe and secure while handling humongous volumes of transactions is a challenge. And to reduce the risk of POS failure during transactions, there is no alternative but to perform POS testing through automation.
Interestingly, any retail testing strategy for POS terminals should cover a host of scenarios. This includes payment gateway processing, cashier activity, negative scenarios, return and exchange scenarios, promotions and discounts, sales, and security and regulatory compliance. While executing POS testing, a few issues need to be resolved such as peripheral issues, complex interfaces, multiple configuration settings, upgrades, and PCI compliance, among others.
How to automate POS testing
By automating the testing of POS systems, any retail organization can have a decisive advantage over its competitors in terms of achieving seamless and quick transactions. To begin with, the quality assurance services for retail should set up an automated retail testing strategy. According to the strategy, an automated testing framework needs to be built.
Designing an automation framework: To automate the test cases of POS systems, a test automation tool that recognizes the UI controls of the application is needed. A proof-of-concept (POC) task can be performed to choose the best tool for testing the POS application. The automation framework should be designed using best practices for automation testing. Best practices may include externalization of test data and UI elements, page object model, implementation of easy-to-interpret and informative test reports, and integration of the framework with a continuous integration tool and a test case management tool, among others.
Selecting an automation tool: Choose an automated tool (open source or commercial) that best suits the POS system under test based on certain parameters. These parameters can be the capability to identify the UI elements, support for multiple platforms, support for languages, cost, and support available post-sales, among others.
Selecting a test case management tool: The tool should store the test cases and needs to be integrated with the automation tool. This is because the status of test cases (pass, fail, not run, etc.) should be updated in the test case management tool after test execution.
Selecting a continuous integration tool: As a critical component of the automation solution, the tool allows test execution by the click of a button and delivers reports to the inbox of the stakeholders.
Generating test reports: The framework should generate informative and easy-to-interpret test reports. The reports give details of test execution, such as pass or fail%, screenshots of failure, and test coverage.
Conclusion
For POS retail testing, an in-depth understanding of POS-related challenges and domain expertise is needed. To mitigate such risks, the subject matter expert should design the retail software testing strategy carefully in order to achieve the quality goals.
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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.
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