Magento Mods Exploratory Testing: 12 Tours for Beginners

Hello to Amasty blog readers!

Today we will talk about testing tools we use at Amasty and ideas we follow. This post will be interesting for junior QA engineers and people who are testing their own mods. Find out how to investigate your product backwards and forwards from this article.

Let’s go!

The main principles of tour testing method

The central idea

Imagine that your application is a strange city, and you are a tourist there. You have limited time, so you can do only one exact task: visit casinos, or sightsee, or have a business meeting. You do only one job, no matter what.

How does it work?

Choose the tour from the list, learn its goal, and set a timer for 2 hours. Then make exploratory testing by focusing only on the main target. Stay concentrated only on the tour goal. And repeat it, if needed.

How do we use it at Amasty?

This tool is pretty helpful for new QA engineers learning, especially junior QA engineers. They are often confused and can't decide how to start extension testing, where to rush first. This is largely due to the fact that they get too much information, features, and tools for testing from the very beginning. Exploratory testing tours give ideas about what to analyze first and in what order to check a mod.

But we have made some customizations. As you know, the tour method denies check-lists, we’ve decided to break the rules and apply them to our check-lists. And it worked. As a result, our newbies understood how they should act and where to start. Now they know how to begin in certain situations, and what needs their attention primarily. Here are 12 tours that we really like using in our job. Let's consider them in detail.

12 tours to start your exploratory testing

#1. The Guidebook Tour

Goal: Find all instructions and do them.

A tourist normally knows all important sights from the guidebook and can feel free to walk to the proposed places.

A user guide you receive when buying one of our extensions or find when surfing our store or any other available documentation can be the guidebook in your case.

This tour helps in regression and smoke testing. We test the mod functions specified in the user guide or on the product page using this tour. Moreover, we check the user guide for contradictions during testing because we often have updates, and we need to be sure that all the information is relevant.

The tour is not designed for negative testing. We check the declared features only.

#2. The Money Tour

Goal: Find functions that are the reasons why people buy an extension and make deeper testing.

As well as tourists have reasons why they go to one exact place, users have arguments for buying your mod. Your ‘destination’ is to find these parts and analyze them. Imagine that you are a fastidious customer and ask the next questions:

• Why is this field named like this?
• What will happen if I do this?
• What will happen if I enter this?
• How should I do it? Where is this described?

#3. The Bad-Neighborhood Tour

Goal: Find an element that has the biggest quantity of errors and explore it.

Tourists try avoiding dangerous places, but QA engineers spend there as much time as possible.

When you have more experience, you will understand where these problem places are and what parts require your attention.

This tour is good for checking bugs from support. Sometimes when you fix one error, old troubles can appear again.

#4. The Supermodel Tour

Goal: Analyze how this extension looks like and what impression it makes.

You don’t need to go deep on this tour. It doesn’t test any functions it checks how it looks like only. If it seems OK and you’re ready to use it for your store, it’s a good sign. But if not, this is the reason to think about how to make it better. Answer these questions:

• Do this mod and its options look good?
• Does it match the Magento styles and requirements?
• Does it look good on a mobile phone screen?
• Are field names seem logical? Do they match the Title Case? And more.

This tour is obligatory for new mods and functions. It helps to find out what is inconvenient, unclear, illogical, does not meet Magento standards, or maybe you have ideas about how to make it better.

#5. The Antisocial Tour

Goal: Make all your actions out of requirements.

You should imagine that you are the kind of person who always does the opposite. This tour suits perfectly to negative testing. There are 3 sub-tours:

• Opposite tour. Enter wrong or impossible data, for example, print '-12' pages, use 0 reward points, etc.
• Illegal inputs. Enter 'illegal' information, for example in the field with the type 'int' enter the data with the type 'string'.
• Wrong turn tour. Make all actions in the wrong order.

This tour is obligatory for new mods or new functions.

#6. The Obsessive-Compulsive Tour

Goal: Repeat one action again and again until you are bored.

This tour looks needless, but occasionally you can find a bug when you repeat the same action two or more times. We use it when we are testing new features or bugs from the support team. It often helps to find such errors as:

• Get the same discount twice;
• Save the rule more than two times;
• Upload banner 2 times in a row.

#7. The Garbage Collector Tour

Goal: Choose target functions and visit them using the quickest way.

Say, you are a garbage collector on this tour, you stop near every house but only for a few seconds. You inspect every option checking out the obvious things but don't go into details. This testing is suitable for smoke testing after an update. You check that everything works without going deeper into features.

#8. The Rained-Out Tour

Goal: Find functions that work at least a couple of seconds, start and immediately cancel them.

The main idea is to begin any action, cancel it and start once again. For example, you can initiate file uploading and cut the process. Stop everything you can. If you have the cancel button, you should click on it. Sometimes an extension can stop everything then every action can bring error. So after the cancellation click everywhere around to be sure that all works correctly and you can repeat your actions. A user can change his mind, it’s OK.

#9. The Intellectual Tour

Goal: Ask 'difficult' questions to make your app work as hard as possible. Or vice versa ask very silly questions.

The main question that you should keep in mind is: How can I make the mod work as hard as possible? This tour combines negative and stress testing. The level of selectivity varies depending on the available time and mod. For example:

• Create the most difficult order. Order 300 items, enter absurd data or too many characters in a field.
• Upload a file with 1000 characters and lines where it’s possible.
• Upload an empty file.
• Upload a big (2>Mb) picture.
• Enter a wrong data in the uploading field.
• Upload a file with the wrong extension.

#10. The Couch Potato Tour

Goal: Be lazy! Do as little work as possible.

The main idea is to do as little manual work as possible and make the extension work for you. This tour will help you check validation with empty fields or replacement of default values after saving. What you should try to:

• Save form without data leaving fields empty;
• Fill in obligatory fields only;
• Agree with default values.

We use this tour rarely because we obligatory test validation and default values in our extensions. But this tour helped us to test free gift rules wizard in Free Gift extension where you need to do 4 steps to make your rule. And after we check how these all fields look like without information if they have any mistakes or extra data. So, it can be helpful.

#11. The Supporting Actor Tour

Goal: Test the functions that locate on the same display as the most used functions.

Usually, extension points you in the right direction. We highlight the main fields, validate them, put menu points in a certain order, and focus your attention on the necessary features in the user guide.

But this tour attracts your attention to the secondary options. Test how they work. Do they work correctly or break all down?

#12. The Cup of Coffee Tour

Goal: Work with extension close it and open after a long period of time.

This tour helps to see how your mod will be dealing with updates and migration. Our developers think about it in advance, but this is an interesting way to make sure that after a big update, all will work as stated. Will it work? Or will it be fatal for our extension? How will the migration take place?

Practical examples of testing tours

We have made a list of tours, which are suitable for different cases.

We often have a deal with:

• Check-lists writing;
• Regressive testing:
• Smoke testing;
• New features or module testing;
• Bugs from support team testing.

We recommend doing these tours in the same order. The next tour will complement the previous one in some situations.

Check-lists writing

Regressive testing

• The Guidebook Tour;
• The Money Tour;
• The Antisocial Tour;
• The Supporting Actor Tour;
• The Bad-Neighborhood Tour.

Smoke testing

• The Money Tour;
• The Antisocial Tour;
• The Garbage Collector Tour;
• The Cup of Coffee Tour.

New features or module testing

Bugs from support testing

• The Money Tour;
• The Obsessive-Compulsive Tour;
• The Bad-Neighborhood Tour.

Some situations where suit certain tours.

• Update and migration testing - The Cup of Coffee Tour.
• Wizard testing or the same functions with minimal user actions - The Couch Potato Tour.

How can 12 tours help?

Once we got a bug in the Gift Card extension from the support team. The tax was counted incorrectly in a cart. We have fixed this and added changes to the mod. But this mod hasn’t been updated for a long period of time.

We have tested this bug, made smoke testing and were ready to release it, but we had enough time to make more tests, so we decided to do The Bad-Neighborhood Tour.

We found 2 old bugs during this tour. They were already fixed once but came again. As a result, we fixed them too. Now we always check our bug tracking system before releases because you simply can’t remember everything.

Thanks to this tour, we have saved our customers from disappointments.

To sum-up

We hope you have enjoyed this article and it was helpful for you and you managed to learn something new about exploratory testing and tour method.

We were happy to share with you cases from our experience and show how it works in Amasty.

Have you anything to add? Tell us about your experience in the comments down below.