Bridging the Test Coverage Gap With Proactive Monitoring in Production and Testing Environments

The Limitations and Imperfections of Requirement Coverage

In a broader sense, software testing is a systematic and dynamic process that involves evaluating a software application to detect and fix potential defects, ensuring it meets specified requirements and works as intended.

Test coverage is a critical aspect of test planning in software testing, playing a crucial role in ensuring a comprehensive validation of the software under test.

Test coverage ensures that the testing process is comprehensive, covering all critical aspects of the software. It helps identify gaps in testing and ensures that different functionalities, features, and user flows.

In that context, requirement coverage is a crucial metric in software testing that gauges the thoroughness of the testing process concerning the specified software requirements.

It revolves around the idea of creating and executing test cases to ensure that each individual requirement outlined in the written specifications is thoroughly tested.

Areas of software that are not covered by tests, or that are not tested thoroughly enough, are known as coverage gaps. These gaps signify potential blind spots where the software's behavior may not have been adequately verified, leaving room for undetected defects or functional issues.

Identifying coverage gaps is crucial for risk mitigation, as it highlights potential areas of uncertainty and helps testing teams prioritize their efforts.

Coverage gaps commonly occur when requirements are misunderstood, specifications are poorly defined or ambiguous, and changes in the software are not appropriately incorporated into the testing strategy.

However, coverage gaps frequently arise due to the insufficient representation of real-world user behaviors and preferences in the requirements. Anticipating and comprehensively accounting for all user interactions and behaviors in written requirements proves to be a challenging task for product owners and business analysts.

Monitoring Production and Test Environments to Boost Coverage

To increase test coverage and align testing with real-world usage, testing teams can analyze production and test environment traces, user analytics, logs, and telemetry, aiming to bridge the gap between specified requirements and actual user behaviors in the real world.

This type of analysis facilitates the recognition of usage patterns, common user journeys, and frequently accessed features, effectively addressing gaps left by potentially incomplete, poorly defined, or ambiguous requirements.

Ensuring continuous observation involves establishing mechanisms that collect and analyze data outputs from the production and testing environments. This means putting in place tools and processes to actively watch, measure, and analyze how users behave when interacting with your live application or how tests interact with the application during test runs.

You'll need to work with raw, unstructured data and thoroughly analyze it. The goal is to slice and dice the data to gain insights into how users are engaging with your application, for example, by looking for usage patterns, finding out which features are used most frequently, and spotting trends in important areas.

Lack of Tools for Testing Teams

In the market, tools like Google Analytics, Amplitude, SmartLook, Datadog, and others assist in collecting and analyzing usage telemetry from any environment. However, a key challenge is that these tools are not tailored to effectively address the specific needs of testing teams, limiting their ability to extract maximum value.

These tools are primarily designed for different purposes, such as Product and Marketing Analytics, Observability, APM (Application Performance Management), and Digital Experience Monitoring, typically lacking a unified and holistic solution.

Consequently, testing teams face great challenges navigating error-prone, time-consuming analysis to extract meaning from these disparate data sources.

Gravity Comes to the Rescue

Gravity is a unified platform designed to help testing teams monitor and leverage insights from both production and testing environments. It consolidates key data and insights into a single solution for easy access and analysis.

Its primary function is to employ machine learning mechanisms to identify usage patterns, frequently accessed features, and critical user journeys from traces, user analytics, logs, and telemetry with the goal of generating dashboards with quality analytics to help teams broaden test coverage.

Gravity's ability to monitor production and testing environments allows it to conduct a comprehensive test gap analysis.

By comparing the paths taken by real user interactions in live production with the tests executed in testing environments, Gravity generates insights to enable testing teams to spot gaps in coverage, identify features that are either over-tested or under-tested, and recognize redundant testing efforts in less critical areas.

This enables data-driven test case prioritization, focusing test coverage on high-impact areas that directly affect the end-user experience. By bridging assumptions with usage insights, Gravity helps optimize test planning for relevant coverage.

If you want to learn more about Gravity, you can book a demo here: Book a demo

Conclusion

Understanding user behaviors not only elevates test coverage by focusing on genuine user experiences but also acts as a powerful antidote to the limitations of poor requirements.

It ensures that testing efforts are not confined to the rigid boundaries of documented requirements but rather extend to the dynamic and evolving landscape of user interactions, contributing to a more comprehensive testing strategy.

This targeted approach ensures that testing efforts are focused on the aspects of the software that are most relevant and impactful to users, thereby optimizing resource allocation and reducing risks.

Author: Cristiano Caetano

Head of Growth at Smartesting

Cristiano Caetano: Software testing authority with two decades of expertise in the field. Brazilian native who has called London home for the past six years. I am the proud founder of Zephyr Scale, the leading Test Management application in the Atlassian ecosystem.

Over the last ten years, my role has been pivotal in guiding testing companies to build and launch innovative testing tools into the market.

Currently, I hold the position of Head of Growth at Smartesting, a testing company committed to the development of AI-powered testing tools.