How the Applause Product Excellence Platform Enables Exceptional Experiences
For more than 13 years, Applause has helped customers deliver exceptional products to their end users: quickly, remotely and globally. How we do this has changed over the past decade. While we started as a point solution for functional testing on desktop, we soon incorporated mobile testing and user experience offerings as the mobile economy took off. We evolved our portfolio over the years — incorporating different testing types like accessibility and customer journeys across devices and industries — as we became a solutions company.
We continued to evolve to best meet client needs and now offer a complete platform that delivers a comprehensive approach to quality. This latest evolution empowers the world’s greatest companies to deliver exceptional digital experiences — and meet their end users’ high expectations — across desktop, mobile, voice, connected devices and more.
We are proud to introduce the Applause Product Excellence Platform (Applause PEP™), the first holistic answer for digital quality and product excellence for enterprises. The Product Excellence Platform expands on our comprehensive approach to digital quality to provide customers greater release velocity and confidence. It does so by combining world-class software products, an enterprise-grade SaaS testing infrastructure, a wide range of digital testing solutions and access to the world’s largest community of digital experts. This harmonized approach gives brands the insights and expertise they need to release exceptional digital assets.
The Applause Product Excellence Platform is built on the foundation of Applause’s industry-leading global community of digital experts, uTest. Our community provides the flexibility to test products in a vast array of scenarios. With Applause, clients can test their products across different device/operating system combinations, geographies and user profiles — all with fast turnaround times and scalable results.
What is the Applause Product Excellence Platform?
With the Product Excellence Platform, Applause provides the infrastructure, products, solutions and expertise that enable customers to deliver great software quality with unmatched flexibility, scale and speed. The Applause Product Excellence Platform integrates into customers’ SDLC and workflows, delivering upon their unique digital quality needs in a harmonious fashion.
Open, scalable and enterprise-class, the Applause Product Excellence Platform is built on five core concepts:
Cutting-edge SaaS products, such as Bring Your Own Testers and Applause Codeless Automation, a new innovation, which we explain below;
Comprehensive digital quality solutions designed to meet clients’ functional and specialized testing needs;
Unmatched domain expertise across a diverse range of industries and use cases;
An enterprise-grade SaaS infrastructure designed for seamless integration, flexibility and scale;
The world’s largest global testing community, uTest, enables a massive scope of potential test cases.
Our multi-point testing solutions include:
Full-scale functional testing. All companies realize the value of functional testing, but few can execute it with scale and speed. The Applause Product Excellence Platform enables customers to tap into vetted and curated real-world testers across the globe to augment their digital quality efforts at the speed and scale of life. Whether customers need exploratory or scripted tests, Applause delivers actionable bug reports and images — including screenshots and recordings — to enable teams to reproduce and fix issues quickly.
Integrated manual/automated testing. Both automated and manual testing fit into most organizations’ digital quality initiatives. But it’s not always easy to balance the approaches and hit test coverage benchmarks. The Applause Integrated Functional Testing solution helps brands boost both development velocity and product quality simultaneously. Our dedicated team of experts helps customers blend world-class manual testing and efficient automated test scripts in a cohesive, fully managed solution, with results available all within a single dashboard.
The Applause Product Excellence Platform extends beyond functional testing to ensure end users have exceptional product experiences. The Product Excellence Platform includes specialized solutions for:
User experience. In the age of app ubiquity, companies must make sure customers have seamless product experiences, instantly and consistently. With User Experience Testing, brands can turn to our global community of experts to prioritize the users that matter most, conduct expert-led usability studies and gain peace of mind that their product both works and is intuitive.
Accessibility. All users must have a great experience with digital products, but that requires a consistent effort. Accessibility Testing provides expert-led accessibility assessments and community-driven testing and inclusive design studies. Accessibility Testing helps customers conform with guidelines like WCAG 2.1 or Section 508 and reach more end users.
Customer journeys. Customer Journey Testing lets brands tap into the myriad ways their customers interact with products and services. Target testers in the Applause community with specific demographics in mind, then receive insights as they walk along the customer path to improve customer loyalty and conversion rates.
Payments. Payment Testing enables companies to process real — not dummy — transactions in a variety of payment forms. The Applause community grants businesses the flexibility to validate payments in different parts of the world, with different currencies and with different devices, including contactless payment.
Voice. Whether customers use voice interfaces on their phones, in their living rooms or even driving in their cars, it’s important that those inputs are understood without difficulty. Voice Testing with Applause takes advantage of native speakers covering a variety of languages and accents at scale to uniquely test voice-enabled products, with results such as logs and audio/video files provided.
AI training and testing. Artificial intelligence and machine learning enables businesses to make projections based on their data, but it takes time and expertise to effectively train algorithms. Applause AI Training and Testing enables brands to take advantage of globally sourced training data and test against AI biases, all to get the most out of AI/ML investments.
As a core component of the Product Excellence Platform, Applause provides deep domain knowledge of testing across all verticals and industries. See how we tailor testing for retail, media, financial services, healthcare and travel and hospitality companies to help them deliver exceptional digital products.
Applause is committed to delivering more value to clients through the Product Excellence Platform. As we evolve as a platform company, we will announce new features, solutions and SaaS products throughout the year, and integrate them into the Applause PEP.
Two new offerings were also announced today as part of the Applause PEP to lower the barrier to entry to test automation and shifting testing left, both important objectives in continuous testing. Applause Codeless Automation enables customers to create scripted tests without any programming expertise. And Applause In-Sprint Testing automatically creates feature-level test cases at the push of a button in clients’ bug tracking systems.
Applause Codeless Automation
Test automation carries a lot of power, as it can be a differentiator for brands that aim to put quality digital products into the hands of their end users quickly. But test automation often requires programming skills and regular maintenance – a drain on development time and resources.
Applause Codeless Automation (ACA), an innovation in test automation, enables anyone to build automated tests for mobile applications without writing a single line of code. ACA helps organizations deliver significant value without any on-hand automation experience. All you have to do is mimic the customer path in an application, and ACA handles the rest. A SaaS product, ACA helps customers leverage test automation faster and cheaper. With ACA, anyone can script a test, enabling teams to improve test coverage and mature their test automation strategy quickly.
With ACA, anyone can simply use a browser to select a device and move through a test case. The solution automatically records these actions, then translates them into an Appium- or Selenium-compliant test script. From there, the user can add assertions to each step of the test case to validate results. ACA then merges the assertion with the action to generate the test script.
ACA integrates with a device cloud to execute test scripts on real devices, not just simulators. With one click, users can export failed test cases to their bug-tracking systems.
Applause Codeless Automation is coming soon in 2021 for Android and iOS apps. Support for web applications is coming later in the year. Contact Applause here for a demo of ACA.
Applause In-Sprint Testing
The sooner you test in the SDLC, the sooner you discover defects — and the cheaper it is to fix them. This is why organizations are shifting testing to the left, to involve developers in the QA process. But, while it’s helpful to write unit tests, your shift-left efforts shouldn’t stop there. Applause can help introduce testing mid-sprint to avoid QA bottlenecks that delay application development and delivery.
Applause In-Sprint Testing (AIST) puts more power in the hands of the developer. With this feature, developers can automatically create test cases for the Applause global testing community at the feature level, before code merges into the branch. Thus, organizations can test smaller, defined pieces of work sooner.
AIST leverages two-way integration with bug-tracking systems to trigger a test case when a customer updates the status of a story. That test case is sent to Applause’s community of experts, who provide a same-day turnaround — in as little as four hours. You receive vetted and triaged issues that are ready to address as appropriate. In short, you can test sooner, react faster and deliver exceptional digital assets with confidence.
For organizations that currently conduct testing of coded features during sprints with internal resources, AIST streamlines the process, helping you fit testing into a CI/CD workflow. For organizations that don’t have the resources to effectively test features mid-sprint, Applause now provides this capability at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated testing resource.
Applause In-Sprint Testing is due for availability in the first half of 2021.
The Applause Product Excellence Platform provides a harmonized approach to digital quality, empowering brands to deliver exceptional products that their customers will love. Learn more today.
