The hidden link between tracking and test automation

Event tracking and test automation are two critical processes in software development that often operate in isolation, despite being equally important. While test automation focuses on streamlining the testing process, event tracking is all about capturing and analyzing user behavior. At first, they might seem separate, but they share a common goal: accuracy and reliability.

Effective automation isn’t just about speed; it’s about providing dependable data and processes. Without this reliability, automation loses its value. When implemented correctly, event tracking and test automation can work hand-in-hand, enhancing product quality and driving growth.

Understanding event tracking

Event tracking is a crucial process in marketing and product analytics, providing valuable insights into user behavior. It tracks key metrics such as clicks, page views, bounce rates, form submissions, navigation paths, and engagement metrics; each offering a clear picture of how users interact with a website or product.

For most SaaS companies, their products are accessible via web browsers, making it easier to capture real-time metrics of user interactions. With these insights, marketers and product managers can develop targeted strategies to improve user engagement and enhance the overall user experience.

Automated event tracking

Traditional tracking methods often required developers to manually write code for each event, resulting in delays, inefficiencies, and potential inaccuracies. However, automation has transformed this process, making event tracking faster and more reliable.

With automation platforms like Usermaven, companies can effortlessly capture real-time user interactions with their website or product. This allows teams to shift their focus from the complex task of data collection to creating insight-driven strategies that drive growth and improve user experience.

Understanding test automation

While event tracking automation focuses on external activities, test automation is primarily an internal process. By automating testing, companies can significantly streamline their entire testing workflow, improving efficiency and consistency. Test automation involves creating test scripts and frameworks that can be reused as often as needed, freeing testers from repetitive tasks and allowing them to concentrate on more valuable, strategic work.

Quality is what transforms a product from good to great. While eliminating errors is the primary goal, automation enables testers to go beyond just bug-fixing. With test automation, testers can focus on enhancing the overall quality of the product, ensuring it meets higher standards and delivers a superior user experience.

Auto-generation of test cases

Writing test cases manually is becoming a thing of the past. Traditionally, test cases were created using programming languages to write test scripts. However, with the advent of modern automation tools powered by GenAI technology, test cases can now be generated using simple commands.

For example, testRigor is an automated testing tool that allows users to create and run test cases using natural language commands. The screenshot below illustrates how easy it is to generate a test case in testRigor for testing the login method in the Usermaven tool.

Once the test case is executed, the automation tool captures a series of screenshots for each step, as shown in the screenshot below.

These test cases can then be reused as often as needed, making them particularly valuable for regression testing, where the functionality of the software needs to be validated after each update.

The overlap between tracking and test automation

The link between tracking and test automation is quite clear: they serve complementary roles in the product development process.

Both aim to improve the product, but they do so at different stages. Test automation comes before release, ensuring that everything functions as intended, while tracking provides insights into real-world usage and performance.

Feedback loop

Test automation ensures that all features function correctly before the product is released, preparing it for practical use. However, it’s only after event tracking is in place that the whole picture emerges. Tracking reveals how users interact with the product and whether the features are performing as expected. By leveraging product metrics, you can identify patterns, measure user behavior, and ensure the product is meeting its intended goals.

When test automation and event tracking are used together, they create a powerful feedback loop, where test results inform product readiness and real-time tracking provides insights for continuous improvement. This loop ensures the product not only works as intended but also meets user expectations, ultimately boosting product engagement and evolving based on real-world interactions.

Redundancy revealed

During the design and development phase, the focus is on implementing the requirements set by the product owners or the Chief Product Officer. These stakeholders often have their own assumptions about what will make the product successful, such as a feature they believe will be highly valuable, and they move forward with building it into the product.

Test automation ensures that the product meets the specified requirements and functions as intended. However, monitoring the product in real-world usage reveals a different perspective. A feature that seemed crucial to the product designers might turn out to be underutilized by customers. This highlights a gap between the initial product strategy and the actual product-market fit.

By monitoring real-world usage, you can better understand where your product stands on the product adoption curve, helping you identify where users are engaging most and where adjustments are needed. Monitoring provides the feedback needed to identify and address these misalignments.

Detecting unexpected scenarios

During testing, testers typically cover a wide range of scenarios that align with the product’s intended use. However, when complex products are used in real-world situations, customer interactions can uncover new insights. Monitoring these interactions can reveal issues that were overlooked during testing. For example, a customer might encounter an error during repeated navigation or abandon a workflow midway, issues that only emerge in real-time use but may have been missed in the testing phase. This feedback allows testers to refine their test scenarios and improve the product.

Furthermore, integrating a monitoring tool with the testing pipeline can seamlessly feed real-time data into the testing process, bridging the gap between QA and product analytics. The integration ensures both testing and monitoring are aligned. It provides a comprehensive approach to improving the product. It also offers valuable product trend analysis to adapt the product to meet evolving user needs.

Benefits of unifying test automation with tracking

Combining test automation and tracking creates a synergy that offers more advantages than handling each process separately.

• Reduced blind spots: Integrating both test automation and tracking ensures that no gaps remain in your product enhancement strategy. It guarantees that every scenario is covered, whether in testing or data tracking, providing comprehensive validation from both internal and external perspectives.

• Enhanced collaboration: Testing is typically handled by the QA team, while event tracking is managed by customer success or marketing teams. By combining both processes, these teams are required to communicate their findings, fostering better collaboration. This leads to more informed decision-making, with marketers gaining insights from the tester’s perspective and testers incorporating more realistic scenarios based on real-world usage.

• Improved prioritization: Monitoring real-time customer interactions and feature usage provides clear insights into which features matter most to users. Features that are frequently used reveal where the testing team should focus their efforts. By prioritizing features based on actual user behavior, teams can direct their testing towards the most critical areas of the product, ensuring resources are spent on what truly impacts the user experience.

• Faster feedback loops: Real-time monitoring data greatly enhances the testing process. While testers typically use synthetic data, real-time insights provide a clearer picture of the product’s quality. Testing is no longer a static, isolated activity. With automation, testing becomes continuous, and when integrated with live data, it allows for ongoing, dynamic testing. This enables quick fixes and patches to be developed and deployed without interrupting the customer experience.

• Higher trust: Introducing a combination of test automation and real-time tracking builds customer trust. Imagine a customer encountering a minor glitch but, without needing to report it, noticing that the issue is already fixed by the next day. This is the power of continuous testing and tracking. Such proactive improvements foster trust and play a key role in lifecycle marketing by nurturing the customer relationship at every stage.

The impact of delivering a well-tested product and using real-time interactions to drive continuous improvement is significant. A thoroughly tested product (inside and out) leaves a stronger impression on customers than one that is only partially tested.

Conclusion

As we have seen how test automation can be performed through an automated tool, we can also see the automation of the tracking process. Automation allows testers to rerun test cases as many times as needed. This is especially useful for regression testing when a product frequently undergoes changes. Test cases for regression testing mostly remain the same because they are designed to test existing functionality after every upgrade. Once created, they can be reused as many times as needed.

Automation testing and tracking are the two sides of the same coin. One produces quality, and the other captures the feedback. Both aspects are necessary for turning a product to be a great solution. Product scalability and release cycles are common phenomena in any software company. The convergence of these two types of automation decides the evolution of the product, both internally and externally facing the customer. And if the product is constantly evolving, customers stick with it for a long time.

Frequently asked questions

1. What is the connection between tracking and test automation?

Both are meant to enhance product quality at different stages. One does it before release, and the other does it after.

2. What is the role of automatic event tracking in testing?

Automated event tracking provides real-time data to the QA teams. Based on that, they can prioritize which features to test more thoroughly and how product quality can be improved.

3. Does tracking have any impact on test coverage?

Yes, testing before launch may have included only ideal scenarios and a few negative or edge test cases. But real-time information reveals more test cases that must have been missed during testing.

4. How to integrate tracking data with a test automation tool?

Online tracking platforms can inject real-time data into the testing pipeline. Test automation tools include features that enable such integration.

5. Which is the most important benefit of combining testing and tracking automation?

One ensures the code works fine, while the other ensures the customer experience is enhanced. Together, they contribute to the overall success of the product, from internal to external aspects.