Compatibility & Functional Testing in Healthcare Industry?

Should digital transformation be a strategic priority for health insurers? A recent report by McKinsey raises and discusses this point in detail. According to the report, various institutions, including healthcare, began implementing the latest technology with an objective to automate repetitive tasks.

In other words, the adoption of IT in the healthcare industry is equally important as it is in any other industry. And to be able to keep a check and balance on the trends adopted and the apps being used, functional testing plays an imperative role.

Almost after twenty years, industries experienced another wave of IT adoption and digitization. This resulted in two changes:

• It combined different aspects of central processes with a business.
• It supported business to business processes like supply-chain management for different institution across industries.

Automation and digitization are very important in the healthcare sector because there are round-the-clock repetitive tasks that need to completed immediately and accurately. Digitization encompasses a wide range of apps and technologies that can support automation, coherent decision-making, improved connectivity with end-users, and more data-driven innovation.

Hence, the significance of creating a market-ready and robust system cannot be overlooked. The main objective here is to provide a secure, digitally resilient, agile, and up-to-date business-user interface platform.

Compatibility testing and functional testing play an imperative role in creating a market-ready and responsive web platform for customers in an industry that desires for consistent performance and results. Although, Cross-Browser Compatibility testing is very important for web app testing as well as mobile app testing to evaluate if the product is functioning as desired across an approved list of supported browsers.

Connecting the whole functions and system with a web app is a huge task and getting it operational is a major difficulty. Therefore, testing these healthcare apps is necessary and you must ensure that the app goes through different testing phases.

Nowadays, users are evaluating healthcare apps across browsers and devices with several dimensions. In this situation, building a compatible app is very important for all the businesses.

Compatibility testing can be referred to as a non-functional testing applied to evaluate the app’s compatibility across different environments. It is segmented as backward compatibility testing and forward compatibility testing.

The main aim is to guarantee the apps compatibility across different versions of browser, databases, operating systems, and hardware. The compatibility testing process encompasses developing software and hardware configurations, designing and performing tests in practical life.

A web interface is specifically designed for your customer. It provides convenience in usage and plays an important role in building the institution’s brand image. Any functionality issues in the app can destroy the company’s position, leading to customers’ dissatisfaction.

Moreover, software’s incompatibility with a majority of the existing hardware devices makes the entire software application upgradation effort useless. The main objective of updating hardware is to speed-up the operation and provide improved operations.

What will happen if you ignore QA Testing?

Ignoring compatibility or functional testing processes can have some very serious consequences:

• Software’s incompatibility across various browsers and devices will make the user lose interest.
• The hardware can also be damaged if the software is not compatible with different other devices like printers.
• Incompatibility across different database versions can also lead to interoperability issues.
• Software’s incompatibility with the network can lead the user to experience bandwidth and performance issues.

Functional testing, at the same time, tests different features and components in the app – discusses the activities that validate a function or an action of the code. It assists to answer the questions from the perspective of the user.

This testing technique is applied to assess different functionalities and features of the app, considering various situations that would contain boundary cases and failure paths.

Types of Functional Testing

There are two following types of functional testing.

• Requirement-based testing: In this testing, necessities are ranked on the basis of test planned and risks involved. This guarantees that a few critical tests are involved in the overall testing effort.
• Business-process-based testing: This comprises of considering a daily business situation when planning the tests. Business knowledge is implemented in this scenario to create and perform the tests.

Moreover, testing across numerous browsers is an enormous task that might not attainable every time. It is practically not possible.  So, what can we do?

A wide-ranging testing approach must be combined to effectively test across different resolutions, platforms, and browsers.