Software testing for metaverse experiences: Here’s what you need to know

While the industry grapples with what reverse is and isn’t, companies are envisioning what it means for them and how they can experiment right now. Bloomberg Intelligence forecasts that the metaverse market could be a $800 billion market by 2024. In a word, another high-growth tech market – the public cloud – is forecast to be $716 billion the same year. .

Companies are investing for a variety of business reasons; the majority of them to improve the digital experience. For internal employees, the metaverse leads to the creation of digital workplace allowing distributed work forces. For buyers, that means creating new immersive experiences – whether at home or in a physical store – that will further raise the bar of customer experience.

And, while there are obvious benefits in industries like retail and gaming, there are also benefits in industries that aren’t so obvious. For example, metaverse-enabled technologies could benefit healthcare, where doctors and clinicians will have better ways to access information and interact with patients. Or, in the auto industry, where metaverse technology can allow potential buyers to test drive cars virtually.

However, before you can run, you need to walk. No software is immune to the hurdles of testing, and in the metaverse, it’s important to understand how to test metaverse experiences and what determines success.

Some of the testing challenges will be familiar, like dealing with different platforms, techniques, and considerations. To ensure customers have a seamless, high-quality experience on any device and with any payment source, it’s important to test with real people in real-world scenarios.

A new challenge that is emerging for metaverse testing is scale. The complexity of assembling the technologies that create a metaverse experience, rendering it properly, and delivering the right content is in itself quite substantial, but those experiences must also be continually validated and refined as it evolves. metaverse develops.

If the metaverse experience includes payments, non-corrosive token (NFT) and electronic money that will be accepted will need to be verified and authenticated. That leads to transaction validation at a scale that companies have not yet experienced.

While it’s difficult to get ready to meet the scale challenges that exist right now, it’s important to note that the metaverse is the rise of a seamless user experience. Doing so will put companies on the right track in delivering world-class experiences.

The three pillars of the metaverse experience

As companies adapt to the scale of the metaverse experiences they are creating and conduct usability testing to understand how real users will interact with emerging digital experiences, there are three themes: The main focus revolves around the role of software testing in the metaverse, regardless of industry.

• Test API. The API is the backbone of the metaverse experience. Almost 60% of developers reports that they are directly involved in API testing – and that number will grow as the metaverse grows. They’re key to operability, but new specifications for APIs are constantly hitting the market before existing APIs become obsolete, creating more complexity for developers. APIs will be crucial to support the interoperability, flexibility, and decentralization that are so important to the metaverse experience. But they need to be checked to identify problems.
• Interactive and immersive testing. The success of the metaverse is entirely dependent on the users it affects. Super-diverse experiences must be interactive, accessible, and immersive, each requiring a holistic approach to testing. Companies must also ensure that the metaverse experience is included for all users and should establish a accessibility testing program.
  Over time, the best testing will be done “in the wild,” where companies can better capture the challenge of real users in real environments around the world. Native testing will become increasingly important as cross-app experiences become more ubiquitous, interactions become less device-dependent, and highly sensory experiences drive demand for testing. high sensory experience. What does this look like in reality? An example of a cross-app experience would be a user-flow test that takes you to one app to shop, another to purchase, and a third to schedule delivery.
• Network security. The challenges of the metaverse’s scale and complexity mean there are more avenues to attack and spread. Cyberattacks on vulnerable networks increase 50% in 2021 – and that’s at a significantly increased risk as potential vulnerabilities grow. With developer talent at a high level, many companies may not have the talent needed to support the complexities of meta-experience architectures, let alone do so safely and security. Security testing is already an important part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) but will need to advance to keep up with the evolving tactics of hackers in the metaverse.

Metaverse presents the next great opportunity for companies to differentiate and transform their digital user experience. While most of us are not yet ready to take advantage of all the business benefits the metaverse will eventually bring, we are at a place where we can experiment and succeed, as long as we keep testing. Thoroughly examine your design.

Rob Mason is the CTO at Applause.