In the Agile release era, surviving in a market that expects companies to work with predefined  project timelines, testing everything everytime is challenging to say the least, especially for a product based company where end users are from different domains. It  is difficult to come up with a good coverage of use cases for any module, and for each testing cycle involved, there are multiple permutations and combinations. While automating them is an ongoing process, there are numerous challenges involving complex combinations, UI validations, multiple prerequisites, and the vast coverage needed in terms of devices, browsers, and various compatibility checks.

Identifying your gold (high revenue-generating/premium) customers and deriving tests based on customer-driven data and analytics can be a better approach for this. Below is a simple yet powerful process which ensures that a good test coverage is achieved.

1. Identification of Gold Customers: Customers are picked based on the organization’s priority criteria and categorized as Gold customers (Ex: based on customers license count)

2. Test Case Derivation: It is important to understand the use case of your customer and then derive detailed test cases for the customer. This can be done by conducting sessions/ interviews with the respective stakeholders (sales, support teams ) and also with the customers directly (through forms, calls, etc.) to understand their pain points. Derive your test cases based on the data you have gathered from the sessions conducted with the  multiple sources of the customer. This is a continuous process, and has to be repeated  for all Gold customers identified.

3. Test Execution: Make sure these tests are always executed (it’s best if you can automate them) for all releases. This assures customers that you have covered the customer test scenarios even during the hectic release cycles and ensures that none of the customers’ existing flows are affected with your new releases

4. Additionally, to identify more customer use cases, test cases can be derived using customer analytics data . There are many web based tools available in the market that capture user actions when integrated with your product . With user consent, track the various activities that the users perform daily and generate the analytical report for a specific duration, Later, you can derive test cases by using this analytical data.

Hope this provided some insight into deriving focus tests based on customer usage rather than going by theoretical usage.