Did you know that 92% of customers check online reviews before purchasing anything? This means that app reviews are much more than just a measure of customer satisfaction. These reviews can also show errors and usability issues that might not be captured by your QA team.
So, why not put that information to work and create better tests? Instead of having to read through all the reviews individually, the team could employ an easier plan: gather customer feedback, organize the complaints, choose the most significant issues, and produce test cases from the findings.
Gather Reviews in One Place
First, you need to gather your reviews from the App Store and Google Play in one central place. Make sure to collect essential information like review text, score, date, version of the application used, device, and operating system when applicable.
This context matters. Saying ‘The application keeps crashing’ is significant, but ‘the application started crashing on Android by version 8.2 ‘ gives your testers much more relevant information.
Categorize Similar Complaints
Users rarely use the same words to describe the same problem. One user might say that a certain app ‘freezes’, the second one might say that it ‘hangs while loading’, while the third one might say that it ‘crashes all the time’.
All these statements could define the same problem. Therefore, instead of treating each complaint as a separate issue, you need to collect similar complaints together. AI-powered app review management instruments can help you with automatic labeling, summaries, sentiment analysis, and identifying repeating themes, making this process much faster.
Use Simple Tags to Triage Issues
After you categorize the reviews, don’t forget to classify them properly. Consider the following tags:
- Crash or blocking bug
- Performance-related issues
- Design or user experience
- Account or login issues
Keep in mind that you do not need to develop a complicated system. You only need to simplify the process of identifying certain patterns.
Setting Priorities According to the Actual Effect
You don’t always have to give top priority to all one-star reviews. Consider the seriousness, occurrence, antiquity, and impact on the business.
A slight complaint made a hundred times could be more important than a significant payment or a data loss issue mentioned a few times. That allows your QA department to decide better which feedback to turn into test cases.
Convert Reviews into BDD Scenarios
This is where customer feedback can be transformed into testing processes. For example, if a client writes, ‘I choose a profile picture, and the app stops working,’ You could turn that into:
Given the user is logged in
When they select a valid profile photo
Then the image should upload successfully
And the app should remain responsive
Now, you can check different scenarios, such as unsupported file types, bad internet connection, or heavy images. The review describes the real-life problem, and the tester converts it into a test.
Register Jira Tickets for Identified Bugs
After replicating an issue, make a simple and brief Jira ticket. The ticket contains the original feedback, version of the app, gadget, or OS specification, steps to replicate, expected outcome, real outcome, and the severity of the issue.
It’s useful to keep customer feedback and share it with developers. They should understand exactly what happened to the user instead of receiving a vague description.
Include Important Issues in Your Regression Suite
Do not let the issue reported by a customer be forgotten after it has been fixed. If the issue was reported and mattered to users, include it in your regression suite.
It means that the next releases will undergo tests for the issues that were already encountered. With time, your regression tests will become more realistic because they will be partly based on real-life examples.
Maintain the Feedback Loop
This process generally unfolds in the following order: Analyze → Collect → Categorize → Determine Importance → Conduct Tests → Rectify Issues → Conduct Regression Testing → Supervise.
After publishing any fixes, it is essential to keep monitoring reviews. The fall in the number of complaints indicates the success of the fix. If they continue, your team may need to investigate further.
The biggest benefit is simple. You’re no longer treating app reviews as feedback that belongs only to marketing or customer support. You’re using them as a source of information for testing in real-life.
Turn Customer Feedback Into Better Testing
Your users are already telling you where your app is struggling. You just need a way to turn those comments into action.
Sorting reviews according to their similarities can help QA teams determine possible issues using different BDD scenarios. They can include definite bugs in regression testing.
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