Software testing on metaverse technologies

Metaverse is a new form of a reality where people can meet up using their avatar to be seen in a virtual office where employees can demonstrate the project, discuss the company status, plans and timeline as well as people can be seen working from all over the world. The other possible form of the metaverse is the use of AI and Augmented reality with a special device where people can see a real world view and a labeled object.

Software testing on metaverse technologies

The sample available public project for this has happened in Pokemon Go but there are many confidential projects that were made way before consumers have experienced. Testing and QA Automation will play an important role during the software development phase of the metaverse project as it will detect bugs and edge cases during the development stage to improve the quality of product. 

A reality of the metaverse

Way back 2000 to 2010 there was a successful multiplayer online role-playing game called Runescape with millions of players. In this game people can talk, see each other with their avatars, build their own homes and do fun activities with users from around the world. During this time augmented reality was already available and was under the development of Microsoft and Apple with the use of Kinect, and iOS devices. People can command the computer with hand gestures and see labeled objects with the use of an iPad or an iPhone. Citrix, a desktop virtualization from servers around the world, was being used by many professionals to work on confidential projects in the same years. Due to the security concerns, these companies want to use computers that they own in the cloud. For the year 2022 metaverse is announced to combine many technologies from the past that will enable people to be more productive and be seen in the meta reality. This will help people from around the world to connect and do the job as required by the companies. 

Testing in the metaverse

Doing manual testing and QA Automation in the metaverse reality is important and possible. Following the Agile methodology in the software development life cycle is necessary as this will help the project become successful. This has been a best practice of the development teams worldwide as this is an effective way to complete the project requirements based on the release schedule of the application and by following the story points of every assigned task to give proper estimation against the deadline. Testing the product as early as possible is a good model.

Additionally, as a QA having technical background on how to troubleshoot advanced devices such as the Google Glass, Oculus Quest, latest iPad, Kinect, and Hololens including the softwares in desktop, mobile and web will make the project successful as the tester can easily know the cause of the problem by using a troubleshooting tool or reading the log files. In this way bug reporting is accurate, easily reproducible by the assigned engineer and re-testing would be easy for the team. It could be a hardware or a software issue; the defect will be reported to the engineers in the quickest way possible. The QA follows the written test cases based on the product requirements, sprint task and test plan. They will mark the test result Passed, Failed or Blocked depending on the outcome of the test. With the use of the software development languages such as Javascript, Java, Python or C#. The software engineer in the test can automate the view by using visual regression, image comparison, auto clicker, x and y coordinate clicker and the graphical user interface tool such as Sikuli that uses images to identify the objects.

Metadata is playing a useful part in the project as it is giving information to the end user. The coder can write a test automation script that will verify if the correct information is sent and received with the use of Application Programming Interface with the stored data from the server. Adding the DevOps tools such as version control tools such as Github, and CircleCI a continuous integration, and deployment tool will make the test process faster and results will be delivered on time based on the written schedule. The process can be scheduled in the code on a daily basis while the employees are sleeping at night. In this way the amount of work is reduced especially in manual testing where most of the test cases are repetitive and can be automated. Regression bugs will easily be detected and will be identified before it reaches the customers. Peer review should be a normal practice by the QA team. This will help in making test procedures more clear and reliable.

The importance of testing

The Tester, QA automation, and the metaverse technologies will be working together to make the application development successful. Without integration testing or end to end testing, customers will not be satisfied and will report all the encountered bugs due to the failure and the usability issues. Based on study, a buggy product costs more money than hiring quality engineers and automation engineers. Testing is always necessary in every product. This is why big companies like Facebook (Meta), Google and Amazon hire highly skilled QA automation engineers to test their application so that they can get reliable and faster results. Working with highly experienced engineers will help the deliverables finish on time. This enables the company to start promoting and make the product available to the public. In this way, the stakeholders will be interested to invest more in the project.