Online Gambling Testing: an Ultimate Guide and Solutions

Online gambling gained broad popularity and even became a multi-billion dollar industry because gamblers worldwide play computer casino games striving to fulfill the adrenaline rush and eagerness to win. Thus, the sector boosted, and along with that, the need for secure services that users would trust increased as well. 

Lengthy verifications, complicated registrations, too much private data required, and indecipherable error messages cause a bad user experience.  So many of the potential users quit without even starting playing, for they don’t want to provide too much personal information or for other reasons. Users’ experience should be as seamless as possible. 

The registration process must be smooth, quick, and straightforward. Online gambling platforms should catch up with modern testing techniques to enable a secure and pleasant user experience. And to that end, they need high-profile QA engineers, with a diversity of devices, and from different geographies to test online casino platforms thoroughly before the launch, or before releasing new features.

Online gambling testing steps

The testing process connects with the game’s development through its entire development life cycle, including designing the game, polishing it, and fixing bugs missed during the previous stages. Here are 3 steps for a better online casinos’ testing process:

• The design stage connects with risk analysis and static testing. At this initial stage, a tester and a developer build trusting relations for further cooperation, understand the game, discuss phases and the scope of the product.
• When there are features to be tested, agile testing begins. The tester should provide comprehensive information on the product to the developers at this stage (can also be called the alpha testing phase). The products can be changed at any time based on the received feedback.
• When the developers are done with their part, the testers team starts integrating testing. 
• The last part should involve a third-party check and testing. It can be beta testing by VIP users or using a crowdsourced testing company to allow scaling up the testing, adding many testers to the testing process.  

Online gambling testing techniques

Here are the crucial testing techniques to follow during online gambling games quality assessment.

Compatibility Testing

The QA team ensures that the gambling platform runs smoothly in different environments. The software market is constantly developing, so the developers must be sure to make software for online gambling platforms available for all possible platforms, browsers, and OS. A casino must run smoothly on each of them, either Windows or macOS, or mobile platforms. Besides, gamblers worldwide use a variety of devices to play on, either mobile casino, PC version, or tablet. Thus, QA testers also check this aspect, trying online casinos on all the possible devices. Using crowd testing is perfect for this case, because testers from all around the world can try gambling platforms on different devices and OS, providing a comprehensive quality assessment of the product.

Functional testing

Functional testing is a crucial stage for any mobile apps, desktop, web site testing. It allows seeing if all the functions of the online casino platform match their descriptions in the specification. Those are the features in the game design documents which must match specific systems and platforms. The tester’s task is to report any detail that does not correspond to what is described in the specification. Game configuration setup, functionalities, game key concepts, game play, audio – all these aspects are tested during functional testing.

Localization testing

This type of testing aims to make the online casino product localized to the local market and target audience. That is, users, taking into account their nation, language, and other unique local aspects. Localization testing aims to provide high linguistic quality of the product and adapt the platform to the users from different countries, cultures, and local tax policies. For example, when users fill out specific forms on a gambling platform, they should know what is expected before they start typing. Casino developers should provide a list of all requirements for the users, visual aids on how they can find a certain number of their ID documents, hints on where they can find local tax references on payslips or letters about tax, etc. Those instructions must be localized for different markets and refer to the local tax reference, such as the National Insurance number for a particular country. During this testing, each country’s specific gambling laws and rules must be considered. It is essential to use local testers from the actual target markets to ensure that real people from the specific location check all the localization points to be tested.  

Penetration testing

This type of testing should be completed before the game release. Security testing must be executed in the whole system, hardware, and network. A product should meet regulatory network security specifications. Deposit and withdrawal details need to be encrypted and secure accordingly. In penetration testing, geo-location and age verification should be identified as a platform function, because each geographic location has different regulations.

Performance testing

This type of testing includes many test procedures such as workload, throughput, scalability, smoke testing, saturation tests, metrics, endurance tests, and capacity testing. If the online gambling platform does not work correctly during the traffic increment. It brings a negative user experience because every second is precious in gambling. During this testing, QA engineers test the load of the memory, network, or hardware to make them more capable of handling big loads. A gambling platform must offer proper speed and capacity to handle user load when the number of gamblers is increasing. Otherwise, it does not make sense to release the platform with failures and bugs because of low speed and capacity. Losing time because of lags causes users to leave the platform forever and switch to another that works properly. So performance testing is a crucial stage in QA. 

The performance testing includes:

• find out the response time
• make optimizations
• improve load capability
• ensure usability
• detect memory leaks
• check reliability
• etc

Regression testing

Regression testing is all about finding bugs in the software after modifications of the code or the release. It checks if the new version of the gambling platform works better than the previous one.

Payment testing

Online gambling apps involve payment transactions. The player must make deposits and withdrawals during the session. Therefore, payment transactions testing must be a major part of the testing process before releasing the product. Sandbox testing and dummy credit cards are not enough. In order for one to make sure that the product works perfectly, one must use real payment transactions to make sure that there are no failures. Using the Ubertesters community of testers you can test your deposits and withdrawals with real banks, real credit cards, and any other form of ePayment. 

Usability testing

Usability testing of online gambling apps is meant to be carried out from the end user’s perspective. The widespread practice is to attract gamblers to test the online casino and estimate if it operates smoothly and what are the bugs. Nonprofessional people who have nothing to do with QA sometimes better determine defects, especially in such a narrow sector as gambling and casino. When it comes to gambling, users more easily enter their personal data if they understand why. So gambling operators should explain the purpose of each stage of the registration. And only ask for the minimum amount of information needed to onboard a user. Online gambling platforms can access many beta testers through crowd testing to receive accurate user feedback from real users, using real devices.

So the QA team should:

• realize gamblers’ requirements and expectations from playing in the casino
• make sure graphics are visually pleasant 
• scrolling, navigations, links, minor glitches from design issues and invalid buttons, filters activity, issues like wrong bonus accrual, etc.
• check how much time it takes to request data and receive the response
• consider various browsers design
• check if the “Search” field is available on each of the pages
• check if headlines are clear

Crowdsourced testing and online casino gambling systems 

Crowd testing is an on-demand community of testers that can carry out quality assessment more quickly and efficiently than an in-house team. Numerous testers living in different countries may check the gambling system on various devices. That gives you a comprehensive picture of all the bugs and compatibility with the laws of this or that country.

QA testing for online casinos is better to carry out through crowdsourcing because the gambling platform should meet players’ requirements all around the world, for people worldwide are into gambling. This refers to local laws concerning gambling, users’ readiness to enter their personal data. And the reliability of deposits and withdrawals of real money from an online casino, etc. 

Conclusion

Gambling testing is often a challenge for QA testers. It requires experience, the latest technologies and tools, the fundamental techniques for QA testing, and above all, a passion for casino games playing. However, gambling platforms would only lose their audience without QA and quality online bug tests that will ensure smooth and seamless operations of all game aspects. At the same time, the market is highly competitive, and gamblers have a wide variety of platforms to choose from.

For best-crowdsourced testing experience and results, feel free to contact the Ubertesters team. Want to know more?  Contact us for more details.