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  2. Chatbot Connections

Selecting a Botium Connector

Botium supports pretty much every important chatbot technology out there. This article gives an overview of the what kind of test levels supported by Botium, and the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Note: There are numerous Botium Connectors available, with new ones continually added through contributions from the community and partners
This picture shows a typical chatbot architecture with 6 integration points for Botium test cases:

  • There is a user frontend hosted as chat widget on a website

  • The frontend connects to a backend service (often called Orchestration Service) with web-protocols — HTTP(S), JSON, Websockets

  • Somewhere behind, there is an NLU/NLP engine to convert user input to structured data with intents and entities

  • An additional component is handling the dialogue sessions.

  • And finally, there are some kind of business services, often backed by business databases.

Note: In most cases, the NLU/NLP engine and the dialogue engine are integrated, as seen with IBM Watson Assistant and Dialogflow. However, with Microsoft LUIS and Azure Bot Service, these components are separated.

1: User Interface Level / E2E Testing

Botium supports End-To-End-Testing with a Webdriver Connector, combining the power of Seleniums web browser automation with Botiums chatbot testing superpowers. The chatbot is tested by doing pointing and clicking and typing on a website just as a real user would do.

For more info on Webdriver Connectors visit our Github page.

Scenarios:

  • Validating browser/client compatibility

  • Smoke Tests before going live

Pros:

  • Testing end user experience

  • Works for all kind of chatbots, independent of the backend technology (in theory)

Cons:

  • Requires Selenium infrastructure setup which is not a piece of cake (or use a Selenium cloud provider)

  • Usually, Webdriver scripting is required (in Javascript)

  • Very slow compared to the other testing levels

2: API Level / Orchestration Service Testing

Typically, the Orchestration Service is published as an HTTP/JSON or Websocket endpoint.

Most chatbot engine providers support such endpoints, and Botium also includes a generic HTTP/JSON connector and a generic Websocket connector adaptable to a wide range of endpoints.

Scenarios:

  • Conversation Flow Testing is usually done on API level

  • Integration Testing

Pros:

  • Testing on API level reduces flakiness and increases speed

  • Testing near end user experience

Cons:

  • No standard API available, has to be adapted for every custom endpoint schema out there

3 & 4: Backend Level / Dialogue and NLU/NLP Engine Testing

There are lots of dialogue engines out there, some of them even offer free plans. In some cases, those engines include an NLP/NLU engine.
  • Examples for combined dialogue engines are Google Dialogflow, IBM Watson Assistant and Microsoft Bot Framework.
  • Examples for specialized NLU/NLP engines are wit.ai and Microsoft LUIS.

Botium provides connectors for all important dialogue engines out there, as well as for well-known NLP/NLU engines(see Botium Connectors list), and includes a module for providing NLP/NLU analytics.

Scenarios:

  • Regression testing for intent/utterance resolution

  • NLP/NLU analytics

Pros:

  • Supported out-of-the-box with predefined Botium Connectors

  • Allows very deep analysis of NLP data such as intents and entities

Cons:

  • Depending on the implementation, far away from the end-user experience

5: Business Logic Level / Business Service Testing

Usually there is some kind of business service involved, the core to providing value with a chatbot. Botium includes an HTTP/JSON endpoint asserter to make sure a test case actually had an impact on business data.

For example:

  • By using an eCommerce chatbot, Botium places a test order with the help of an order service in the backend

  • The order service persists the order in the business database

  • Botium asks the order service for details about the order to verify that the order has been persisted

6: Business Data Level / Business Database Testing

This is a special case for the Business Service Testing case above — Botium includes asserters for most common business databases (Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL) to query for test case outcome.

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