Why Penetration Testing Services are Difficult for Chatbots?

Last updated on February 26th, 2023 at 10:09 am

With the usage of chatbots becoming a trend, a lot of companies have found themselves stuck between wanting a chatbot and not being ready to maintain it. A lot of businesses fear that chatbots are high maintenance, demand a lot of cash inflow, and need a huge team to manage it as well. However, the reality is different if you have a proper plan and you decide to follow it step by step as well. There are some penetration testing services designed specially to test chatbots to ensure they’re fine working and quality results. There are a few topics we need to discuss before discussing why people believe chatbot testing is difficult.

Why Test Your Chatbot?

The first question a lot of businesses with chatbots find themselves asking experts is about the need for chatbot testing. Why do we need to test our chatbot when it is just a simple and easy program not accomplishing any complex goals? Chatbot becomes an important part of your business the moment you incorporate it into your business. The success of your business starts depending on it as the majority of your customers interact with it rather than writing to a customer service representative. So, testing your chatbot every once in a while ensures it is working fine, meeting all requirements of the business, and fulfilling the purpose it was made for. Now, that you are aware of the need for chatbot testing, we will move forward to another related topic.

Why Chatbot Testing is Difficult?

Chatbot testing has been declared as one of the most difficult testings by a lot of experts but have you ever thought why that is so? If you have given a minute to this thought, we have reasons lined up for you. The basic reason is that chatbots are a lot different from all typical types of software. Where a lot of software share more than one trait, chatbots share almost nothing with the software businesses have been using for centuries. Here are some of the chatbot features that make them stand out among the crowd:

Cloud-Based Services

The majority of the chatbots are cloud-based software and are enabled to keep up with the changing trends with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Dialogflow, LUIS, and Wit.ai are the most famous cloud-based services used by chatbots. It is difficult to make test cases for these cloud-based pieces of code as in a lot of cases testing ends up having an impact on the cloud services, which is figured out only at later stages.

Multiple Inputs

A chatbot has to deal directly with humans who in most cases do not follow the same set of questions or instructions. This forces the chatbots to have one question or input stored in more than one way. This demands test cases made for every single possibility of questions so the knowledge of the chatbot can be tested to its best. This has been reported as one of the most difficult challenges for any sort of penetration testing aimed to test chatbots.

No User Limits

With the help of technology, we do not only have textual chatbots with us but vocal chatbots as well. One thing that remains the same for both of these chatbots is that the user is not limited in terms of interaction. Users can ask almost any sort of question or pass any compliment so the chatbot must be smart enough to understand what the user is wanting to say. Testing a chatbot from this perspective can be quite challenging as it only has a limited set of outputs for the users.

Design Issues Noted

Last but not the least, the infrastructure and user interface designs of the chatbots are a lot different from typical software or mobile applications. It has multiple layers of machine learning and artificial intelligence to keep it going in the right direction. Apart from that, the infrastructure and architecture of chatbots are made to support it on the website as well as on mobile as well. Based on all these facts you must already be aware that a chatbot must be tested in multiple ways using the penetration testing services before declaring it perfect to be launched.

Conclusion

Chatbots are slowly taking over the world but sadly, a lot of companies still need to understand the importance of its testing. Its testing might be difficult but is equally important. So you must have your chatbots tested every 6 months to ensure it is doing great at expanding its knowledge and handling customers.