Testing Your Applications

Building an application is an iterative process. You may already have ideas about which phrases to search for, but these may not be all-inclusive, and may not always match the category you expect them to match. For this reason, it is necessary to test your applications by reviewing the search results generated by your app, revising search phrases, and re-processing the changes. The recommended way to test your application is to look for both false negatives and false positives.

False negatives are calls that should have matched a particular category, but don’t contain any of the phrases currently used in the application. Looking at these calls will help you find phrases that you need to add to your application.

False positives are calls that matched a particular application phrase, but the context of the phrase does not properly match the intended category. Looking at these calls will help you identify application phrases that might be too general. You may want to add exclude phrases to eliminate incorrect matches, or make your current phrases more specific.

The easiest way to test for false positives and false negatives is to use the application metrics filters on the Dashboard. These filters allow you to search matches for each category as well as search for calls that do not match a category at all.

You can also test application search phrases before adding them to your application by using the ad-hoc search capabilities. Using ad-hoc searching allows you to experiment with different variations of special search characters, adjust the different metadata filter settings, and evaluate the kinds of calls that are linked to a particular search phrase.

Figure 1. Dashboard Application Metrics Filters