Today, the majority of businesses rely on mobile applications to run their operations, and these applications are the most popular means of providing services to clients. A lot of businesses have been spending a lot of money to attract more digital clients using business applications. But these apps need to maintain certain standards, like a good user experience, faultless performance, and speedy loading. The success of both mobile and web applications depends on their ability to provide exceptional customer service and be error-free.
Why Mobile App Testing?
Additionally, it is critical that these applications function flawlessly in accordance with user expectations and be stable in order to retain clients for mobile apps. Therefore, testing mobile applications is essential to the development of effective applications. It is a procedure used to assess the software created for portable devices’ usability, performance, consistency, and other features. However, there are difficulties in the testing process for mobile apps. As a result, testing mobile apps becomes a challenging operation due to the variety of elements that must be taken into account, including operating systems (OS), device kinds, various usage situations, and network compatibility.
What Factors to Consider for Mobile Application Testing?
- Stable Network Bandwidth and Carrier Networks:
Mobile apps are heavily impacted by internet bandwidth. Different consumers’ experiences with mobile applications are negatively impacted by a generally sluggish or poor internet connection. Most of the time, users don’t let an app page load for more than three seconds. Therefore, it is important to do mobile testing to determine how disruptions and network fluctuations affect the system.
In order to simulate sudden or unexpected interruptions in the app, such as battery removal, OS upgrades, plugging in and out of charging, network loss and restoration, and device shut down, to mention a few, interruption testing is a method. To obtain a true picture of mobile application behaviour, it is crucial to test mobile apps in real network contexts.
In order to engage consumers, mobile applications are often created to support numerous geographic regions and are multilingual. To verify the app’s proper operation in various regions, these apps should be tested across carrier networks in terms of geolocation.
- Great User Experience (CX):
The requirement to create a seamless and effective user experience is the most crucial first impression of any mobile app. The user interface should be straightforward, efficient, and simple for users to utilise. Therefore, the mobile app should be evaluated using the user-interface crowd testing approach for mobile devices. This aids in understanding the immediate reaction and comments made by live users. To acquire a firsthand impression of the app, it is also beneficial to test the app with users from various places in real-world settings.
- Impressive Performance:
Users of mobile apps anticipate a positive user experience when using the app. The responsiveness, startup time, memory use, power usage, and other aspects of an app’s functionality are used to gauge its performance. Furthermore, depending on the mobile device a user is using, their expectations for responsiveness change. To achieve outstanding app performance, optimising screen size is crucial. Performance testing must be done to ensure faultless app performance because errors might cause users to get disengaged.
- Effective End-to-End Security:
It is crucial to have them fully examined for security given the numerous cyberthreats present, especially given how frequently mobile applications are targeted. Users desire secure transactions and the protection of their personal data. End-to-end security testing needs to be done for the mobile apps to integrate payments securely. Data security is ensured via security testing, which helps to discover risks and weaknesses in the app, if any.
- Stable Across Operating Systems:
There are several different mobile operating systems in use (including iOS, Android, Windows 10, and others), and each of these operating systems has a number of versions. The supported platforms’ complexity has in fact increased to a new degree. Businesses should typically ensure that their mobile applications run smoothly on all supported operating systems and versions. Effective end-to-end mobile app testing should be conducted across OS versions in order to achieve cross-OS compatibility.
- Delight with Usability:
To appeal to ageing boomers, inexperienced users, as well as experienced users, mobile apps should be simple to use and intuitive. The app should have excellent navigation throughout all of the capabilities and be engaging with a nice appearance and feel. Users are confused by convoluted user processes, and they may even decide not to use such mobile apps. Usability testing should be done as a result to make sure the app’s capabilities run smoothly and simply.
- Compatible Across Devices:
The mobile application should function as intended on a variety of mobile devices and browsers, as there are many different kinds of mobile devices. To ensure that displays and behaviour behave as intended across a range of devices and browsers, mobile compatibility testing should be mandated. The following are the typical purposes for compatibility testing:
- testing using several databases, including SQL Server, Oracle, etc.
- Cross-browser testing using browsers like IE, Chrome, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, etc.
- testing of system software, including updates and web servers
- Cross-platform testing on numerous mobile platforms, devices, and networks
Mobile compatibility testing therefore helps to guarantee that the mobile app is compatible across all of these differences given the range of devices, platforms, screen resolutions, memory sizes, and connectivity possibilities.
- Uniform Scalability:
There is a noticeable rise in users as a mobile app becomes popularity, and in certain cases the growth may even be exponential. Therefore, it becomes clear that load testing should be used to check the mobile app’s scalability with increasing and decreasing user loads. The ability of the software to scale when several people use it simultaneously is determined through load testing.
- Wide Localization:
For a mobile app to succeed, it is also crucial that it follow regional settings; the app should be tailored to the target nation or area with a linguistic touch. In order to make sure the software balances the cultural and linguistic features of a certain location, localization testing is required. To create a mobile app that actually charms the end users, linguistic testing, cultural testing, aesthetic testing, and functional testing should be undertaken.
What are the tips to select the best mobile app testing tool?
Cross-Platform Support:
The mobile testing tool of choice should be capable of supporting devices running a range of operating systems and platforms.
Reusability:
Reusing testing scripts will save teams time and effort and should be possible using the testing tool.
The chosen tool must help the vendor in all situations, including installation, maintenance, device accessibility, etc.
Cost:
Cost is one of the key considerations when preparing for a tool, thus it is vital to assess whether or not the ownership of the tool falls within the enterprise’s budget.
Integration with other tools:
The mobile testing solution has to be able to interface with other tools for test management, application lifecycle management, and support for communication with all stakeholders.
Cross-Browser Support:
To evaluate the performance of the app, testing must be done across a range of browsers, including Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox. Consequently, it is crucial to take into account a tool that offers cross-browser support.
What are the popular tools for mobile app testing?
Appium:
For both native and hybrid iOS, this is a cross-platform test automation tool. Ruby, C#, Java, and more programming languages are supported by this open-source application. Additionally, it leverages WebDriver APIs to perform test cases and supports Android versions higher than 2.3.
Robotium:
This open-source instrument is used just to test Android apps. This tool is well-known for building automated black-box test cases, and the test cases are written in Java. This tool facilitates a tester’s performance of several tasks and speeds up the writing of test cases.
Test Project:
The first community-powered test automation platform in the world, it enables users to run tests on web, Android, and iOS apps across various operating systems. To assure speed and quality, this free cloud-based solution may simply cooperate with the teams utilising Appium and Selenium.
Testdroid:
This is a cloud-based mobile application testing solution that aids teams in accelerating the release of products to the market, lowers app development expenses, and lessens the likelihood of unexpected or unplanned charges. Using this tool makes testing the programme on Android and iOS devices across various screen resolutions, OS versions, and hardware platforms the simplest and fastest method possible.
Calabash:
This is a framework for testing mobile applications that are multilingual. A set of libraries provided by Calabash make it easier for test code to communicate with native and hybrid apps on a technical level.
Pitfalls to avoid with Mobile App testing
Mobile app testing is crucial to the success of an app, but there are several mistakes that teams must avoid to guarantee that only high-quality apps are delivered to the market.
Following are some of the pitfalls to avoid with mobile app testing:
- Avoidance of UI/UX guidelines:
When testing an Android or iOS app, a tester must adhere to UI/UX requirements. These recommendations will assist a tester in creating a user-friendly, highly engaging, and straightforward mobile app front-end. Therefore, to ensure that high-quality apps are launched, mobile app testers must have well designed UI/UX guidelines that are in compliance with the testing requirements.
- Incoherent use of testing methods:
It is not seen as a good practise to test every feature of a mobile application. Time will be lost as a result, and expenditures will go up. It is preferable for a tester to first have a thorough grasp of the features of the app and how it will benefit customers. The testers may then create a context-driven testing technique that will direct them to exclusively test on particular features of the mobile app.
- Too much emphasis on automation:
It’s not possible to fully automate a mobile app. In contrast to automated software programmes, automating the features of a mobile app is really more difficult. Only automating the mobile app’s specific operations that are truly necessary should be thought about and handled. A tactical method for automating mobile application testing is the mobile test pyramid.
- Lack of strategic planning:
Testing mobile apps is a thorough, time-consuming procedure that must be carried out with extreme care. When testing mobile apps, there is additional uncertainty and complexity without a strategic approach. Therefore, testers should first carry out the essential research to develop a strategic plan of action that will streamline the mobile app testing process.
