#mobile application testing strategy

Today, every second person seems to have a smartphone teeming with a plethora of apps. These apps may deal with communication (WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.) transport (Uber,) games (PokeMon, Candy Crush, etc.) food and beverages (Swiggy, FoodPanda, etc.) online stores (Amazon, Flipkart, etc.) banking, and many others. It goes without saying that these apps have made lives convenient and easy by helping people carry out a host of activities like paying utility bills, booking products or services, etc.

Additionally, these apps have helped businesses accelerate their digital transformation initiatives as well. However, along with the positives, there is a downside to this growth as well - in the form of defective apps. Given the growing menace of cybercrime, downloading a defective app can spell trouble. It may unleash dangerous bugs in the device leading to the siphoning of sensitive personal information (and money) of the user. So, if your business be developing mobile apps with the provision of conducting financial transactions, it must ensure the app remains free of bugs. The best way to go about that is by implementing mobile test automation.

Why is mobile test automation necessary?

The success of a mobile app depends on its seamless performance, besides the presence of a host of features and functionalities. It is arguably the most important differentiation parameter for the customer to adopt or reject it. No matter how fancy looking your app may be, should it falter on performance, users are likely to abandon it without even giving a second thought. The failure of a mobile application does not only impact its adoption but can batter the image and bottom line of the company developing it as well. Importantly, concerns about the quality of an application can generate poor reviews and ratings about the brand thereby impacting its sales.

However, a simple mobile application can add value to its makers if it functions flawlessly. This is because most reviews on the app stores veer around poor loading and performance, crashes, and drain on the battery. Thus, it becomes important for mobile app developers to adopt a robust mobile application testing strategy in right earnest. Since mobile apps need to function across a swathe of device platforms, operating systems, browsers, and networks, they need to be tested for various dependencies by using mobile test automation.

Let us understand how mobile app test automation can add value to a business.

·         Enhances app quality: During the development process, several bugs may enter into the app’s codebase thereby hindering its performance. Investing in manual testing can decrease the speed and scope of testing and leave a lot of vulnerabilities and bugs to remain unidentified. It is only through implementing mobile test automation in the Agile DevOps mould that a business can save time and money, besides enhancing the quality of application significantly.

·         Release quick updates: To be in-sync with the changing customer preferences, businesses may go in for upgrading their existing mobile apps. However, with every upgrade in the source code, intensive regression tests should be carried out to check if the changes have impacted any existing functionality. The repeatable testing so required, necessitates automation in mobile application QA testing. With quick regression testing, businesses can accelerate the delivery of apps to the market, save costs, beat the competition, and achieve ROI.

·         Improve test coverage: As any mobile application needs to operate seamlessly across platforms, it should be tested for variables and dependencies that are connected to the respective platforms. This can only be possible by implementing automation in mobile app testing. Moreover, mobile app test automation can execute crucial tasks such as validating memory and database.

·         Improved user experience: A bug-free mobile app delivers an improved user experience by ensuring better security, performance, and seamless functionality. Since an improved user experience can stimulate trust, word of mouth publicity and better adoption of application, the organization developing the app can achieve ROI. No wonder, mobile testing services are increasingly using automation as a part of their mobile application testing strategy.

Conclusion

The ubiquitous mobile apps have become an integral part of everyday life and help businesses to usher in digital transformation. To ensure their seamless functioning across different platforms, they need to be tested rigorously using automation. It is only through mobile test automation that businesses can add value in terms of better test coverage, quality, customer experience, and ROI.

This article is originally published at ingeniumweb.com, The business value of Mobile Test Automation.

The ubiquitous mobile phone has gone places. It is no longer the communication tool of yore but encompasses multitasking activities like paying utility bills, executing financial transactions, booking tickets, playing games, watching movies, and many more. In fact, the mobile of today or should we say the smartphone has become a wonderful gadget that empowers individuals. Importantly, a mobile application is the underlying software architecture that has transformed mobile phones into modern multipurpose gadgets.

Businesses over the world are leveraging the power, convenience, navigability, and reach of mobile applications to expand their markets and increase the sale of their products and services. This has taken the number of mobile applications to a humongous level and has made ‘quality’ the ultimate arbiter for the success or failure of an application. According to statista.com, the total number of mobile applications running on both iOS and Android platforms stand at a whopping 3.9 million in 2019. Since quality has become the ultimate criterion for any mobile application to succeed on the crucible of user adoption, businesses face challenges galore. These include making the application compatible across platforms, devices, frameworks, and networks. To ensure the same, mobile application testing happens to be the magic wand businesses should employ.

What is mobile application testing and why is it important?

It is a process wherein the functionality, usability, scalability, security, and many other attributes of a mobile application are tested. The testing ensures the application meets a certain standard before being delivered to the end customers. Since mobile applications also facilitate financial transactions, the added security dimension makes them extremely critical for testing. The testing can employ both manual or automatic means where, in the case of the latter, a suitable test tool is used.

Testing mobile applications have become important for it ensures the applications remain compatible across platforms, networks, and devices. It helps to identify and fix the inherent glitches that might enter the code during the development process. Should the applications not meet the expected standards of loading speed, functionality, navigability, security, and usability, they will be at risk of being rejected by the users. Moreover, in today’s time, customers choose to install mobile applications based on their ratings and reviews. Since these parameters are directly linked to the quality of mobile applications, mobile app testing becomes critical for any application to stay competitive.

What are the challenges in conducting mobile application QA testing?

Unlike testing web applications, mobile app testing faces a slew of challenges mostly based on the diversity of smart devices. For example, a mobile application is expected to function seamlessly across screen sizes, device build, hardware configuration, OS and browser versions, and so on. Let us delve into the multifarious challenges that mobile application QA testing entail -

·         Faster delivery to the markets: The chances of any mobile application to hit the success button depends on how fast it is rolled out into the market. The pressure of delivering an application with new features to the market often lets businesses to skip certain aspects of testing. These may result in bugs or glitches going unnoticed.

·         Multiple platforms and browsers: Any robust mobile application testing approach should consider testing the application across a slew of operating platforms and browsers like Android, iOS, Windows, Symbian, Blackberry and Chrome, IE, and Firefox, etc. To top it all, the above-mentioned operating systems and browsers go through periodic version updates. So, any mobile application testing approach should ensure that the application functions seamlessly not only across operating platforms and browsers but their different variants as well.

·         A multitude of devices: The mobile applications need to be tested across devices that may vary in terms of screen sizes, hardware configurations, memory, and others. This diversity can impact end-to-end testing with a need for the seamless integration of APIs. The quality of integration will ensure the data is easily accessed from the backend and shown on the frontend.

·         Choosing the right automation tool: In view of the huge gamut of variables - devices, networks, operating systems, and browsers, implementing mobile test automation would require choosing the right automation tool.

Conclusion

The popularity of mobile applications has made businesses to deliver them in quick succession to remain competitive. However, the applications should be thoroughly tested for glitches and vulnerabilities, especially by experienced mobile testing services.

Read the white paper to know how the right combination of tools and Quality Assurance approach can strengthen the test automation strategy for mobile apps.

The proliferated usage of mobile devices and the emergence of new technologies have opened up a competitive market for mobile applications. The multitude of new devices, various operating platforms and fragmented OEMs have created immense challenges for the mobile app development companies to offer the end users the best solutions at a rapid rate. As mobile applications incorporate complex features, the code bases also turn out to be larger than usual. Thus, the quality testing process of mobile apps becomes complex and time-consuming as well. In this scenario, the mobile app service providers should keep abreast with the latest trends to stay ahead of the competition, which is not possible without the mobile test automation process within a limited time frame. Due to the advent of paradigms like DevOps and Agile, the mobile testing process has gone through noticeable changes.

Here are a few key points as to why businesses should embrace mobile test automation instead of the conventional test approach -

Reduction in turnaround time and increased efficiency:

In the battle of quality versus quantity, the results are not always desirable. However, with the help of automation, both aspects can be achieved in a practical way. The automated mobile app testing process assimilates parallelisation to look after the delayed commits. It is worth noting that the parallelisation process helps reduce the execution time to approximately 50%, thanks to automation.

Increased focus on the performance and user experience:

The primary objective of developers (and testers) is to offer bug-free high-performance applications to edge out other competitors, which can only be possible with the help of automated mobile testing. Furthermore, mobile testing automation can validate the performance, usability, and security of any type of mobile application across operating systems, device platforms and networks.

Enhancement of test coverage:

The automated testing process provides depth and an array of scopes to augment the quality of the mobile apps. Mobile testing automation offers a large number of test cases and reports with every test run compared to manual testing.

Robust security testing with DevOps and DevSecOps:

Security testing is one of the major aspects of the mobile testing process due to the prevalence of threats from hackers and other cyber criminals. The testing process should take into account various aspects of security including identifying (and eliminating) the existing code vulnerabilities. DevSecOps is slated to fill the gaps unaddressed by manual testing process by focusing on vulnerability assessment, continuous monitoring and providing an additional layer of data protection measure like encryption.

Cross-platform testing:

Conventional manual testing methods do not allow users to test more than one device at a time. Whereas automated mobile application testing methodology allows testers to validate the application in several environments within a shorter time frame, where the environments can be Windows OS, Android OS or iOS among others.

Measurement of the Scalability:

Automated mobile application testing methodology helps to measure the scalability of the app to determine the user load and experience. It also includes the response time, throughput and screen timeout of the application. The mobile test automation process simplifies the repeatable and regressive testing process by reducing complexities.

Hardware accessibility and compatibility testing:

The hardware accessibility and compatibility testing are one of important factors that can add additional features to the mobile application. Due to the presence of sensors like proximity sensors, gyroscope and magnetic compass, the apps must be able to access them to perform better. The automated mobile application testing methodology checks these compatibility factors without any additional effort from the developers.

Conclusion:

The automated mobile testing method helps the team of developers and testers to work in a synchronized manner irrespective of their varying fields of work. With the rapid development of mobile applications and associated technologies, it is important to implement automated testing to get the optimal ROI along with a faster turnaround time. The automated solution ensures greater productivity by removing the bottlenecks and minimizing errors to a great extent. So, to keep pace with the ever-changing and growing technological advancements of the day, it is essential to implement the automated testing of mobile applications as an approach to incorporate the best practices.

To work with the industry experts applying automated mobile application testing approach, connect with Cigniti Technologies today!

The mobile phone is no longer used as a medium of communication alone, but has been scaled up and transformed as a multipurpose device. With the advent of mobile based applications to carry out a host of functions, customers are spoilt for choice. So, whether it is hiring a cab, shopping, buying a movie, rail or air ticket, or playing games, there is no looking back for the humble smartphone. Moreover, with the humongous spread of the smartphone users across the world, businesses are trying to woo this segment on the go in order to remain competitive.

While catering to this highly mobile segment, which majorly influences the marketing trends of the day, businesses are caught between the devil and the deep sea. The challenge is to accelerate the time to market with new applications and also to ensure they remain qualitatively superior as well. In many cases, enterprises are caught between the two imperatives and in the process, choose one at the cost of the other (read quantity over quality.)

The need for Mobile application QA testing

However, no matter how many applications an enterprise can come up with, unless they pass the muster on the standards of quality assurance, they run the risk of being rejected by the customers. This calls for a renewed focus on ensuring the quality of applications to meet customers’ expectations. This, however, is easier said than done, for, in order to meet the customers’ expectations, an application has to provide a rich user experience. This should be across devices, platforms, frameworks, operating systems, and networks, which incidentally can be quite diverse and complex.

Why does manual testing not pass the quality test?

By taking recourse to the manual testing of applications, ensuring their quality can be at best a half- baked exercise. The reasons could be many.

Manual testing can falter when the tests are repetitive and complex

The test coverage area can fall woefully short as the human element is likely to take shortcuts

A lot of glitches can remain unidentified as the manual tester is not likely to test every possible scenario and consider variables

Manual testing is inherently time consuming. This can impact the turnaround time

As applications take more time for testing, they lose out on competitiveness

The answer to overcoming the above inadequacies is by undertaking mobile test automation. By following a robust mobile application testing strategy, businesses can see the application meets the quality metrics, be it in functional or non-functional areas. Moreover, as mobile applications embrace cutting edge technologies of the day such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and IoT amongst others, mobile test automation has become the sine-qua-non to ensure their quality. In an increasingly Agile and DevOps driven test environment where continuous improvement and testing are the objectives, adopting a suitable mobile application testing strategy is a must.

Businesses have realized the need to provide customers with a unique experience to stay competitive. In their quest to add value to their products and services in line with their business strategies, they need to uphold quality. The quality parameters should be uniform across platforms, devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks. To achieve optimization of the business strategy, enterprises need to meet the challenges of mobile test automation head on. These are discussed as under.

Cross platform testing: The mobile phone market is deluged with devices of various sizes and brands. Each device has its own architecture mostly customized by OEMs through updates and releases thereby making the device a standalone one vis-a-vis others. The presence of various platforms and browsers has led to the application taking different runtimes. The mobile application testing approach should take into account each of the devices’ architecture and sizes. The final test outcome for any application should be to ensure its seamless functioning across platforms, be it Android, iOS, Windows or BlackBerry.

Network testing: Mobile devices work on networks with varying speeds, types, and functionalities. For example, there are various types of networks such as GPS, CDMA, GPRS, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max that are spread across geographies. An application needs to work seamlessly across networks with varying architecture, speed, and runtimes. The same can only be achieved by undertaking a rigorous mobile application testing approach.

Device architecture challenges: Each device can have its own hardware challenges in terms of architecture, size, processor, and memory size, I/O protocols such as WAP or HTTP, etc. A robust mobile application testing framework should consider the differences and develop suitable test outcomes.

Continuous integration: This is the imperative of a DevOps environment where the writing of mobile app test automation scripts should include an end to end integration of codes as well.

Choosing the right test platform: The testing of a mobile application needs the usage of the correct test automation tool including emulators and simulators. The tool, be it an open source or licensed, should be flexible and convenient enough for the testers to write test scripts in any programming language. Moreover, the test automation platform should provide the right framework, IDE’s or subroutines to write the script. Finally, the tool or platform should have a robust reporting mechanism that records the details of bugs detected, KPIs used, and the test coverage area for further analysis.

Conclusion

Mobile application testing has challenges that span across dimensions such as device make, platforms, frameworks, operating systems, browsers and networks. The only way a business strategy related to the development and deployment of mobile applications can be optimized is by undertaking a suitable mobile application testing approach to meet customers’ expectations.