#mobile performance testing

Intense competition and need for reaching higher revenues has triggered the growth of Application development. Additionally, there are challenges related to changing user preferences, and ultimately you have only a few mobile apps that hold the attention of the users. Teams developing mobile apps go through a laborious process of designing and developing the app. While they put across their best efforts at ensuring quality, there is every likelihood of bugs creeping into the source code. These bugs can result in;  

Impacting the user experience and forcing customers to drop the app

Causing error in the smooth operations of functionalities

Causing data breach or the loss of sensitive personal or business information

Causing financial cost to the company due to litigation from customers

Falling foul of regulatory authorities

Losing the brand value

The answer to deal with all the above lies in carrying out mobile application testing. The process of mobile application testing can be done after developing the app (as in the traditional waterfall model) or simultaneously with the development of the app (as in Agile or DevOps). However, the growing digital challenges of increased competition, faster time to market, changing user preferences, and an increased threat of data breach has meant the manual mode of mobile application testing is no longer viable. Let us find out why using a manual mobile application testing strategy can be counterproductive.  

Increased cost: As manual mobile application testing is a laborious process, the business has to employ a team of testers. The cost of hiring or employing manual testers can be substantial.

Inconsistent testing: Using a manual mobile application testing strategy would mean a human tester checking a greater number of codes and input data for possible outcomes. This can lead to errors whereby certain bugs can be missed or overlooked. Moreover, since the process of mobile application testing can differ from person to person, the results can differ as well.

Failing to manage complexity: During the use of a manual mobile application testing strategy, the focus of the tester decreases with time. Also, as the complexity of codes or the number of inputs increases, the human tester can no longer manage the same. Thus, using a manual mobile application testing strategy is not suitable when test conditions and parameters are scaled up.

Slow rate of progress: The pace at which manual mobile application testing is conducted, the rate of finding bugs becomes slow. This slows down the entire SDLC and defeats the objective of achieving faster time to market.

Test coverage area: To check the proper functioning of a mobile app, the mobile application testing strategy should be comprehensive. It should cover a wide test area with all the permutations and combinations of test data. However, manual testing is simply not capable of covering the entire test area. This leaves room for a number of bugs to escape testing thereby impacting the quality of the app.

The role of mobile app test automation

To address the above shortcomings, carrying out mobile app test automation seems to be the logical step. Given the automation of the testing process, every possible test scenario and the behaviour of dependencies can be verified and validated. Also, the mobile app test automation process can be performed at any time by simply configuring the system. Besides, the test can be repeated and reused for any number of devices, OS platforms, processors, and networks. This eliminates the presence of bugs from the app.  

By incorporating mobile app test automation, a business can spare its highly skilled resource from testing and deploy where it is needed the most. Even though the cost of installing such a test automation tool can be high, there are cost effective options as well. While licensed tools are an option, a number of freely available test automation tools like Selenium, Appium and Calabash can be leveraged as well.

A test automation tool can mean writing test scripts by qualified test engineers, which may or may not be used for all scenarios. To meet this challenge, scriptless digital automation tools to carry out mobile application testing can be utilized.

Conclusion

Over the years, the software testing discipline has evolved from a mere tactical approach into a  highly strategic process. Numerous factors have contributed in this dramatic reshaping of the testing process. The growing software sophistication, along with unimaginable features have also introduced severe functional and performance issues. Hence, test cases of equal complexity as that of the code is required to keep these issues in check. Keeping the following considerations in mind can help in a better testing of mobile applications.

1. Knowing the User – A good testing starts with a comprehensive understanding of the user and his expectations of the software. Testers need to take their time to fully understand the context of the application usage. Before test initiation, it is very important to understand the final performance goals to be able to test properly for the real user experience. For a better understanding of the user go through the initial requirement specification. Investing in market research for identifying user preferences and behavior can help in planning tests.

Considering the following factors may help:

- Time of ac - cessing the App during the day. - Duration of the session - Mode of browsing – in a hurry fro immediate answers or just as a pass time. - Any second screen experience - Likelihood of simultaneously accessing multiple apps. - Cart duration of shopping items. - App performance and revenue correlation.

2.Knowing the App – Users do not care about the features, they are more particular on their experience. Testing is mostly inclined towards functional testing – in mapping the features and its performance as specified in the requirements document. But to properly cater to the user experience, it is important to understand how the user would like to interact with the application. This user intimacy will to a long way in determining the core features and the edge cases.

3.Determining your Test Matrix – The scale of a test matrix is directly related to the budget and value of the project. However, all tests will not be equal, since all functions are not  equal. Hence, analyzing the following points can help in prioritizing the test cases :

- The core functions - The core experience - The core differentiators - The edge or the less important functions.

4.Determine your Devices: The above three points have helped us to determine what to test. Now it is required to understand how it is to be tested. With the rate of new releases and upgrades in the mobile portfolio, for testing purposes, it is a difficult to decide how many will be enough and how many will be too many.  Once the number of devices has been determined, the most important device functions need to be prioritized. The most effective way of determining this is by analyzing the real user data which gives the following statistics:

- Your actual user base - Frequency of visit - Devices and OS used for access. Further comparing device OS vs correlated revenue can help is assessing the risk of test elimination for any given device.

5.How to Automate – Step 3 helped to determine the test matrix for the application and prioritizing the core functions and the edge functions. Here, we need to determine which tests need to be automated. Build the regression test suite with simple and repeatable tests for automation and assign complicated tests to the testing team

6.Knowing the performance – An application’s true quality can be considered as the intersection of its real user data, functional testing and the mobile performance. This data can be used to create real world user test cases and its performance with business metrics. The following factors can help in determining the best performance testing strategy for your app:

- Develop in-depth mobile performance strategy encompassing scenarios and data from the real world. - Analyze the back end metrics and the invisible factors of your app that affect its performance. - Analyze the front end performance metrics to get an understanding of the user experience with your app. - Identify the hot zones where the performance of the app can be effectively improved.

- Bind the performance of your app with revenue generating transactions.

7.Knowing your edge cases: Edge cases refer to the less frequently occurring scenarios. These are also the greatest source of crashes and obstacles of a seamless app performance. With all the time spent in checking core cases, edge cases often remain untested. These can however be covered with automated testing.

Conclusion