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Effective Mobile App Testing Techniques

Effective Mobile App Testing Techniques

It’s smart, it’s trending and it’s a disruptor. The smartphone industry is continuously evolving by the day and these devices have set new standards for communication, for consumers, and for business worldwide. But what good is a smartphone without an application? Simply a heart without blood.

The market being flooded by a plethora of mobile applications, the question that rises is what drives a mobile app’s persuasiveness? What is the primary concern of App Testing Services companies and what could be some effective methods to keep a check on its functionality, quality and hygiene. Let us understand why mobile app testing is important and discuss some ways to make these app testing techniques more effective. These include:

  • Establishes a given brand

  • Builds loyal customer base

  • Increases ROI

  • Helps improving UI of the app

  • Creates a winning SEO strategy

  • Promotes compatibility across platforms

So, what are some of the core testing techniques in ensuring a superlative mobile functional workflow and experience?

Automation Testing

Automation testing is one of the most successful and effective ways for regression testing during the development phase but requires a huge investment. It can help run testing processes parallel across a number of emulators as well as real devices. This app testing technique also helps in saving the configuration before execution and use per requirement. This configuration when shared across teams helps save time and results in a more effective and quality app. Some commonly used tools mobile apps test automation are:

  • Appium

  • Robotium

  • MonkeyRunner

  • UI Automator

  • Selendroid

Having said that, mobile automation still has its own challenges around identification of elements by developers as a pre-requisite, leveraging as much test code as possible between iOS and Android amongst others. While these will evolve over time, these continue to be areas of close watch at this time.

Using Emulators

Using emulators for mobile testing in the initial stages of development can prove to be useful as they can encourage rapid, effective and efficient testing in an agile development environment. These are cost-effective solutions, provides network bypass options, test script language, pseudo live environment and are useful for testing basic functionality of the mobile app during the development phase.

Simulators and emulators have expanded the scope of mobile testing, significantly especially when there are limitations on the devices available to test or even challenges around field testing. Mobile app testing, on the other hand, done on real physical devices allows the understanding of activities in real world cases. An effective mobile app testing strategy draws the right balance between real devices and emulators to get accurate results at the shortest time possible.

Performance Mobile App Testing Services

Geographical location of the user, feasibility of the network, UI, performance of the device and objectives of the mobile app are all significant factors in determining an effective mobile app testing startegy These together play a significant role in determining the performance testing approach too.

Simulating the load with all compatible devices to ensure the coverage across all platforms especially Android, and iOS, is important. This is needed as each device has its own capability when it comes to content translation and supported network. This helps in capturing the real user experience which can be used on emulators to test the different mobile devices without a physical device.

Simulating the load with the user’s network to identify and record the speed and network variation, is also very helpful. Some of the most common networks are GPRS, EDGE, 2G, 3G, 4G etc. and WiFi which provides a significantly long range of speeds, i.e from slow to high speed. Also, testing various combinations of signal strengths is recommended for performance testing because not many users with the same network strength will have the same speed.

Testing the impact of memory, CPU, battery and storage based on varied usage patters, helps in analysing the performance accurately. Devices with below par capability will affect the user’s perception of the application’s performance.

Strategic Mobile App Testing

If there’s a mobile, there is an app and if there is an app there is a chance of security breach! It thus becomes important to have strict mobile application security services to protect from data leaks and loopholes. By duplicating the threat pattern of attackers, the nature of the attack can be anticipated by analysts and a security protocol can be followed well in advance.

Using security scanning tools augmented by effective ethical hacking techniques, can be very effective when it comes to strategic security testing services. These are very useful in finding common vulnerabilities which can be resolved fairly quickly.. The vulnerabilities generally include Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection (SQLi). Irrespective of the whether done manually or in an automated manner, , it is always important to analyse the behaviour of the mobile app to ensure confidentiality, integrity and data safety.

Cloud Based App Testing

With the advent of ‘virtualization’, the methodology of sharing computer resources across networks and multiple systems came into the picture. The ideology increased scalability, enabled easy administration of the infrastructure and greatly reduced operational costs. Thus cloud computing was born and swiftly became the backbone of the digital industry. Cloud testing thus, simply refers to the testing of resources such as hardware and software which are readily available on demand over the cloud network. Let’s understand few methods which are imperative that make cloud based mobile app testing more effective.

Quality – Risky test environments often lead to faulty outcomes. These false test scenarios slow down the project and create loopholes which can end up crippling the app. High quality tests and efficient environment management remove the shortcomings of a misconfiguration and ensures accurate reporting and quality output. Cloud testing as a very effective test platform closes the loop which helps eliminating the dependency on physical sets and streamlines the communication network, ensuring quality.

Ensuring Visibility – The business needs to understand that ensuring proper visibility and feedback does not depend on one single tool; instead it is a chain of vital solutions put together on one single platform. A well implemented DevOps engine allows a proper workflow, feedback, visibility and quick delivery of the services to the customer.

Quicker Delivery – The closer you get to production, the more complex test environments become. By adding a default test rate and an efficient test rate you get improved ability to streamline deployment which helps in a shorter time to market.

With every changing device, OS platform and network type mobile app testing becomes a challenging task. Without a comprehensive and smart testing strategy that is implemented well, the app’s readiness to market cannot be determined and to this extent cloud has enabled mobile app testing significantly.

Over the last 10 yeas on an average about 20- 25% of the mobile apps get used only once. One can imagine the colossal development losses with such negligible app usage. Effective mobile app testing services ensure that your product does not go down the drain. The answer to the above lies in quality app testing services. From diving deep into the functional and non-functional features of your app to its make and platform, our engineers make sure that you have a seamless experience. For the most cost effective app testing solutions simply request a call back.

Mobile apps testing has changed the testing landscape in many different ways

Mobile apps testing has changed the testing landscape in many different ways

The software testing landscape has changed in many ways in the last decade. We often call the agile style of development as one the main reasons for such a major change. While that has certainly been a major reason for such change, there are several others too, of which the mobile computing landscape is also a significant reason. With Agile, one of the changes was how quality moved upstream rather than being seen as a final activity before product release. While such upfront testing gave a major facelift for quality, mobile computing and mobile apps testing brought in another change where big upfront testing (BUFT) is not always necessary and valuable. Mobile apps testing operates in a very large landscape – the combinations to test are huge, not all devices may be available in house and even if they do, it often does not make business sense to invest in such a huge mobile lab. With such increasing complexities that mobile apps bring in, a user centric approach to testing has become the need of the day. Users are being roped into the test efforts, whether as subject experts, real end users or as pure spike testing to take on the load that big upfront testing brings in. This makes compatibility testing more real, achievable and wide in its coverage. Mobile apps have changed the testing landscape in varied ways – this includes, greater focus on non- functional testing, more awareness of end user centric scenarios, pulling the shift left test approach into a shift right approach thereby bringing an unbiased balance between understanding the system implementation to the required level and building end user empathy.

This trend will only further strengthen given that mobile computing is expected to touch newer disciplines and geographies in the coming years. Newer devices, technologies, engineering implementations are all first looking at their seamless functionality in the mobile world. While mobile apps testing has changed the testing landscape in varied ways, the one significant one to call out would be the push back on big upfront testing bringing in a greater focus on end users. At the end of the day, while the focus away from upfront testing may contradict with the core agile manifesto, the end goal both are attempting to reach are the same – the one where solutions that are faster, cheaper and of better quality reach the customer’s hands, with a competitive advantage.

Using human interface guidelines in app testing

Using human interface guidelines in app testing

Mobile app development is reaching newer bounds by the day. What started with a few thousand apps in 2007-2008 timeframe is now close to 1.8 million applications just in the US. If such are the numbers, imagine the global footprint. While this is exciting to see, an equally alarming number is that the average shelf life of an application is a mere 30 days. If you introspect to see why this number is so low, despite all the time and effort that goes into building them, it is not very difficult to understand the underlying reasons. Poor quality of the designed applications is one core reason, where the developer (especially freelance), often puts together a quick and dirty test effort to evaluate his application under the cover of ensuring its readiness to market.

If you look further into it, the issue is often with the overall design of the application. The design has probably been put together without much forethought and in a quick attempt to ideate the core functionality. This is where the human interface guidelines (HIG) come in very handy. These are guidelines aimed to help developers, develop a usable, intuitive yet simple design for end users. These are available specific to varied platforms and operating systems such as the HIG for iOS, Android. These guidelines in the process also help bring in a desired level of design standardization within a specific platform.

While designers and developers ideally need to leverage these HIG principles in their app development efforts, the other side benefit is that testers also need to be encouraged to use these in their quality evaluation efforts. If app testing is done with scenarios outlined in the HIG documents, it helps testers check for both implementations that have been done and also make recommendations for ones that have not been done. So, it helps them catch both re-active defects and make pro-active suggestions. Given that the HIG itself is meant to make the mobile apps more usable, these documents are very intuitive to comprehend. This makes it easier for testers to follow along and design their test scenarios.

If guidelines such as these are adopted, it will help us enhance the quality and the shelf life of mobile applications, and further bring in maturity into the mobile app development and testing landscape, which is very vast and somewhat chaotic today, given the sheer number of developers and applications on the global level. Let’s thus use these human interface guidelines, as testers, to bring more relevance in our testing efforts and add value to the mobile app development discipline.

Optimizing Your Mobile App Testing Effort

Mobile applications have significantly expanded the scope of a test effort primarily due to increased testing combinations that have become necessary. Compatibility testing on the various device, OS, screen resolution combinations cover app functionality, layout and rendering, performance, usability amongst other testing attributes. While it is a no brainer that we want to maximize test coverage, given the constraints around time and cost in app development and more importantly, there are smart ways to optimize test coverage, to reap maximum benefits, testers are always on the look-out for such best practices to arrive at the right mobile app testing strategy. Specific to Android app testing, there are human interface guidelines (HIG) published by the Android team helping testers identify a good suite of tests to cover for their application. Such a set if also available for iOS by Apple.

We at QA InfoTech, have been testing mobile apps for the last several years now. We primarily focus on iOS and Android app testing services that we have now built a separate practice, ATE that focuses on mobile application testing. Based on our experience, we recommend some tried and tested practices in formulating a robust mobile test strategy. These include:

  1. Functional issues are more OS dependent rather than on the device size or screen resolution
  2. User interface issues are more specific to a device size or screen resolution rather than on the OS and typically show the following characteristics:
    1. Different devices with same screen size and OS version would give identical results
    2. Devices with different screen size but identical OS version would give different results

With the above inferences, we target a test matrix which covers varied devices, screen resolutions and operating systems at least once. We also keep in mind usage patterns such that more tests are run on the heavily used devices in the market. With such an approach, we have been able to help clients reduce their mobile app testing time and cost by about 30%, bringing in significant market returns for them.

With newer computing technologies coming in around wearable devices, augmented reality, SMAC, and the never ending set of new devices that enter the market every few days, the mobile app test matrix will only get increasingly complex. It is in the tester’s best interest to optimize the testing effort, to keep the overall quality effort relevant, user centric and realistic in achieving business goals.