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.