The growing use of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices has fueled the escalation of mobile applications and mobile application testing. Mobile devices have become the prevailing standard for communication, for consumers, and for business worldwide.
Mobile applications are driving personal and professional interactions.
To a large extent, mobile apps have put Industry procedures into the hands of consumers, and they’re influencing judgments or running businesses through them.
The questions are:
- What determines a mobile app’s persuasiveness?
- What makes people use yours?
A heavy-duty mobile app development approach is the groundwork of any thriving mobile app. One common element in application development is to ensure your mobile application covers customer expectations and business objectives through a mobile app testing strategy. This testing is a preeminent test of your mobile applications which need to pass before they are deployed.
Mobile Application Testing Challenges
Like any desktop or web application testing, mobile application testing hones in on the quality and performance of the end product. is trickier, though, because of the following aspects:
Device Fragmentation
Unlike conventional web or desktop applications, mobile apps are used on multiple devices and platforms, such as iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and others. Moreover, there are numerous versions of operating systems for each device.
Mobile device fragmentation can be a problem for software developers who must create different versions of the same application in order to make sure it works correctly with different versions of a given OS. It is also challenging for QA departments because different operating versions have different capabilities, which can make them harder to manage and secure.
The diversity of these devices, platforms, screen resolutions, memory sizes, and connectivity options can give quite the headache. Testers have to make sure multi-device, multi-platform compatibility of the app, multiple OS, works—no matter what.
Availability of Mobile Testing Tools
When a business uses in-house testing, it will usually be lacking in the testing tools and efficient methods needed. There is an increased level of sophistication required for many device compliance. Moreover, businesses often don’t have the access to mobile testing best practices, guidelines, and industry standards. This lack of availability in-house is precisely why organizations opt to bring in tools and talent via an augmentation partner.
Application Life-cycle Testing
Mobile application testing methods necessitate frequent upgrades because of the following reasons:
- End users expect near real-time resolution of bugs
- Agile development methodologies are providing frequent benefits and feature updates
- Regular upgrades in mobile platforms and operating systems are forcing developers to maintain app compatibility
These aspects increase the range of mobile application testing needs. The test cycle grows for every device, operating system, and software update.
To conquer these challenges, you require a vigorous mobile application testing approach that ensure the mobile app meets quality and performance guidelines that must be in place. Though most businesses already have a mobile app testing strategy, they often encounter unexpected failures in the app performance and quality.
These failures are a consequence of extended release cycles and bad development practices faced after the app release. By acquiring internally, the right expertise and industry thought leadership, this can be solved.
The Winning Mobile Application Testing Strategy
Here are five key factors to developing a winning mobile app testing strategy that will ensure that your quality assurance activities align with customer expectations, business goals, and industry best practices.
1. Mobile Device Selection
The leading concern before beginning mobile app testing activities is to choose the ways of testing the app. This major testing method can be a difficult decision to make as it corresponds directly to the market and reach for you app.
Within device selection, there are two choices to be made: selecting the gadget model or choosing between emulators and substantial devices.
Device Model
The factors below require consideration during device selection:
- OS Version – Test your mobile app on all stable OS versions.
- Screen Resolution – Use a mix of different screen resolutions to test the mobile app as user operations vary by screen size and resolution.
- Form Factor – Mobile applications may act differently on smartphones and tablets. Therefore, if the app is compatible with both smartphones and tablets, it should be tested for both form factors.
As needed, numerous other factors such as memory size, connectivity options, etc. need to be accounted for while selecting the device model.
2. Emulators vs. Physical Devices
You can also decide among physical devices or emulators. Predominantly in the opening stages of development, device emulators are extremely useful because they assist rapid and efficient testing, especially in an agile development environment.
Device emulators are also very cost-effective. Mobile device emulators are very useful for basic application functionality testing and during feature development. They provide excellent options for network bypass, a pseudo-live environment, and test scripting languages.
Using mobile device emulators does not mean that you should avoid the utilization of physical devices altogether. Testing on physical devices is imperative; it allows the understanding of application activities in real-life scenarios.
Mobile device testing is all about using a right mix of emulators and physical devices to get the best results, quickly, and efficiently.
Physical device testing leads to beta testing as an extremely helpful method of mobile app testing which gives you admittance to real-world testers, real devices, actual networks, and a wider geographic coverage.
Beta testing is a major area where emulators fail in comparison to physical mobile devices. Beta testing gives you a chance to test your mobile app for factors like:
- Network density
- How the app behaves on specific devices
- How real-world users interact with the app
- Different battery states on the devices
- Multiple networks (Wi-Fi, 4G, 3G, etc.)
The real-world testing environment in beta testing is nearly impossible to create in a test lab.
3. Network Connectivity
Network connectivity significantly affects mobile applications. The majority of mobile applications depend on network connectivity to work correctly. Therefore, testing mobile apps in actual network environments is necessary to get the real picture of the application’s behavior
When testing mobile apps in an always-on Internet connectivity scenario, factors like limited connectivity, connectivity with high latency, no connectivity, and metered connectivity must be accounted for.
There is a multitude of network simulation tools available to test mobile apps against network speeds, bandwidths limitations, connection drop outs, and more. These network simulation offerings add exceptional value to the testing activities.
For a mobile app to be victorious, it’s imperative that it delivers consistent performance across diverse network environments.
target devices through a mix of emulators and physical devices—combined with other mobile testing strategies—you move towards a successful release.
4. What’s The Best Way To Get Software QA?
If you’ve worked with deploying software in the past, you understand the challenges. An organization can suffer through consequences because of a lack of QA tools and talent. But there are timely, cost effective ways around this and with an efficient software QA team.
The Bottom Line: Ultimate Mobile Application Testing
- Mobile Device Selection – Select devices with features that best fit your customers own usage.
- Emulators & Physical Devices – Emulation helps with rapid development and automated testing, but the physical device is where the customer’s engagement is found.
- Network Connectivity – Test mobile applications under full, intermittent, and no network connectivity conditions. Have a fallback for each to not leave the customer upset.
5. Very Important Test Case, please follow in every iOS application (which support Push Notifications) because of this case application getting binary rejected in Apple Review.
Steps :
- Open Application
- Deny Push notification
- Enter login credentials
- Clicked on Login.
Application will be crash if this is not handled by developer –
How to generate this scenario :
- Delete or Uninstall the application
- Restart device
- Change Date from setting, select upcoming date.
- Again restart the device.
- Install application again
- Tap on application
- Device will ask for Push Notification “Don’t allow” or “Yes”.
- Tap on “Don’t allow”
- Try to login
- Verify the result.
So, please follow in every iOS to avoid rejection in Apple review.
As this is Key Factors of we have to keep in mind for Mobile Application Testing!
Blogged By-Chaitanya Tipre
