Optimizing Your Mobile Testing Strategy

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The adoption of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices has expanded the growth of mobile applications in recent years. As mobile devices have become the primary medium of interaction for consumers as well as businesses worldwide, mobile applications have started driving these interactions. Nowadays, mobile apps put the business operations in the hands of consumers who are literally running businesses.

However, the big question is: “What makes a mobile app compelling enough to influence consumer behaviors and make them engage with your brand or product?” Of course, a strong mobile app development strategy is the foundation of any successful mobile app, but one key component in app development is testing which ensures your mobile app meets customer expectations and business goals.

Testing plays a critical part in the application’s success or failure. Mobile application testing is important to ensure that the app meets quality standards. Mobile apps should pass the quality test before it is released to Play Store / App store, and reaches end users.

So, how do you optimize your mobile testing for better success?

The main challenge in testing mobile applications is testing in a variety of devices, platforms, screen resolutions, memory sizes and connectivity options to ensure that the app is supported in multiple platforms and devices. Given below some things that one needs to follow to achieve success:

OS Version: The mobile app should be tested on all major stable OS versions.

Screen Resolution: Test the mobile application in different screen resolutions because the user experience varies on different screen sizes and screen resolutions.

Form Factor: The mobile application may act differently on smartphones and tablets. Therefore, if the app is compatible with both phones and tablets, then it should be tested in both form factors.

Mobile testing should cover different platforms like iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows, and multiple versions of Operating System for each device when the application is mentioned as being compatible with all. Testers need to also test the app in several permutations and combinations, every time, to ensure zero defects.

A majority of the mobile application’s functionalities depend on network connectivity. So, testing the mobile apps in real network environment is essential to get the real picture and assess the behaviour of the app in real mobile networks. Therefore, testing should be covered in different types of network conditions like WiFi, 2G, 3G, 4G and also without network, besides testing it in different bandwidths.

A few more points to remember

• While testing the mobile app, testers should also think about the different battery backup states like low charge, medium charge, high charge and perform tests accordingly.
• Performing Beta testing on your mobile app is one of the effective methods of mobile app testing which gives you access to real world testers, devices and actual networks.
• You need to ensure that application works fine when it is upgraded to the next version or when bugs are fixed. Tester should be responsible to perform upgrade testing for every release of the app.
• Complete functionality & UI of the application should also be tested in different devices with different versions to ensure that the application meets customer expectations.

Automation testing can be started once manual testing is performed, and it is preferred when the application is growing and when there are a large number of test cases related to functionality. Automation testing saves you time and is most useful to perform regression testing – especially when any new features are added and those changes are not reflected upon old features.

Performance testing can be done when you want to test the mobile application by giving excess load and by testing a huge number of users performing the same action at the same time.

Conclusion

A well planned mobile app testing strategy will ensure quality and performance of mobile application especially when testers select correct target devices, right mix of emulators, physical devices and testing methodologies.

(Divya Priya works as a Software QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS. She is an ISTQB certified tester and has over 2 years experience in testing mobile & web applications for different domains like Education, Social, Gaming, Travel, Finance and Hardware Integration.)