How To Effectively Implement A Mobile Testing Strategy?

With a phenomenal rise in the usage of smartphones and tablets, we’ve reached an era where mobile devices have become an integral and inseparable part of our life. As per the latest statistics, nearly 80% of world’s adult population own a smartphone – which gives ample scope to businesses to create extremely useful lifehacks via mobile applications. And with that comes into picture the need for proper mobile application testing process to ensure that the app’s quality and performance are flawless. To achieve this, it’s imperative that testers have a good mobile testing strategy in place.

So, what’s a mobile testing strategy? It’s a description of the plan of action to be followed in the testing cycle to let PMs, app developers and testers know of certain key processes involved in the testing part of the app development. App testing happens at two levels

Native Apps testing

This has become very significant no, as testers need to verify whether native apps can be easily downloaded on to the phone from the Playstore or AppStore, and executed without difficulty. The QA also has to determine how the app is interacting with the backend support. Native apps testing also becomes important when updates to the app need to be pushed, or when major changes are made to the app or the OS on the device(s). Therefore, it is essential that the app be tested on multiple physical devices and the older generations of devices to ensure backward compatibility.

Web apps testing

While dealing with web apps that have to be deployed on to mobile devices, testers need to understand that web apps are viewed by users across the world – so they need to think about the scalability factor at the global level rather than at the local level.

Getting the right app testing strategy in place depends on the complexity of your app, your industry and also on which kind of app is being developed – native, hybrid or web. A tester needs to put in a lot of thought and effort in creating a successful mobile application testing strategy. However, creating a test strategy isn’t very easy as, at times, testing becomes difficult due to the following factors

Device Selection

Selection of different devices is the most crucial part to start testing because there are tens of thousands of devices in use by millions of consumers worldwide to open mobile apps. So, the device selected should make the experience perfect for different customers who use your mobile application.

Physical devices can achieve 100% test coverage and provide good results. Different types of testing activities may be performed to confirm that the application is tested perfectly.

Device Model

While choosing any device model there are different options that need to be considered.

• OS Version: The mobile apps need to be tested on different OS platforms to ensure consistency.
• Screen Resolution: Portrait & landscape are the different screen resolutions that need to be considered while testing any application.
• Memory Size: It plays a key role in understanding how the usage is for that particular app.
• Connectivity Options: Bluetooth & WiFi are two main connectivity options to be considered and tested.

Emulators

An emulator is a software that can emulate the behavior of one or more mobile devices. A Quality Analyst can use emulators to test that particular app in different devices with different versions. Besides being highly efficient, emulators tend to be cost-effective as well. Emulators such as Jennymotion and Bluestack are good for testing the app’s basic functionality, especially in an agile environment or when features are under development. Emulators also help in effective testing of the app in all possible scenarios. Beta testing an app – either on emulators or on real devices can help testers understand how users use the app and how the app behaves on different mobile devices

Automation vs Manual

Automation tools are good to test any application in emulators to avoid manual work, and reduce time and cost. The tools available in the market such as SeeTest, QTP, Selenium and TestNG will help in covering multiple categories of tests using different scripting languages. However, it is advisable to use device OS-specific tools to carry out the testing process across platforms while development is still in process. Automation can be performed in the following scenarios

• When a new OS version is released, the application compatibility should be verified.
• When an application is updated, the compatibility factor needs to be checked.

Cloud Testing

Cloud computing allows users to provide a web-based testing environment where apps can be deployed and tested. So, cloud testing can be very effective in testing mobile apps. Complex apps can be tested perfectly as cloud testing environment provides real-time testing results which means defects can be analyzed while testing is in progress.

Conclusion

In mobile application testing, selection of devices & emulators before creating the application testing strategy is considered as perfect to achieve good results for the apps we tested. All these testing strategies and practices can help all those involved in the app development to overcome obstacles of mobile application testing, while making it easy to test mobile apps in all possible scenarios and strategies.

Chevulapelli Nikhil works as QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS and experienced in Mobile and Web Application Testing. His expertise in testing extends to different domains like Education, Hardware Integration, Finance & Healthcare.