Top 5 Mobile-Testing Strategies

Testing a mobile application is often challenging as compared to web application mainly due to the various factors affecting the behavior of the application. Some of these factors include different operating systems and their versions, different screen sizes and different networks.

In this challenging phase of planning and testing a mobile application, it’s critical to follow some useful strategies to ease down the entire process.

Here are the top 5 strategies one should consider before starting with mobile testing :

1. Device Testing

There exists a lot of mobile devices with a different type of screen sizes and operating systems. Stating some of the statistics, there exist about 24,000 devices which have different screen sizes but the same OS, i.e., Android. In any organization, it is next to impossible to make an application optimized for all of these devices. Therefore, an organization should set a list of the devices it is going to support. This makes the QA follow the rules and ensure that the application supports all of the listed devices.

2. OS Version Testing and Support

Broadly considering two OS available for mobile devices in the market are iOS and Android.

Testing an application would have been easy if there hadn’t been multiple versions of operating systems. As compared to iOS, Android is taking the lead in releasing new versions of their operating system. To test an application for all these versions is a nightmare for most of the QA team. For any organization, it’s highly important to have a testing policy which clearly states all versions of these operating systems are supported. This helps the QA team to test each functionality in supported platforms.

3. Network Connectivity Testing

Different carriers provide various types of network connections which include a range of 1G to LTE. For an efficient mobile app testing, a tester should test the application on all the network speeds available broadly considering 4G, 3G and  LTE mobile communication standards. Also, the behavior of any application on wifi can be different than when used on 4G. A tester should also test how an app will perform when there is a sudden transition of a network from 4G to 1G. Cases like what a user is supposed to do in case of loss of connectivity should also be covered.

4. Interrupt Conditions

The question that arises is what exactly are interrupt conditions? Interrupt conditions is referred to any condition when there’s an incoming call or SMS while you’re using the application that needs to be tested. This being a major aspect of testing, many organizations fail to consider this while setting their testing standards. Usually, an application loses its in-progress activities due to interrupt conditions. Therefore, it’s the tester’s duty to report this behavior to the business team for a proper way to deal with it.

5. Security Testing

Security testing is the most crucial part of the mobile app testing especially as the stats are horrifying. While performing security testing, the following must be included :

• Data flow vulnerability – Testers should check the flow of data and where the data is stored.

• Check for data leakage – Testers should make sure that the data is not leaked between logs.

• Make sure all the web data is protected – The web data which is going and coming from application to server-side should be protected. HTTPS is used for data encryption for most applications so the tester should ensure that authenticated pages are served over HTTPS.

There can be other strategies as well, but by following these 5 test strategies, it is possible to achieve a bug-free mobile release to an extent.