Best Practices in Mobile App Testing

Mobile app testing is a crucial and time-consuming task as it exposes the flaws of the app and unique challenges. The results of a good mobile app testing enable you to deliver a high-quality app that provides a great mobile experience to your customers. However, in this fast-paced market, mobile app testing poses quite a lot of challenges due to huge variations in network, devices, and OS.

This blog highlights some of the best practices in mobile app testing that can be followed to deliver a high-quality and intuitive app.

1) Testing Strategy: The right testing strategy helps in laying down certain guidelines which are to be followed by all testers. Such guidelines bring uniformity in the testing process and ensure adequate test coverage.

2) Testing on Real Devices: Use of various emulators and simulators helps in testing mobile apps in the early stages of development. Testing mobile apps on the actual devices enable companies to create realistic test cases. It also allows companies to have a better idea of the look and feel and the behavior of the app.

3) Test Early and Test Often: It defines start testing as soon as development has reached a logical stage. This helps to identify issues early before they become too costly to fix. Track results of each test cycle.

4) Set Device and OS Preferences: Setting up device and OS preferences is important. It might be virtually impossible to test exhaustively on all device, network and OS combinations. Finding solutions for which devices and OS your app will specifically complete to and perform QA on them.

5) Automate Testing: Automation in testing reduces manual efforts and accelerates time-to-market generating high return on investment (ROI). An important factor to keep in mind is the periodic maintenance of the automation test suite.

6) Adequate Performance, Stress and Security Testing: A great way to check for the app robustness is to test the app for its performance, stress and security. To check for the known and unknown vulnerabilities, including those arising from third party and open source software packages.

7) Check Battery Consumption, Standby Mode, Fault Tolerance, and Interoperability: Apps that consumes battery of the device heavily are most likely deleted and hence it is advisable to check for the app and know how much battery does it consume. Standby testing is also performed to check if the mobile app can handle the standby mode.

It is crucial to check the performance of the app as compared to the other popular apps available in the market or app store. The testing is often done on the behavior of the apps to check the performance of the apps in the adverse conditions such as various network strengths or suspended connections.

8) Ensure your App is Truly Global: Mobile apps should have a global appeal to cater the worldwide audiences. Developers should make sure that the app supports various languages, currencies and easily integrated with popular social networking site from prominent markets.

There is nothing worse than an app that loads slowly or frequently crashes as most of the users will never download it, the second time. Hence, it is important for companies to select an appropriate Mobility Testing Services Partner who runs various tests on the mobile app so that it does not crash frequently and provides a seamless User Experience.

9) Know Your Customers: One of the important and biggest challenges in the mobile industry is to match the user expectations. Service partners that provide android app development services or iOS application development services understand and deal with such challenges on daily basis.  Every user wants more from their mobile devices and apps as compared to other web or desktop applications. Therefore, it is important to know your target audience and their expectation from the app. Such information helps organization to understand the usage patterns of the app and gives direction to the mobile testing efforts appropriately. A thorough understanding of the client also helps in focusing on testing the most important functionality and feature from the user/usability point.

10) Testing on Various Data Networks: In today’s busy world, every user accesses their mobile phone and uses apps while they are on the move. Hence, it is an important to test apps on various data networks. A mobile app requires an Internet connection to fulfill a particular task and it may encounter different data networks. It is important that the app works seamlessly providing the same level of performance on all data networks and switches seamlessly.

11) Testing Updates and Install/Uninstall Steps: Before submitting a mobile app to an app store, the QA engineers must test the update and installation process of the app.  All the main mobile platform offers tools to test the update process, in order to replicate updating from an older version of the app to the latest one. In this test scenario, a previously logged-in user must not be logged out after the update or user’s database changes will have no impact on the existing data on the phone.

12) Testing Usability in Different / Multiple Ways: Throughout the mobile app development and testing lifecycle, it is important to check the usability of the app. An app should have UI elements that are easy-to-use and understand and provides clear text and error messages. In case of any error, a user must get a prompt message to solve the current issue.

A successful approach to test usability of an app is by getting feedback from customers directly on the latest features and functionality. Most companies invite customers and provide access to early versions of new features and see if the users are able to work comfortably with the app.

13) Restrict Permissions and Check all Log Files: The last but not the least is to test the app for permissions and log files. Mobile users are very sensitive about their private data and most likely will not install or use an app with unclear permission requirements.

If we follow these practices it will help to increase app usability in a better way at the organization level as well as business perspective and make organization grow in an effective manner.