Mobile Application Testing — Deliver Potential And Scalable Application

In the current digital and technological era, having a smartphone is a basic necessity for people.

People depend on different applications for their day to day needs and pleasure, such as social media, eCommerce, gaming, multimedia, and many more.

Therefore, every digital organization is in the process of developing mobile applications. But developing an application is not enough, it should be fully potential to stand out in the market, and this can be achieved by carrying out different Mobile app testing methods.

Mobile app testing is growing in relevance for any business that wants to be successful in the ever-growing digital world and stay competitive!

The most common issues of a mobile app could be prevented with a complete mobile app testing before going live.

Mobile Application Download & Usage Statistics

• Mobile applications are expected to generate $189 billion in revenue by the end of the year 2020.
• The Apple App Store has 2.2 million applications available for download.
• There are 2.8 million applications available for download on the Google Play Store.
• 21% of Millennials open an app 50+ times per day.
• 49% of people open an app 11+ times each day.
• 57% of all digital media usage comes from mobile applications.
• The average smartphone owner uses 30 applications each month.

Why Mobile App Testing Is Important?

It doesn’t matter, how good you are at writing code, your code must pass through a well-defined set of tests.

Nowadays, mobile applications are not mere mobile applications — they are in the golden era of embracing more progressive and hybrid applications. In such a technological era, mobile app testing has become a critical affair.

We have identified some key points of mobile app testing and they are:

• Native Application: The native applications are built for smartphones and tablets.
• Mobile Web Application: Mobile web applications use different browsers to access websites on mobiles via wireless networks.
• Hybrid Application: Hybrid applications are the combination of native and mobile web applications

What Are Mobile Application Testing Challenges?

Mobile app testing is more challenging than testing desktop and web applications, and therefore developers and testers have to face a whole set of challenges.

Challenges In Mobile Application Testing

Based on our experience, we have found the most common issues mobile testers have to face daily.

• Device fragmentation
• Screen size and OS fragmentation
• Manufacturer fragmentation
• Localization
• Mobile network operators and user’s mobility

Why Mobile Application Testing?

Mobile application testing is growing rapidly in the digital world. The most common issues found in the mobile native and hybrid applications are loading problems or a deficiency in performance, unresponsive elements, response to resolutions, etc.

These issues can be fixed with mobile application testing before releasing into production.

In the technology-driven world, mobile phones have become an important part of everyone’s life.

Everyone is using a mobile application or a mobile-friendly website for any business. Besides, many new businesses are evolving every day in the e-commerce world, with a myriad of applications covering their internet spaces.

Some of the most popular native applications are calling and messaging applications like Snapchat, WhatsApp, Hike; social media application like Facebook, Instagram; e-commerce application Amazon, eBay; gaming application Pub-G, Call of Duty etc.

When running any business, one of your main goals should always be to provide the best experience possible for every customer.

Testing mobile applications is an important phase in the mobile app development process.

All the major issues that an application has can be resolved through a successful mobile application testing. Besides, a perfect mobile application testing ensures easy app launching on the production server, without any flaws.

The Main Categories Of Mobile App Testing Are:

Performance Testing

• Performance testing mostly highlights the functional domain as well as on the backend of an application.
• Most of the Key Performance Indicator in performance testing includes the use of GPS, energy consumption, and other battery killing features, memory usage, network bandwidth usage, as well as, the working of an application under excessive loads. Below-mentioned is some of the objectives that are provided with performance testing of an app:

How The App Performs At Heavy Workloads?

• Performance testing allows product owners to quantify the performance of the framework when the number of users or actions performed by them increases on the mobile app.
• Doing so, the testers will come to know the response time and the amount of resource consumption at the application’s peak points.
• This is exceptionally useful if your application is likely to experience traffic spikes (where, during a specific season or time frame, the number of visitors exceeds and then right after some time the number comes to the normal).

How Hardware Impacts Performance?

By performing performance testing, the mobile application tester team will assure that there is no CPU overhead or little server storage won’t prevent the application from working as per the requirement

What Is The Capacity Of The Application?

You will have the option to check whether the current setup is being provided for coordinating the set of rules defined previously (server response time, peak traffic load and so on).

How The App Performs On The Protocol Level?

While performing performance testing, a mobile application tester team will get a realistic simulation of real traffic, create a load profile, and measure the response time.

How The App Performs Under Critical Conditions?

• By performance mobile application testing, an application developer will have the option to build up the limits of the application’s performance.
• This way, you will have the option to prevent and predict system crashes.
• The application performance test approach is the same for applications in all businesses and with scalability. To effectively execute performance testing, a project manager needs to come up with a strategy that adjusts business requirements and test objectives.

Functional Testing

• The functionality testing of mobile applications is crucial as it serves several purposes — this type of testing assures that the mobile application functions as expected. It also ensures that the design and requirement specifications have been met.
• While doing functionality testing, you ensure that your application functions properly from the end-user perspective.
• Mobile devices come with additional hardware features like storage, camera, screen and sensors like accelerometer, GPS, a touch sensor or ambient light.
• Every one of them needs to be tested in various scenarios and settings. Also, there is a possibility of several interpretation scenarios while an application is working like incoming messages, calls or other notifications.
• The main objective of the functionality of mobile application testing is to find potential errors and unexpected issues that may come in case of an interruption.
• One should not additionally forget that mobile applications are utilized by the naive.
• For instance, what happens when a user randomly touches an application screen or inputs some illogical information? To test such situations, monkey testing tools are generally utilized; which comes under functionality testing.

Usability Testing

• In the digital mobile application development era, developers need to provide higher value and quality to users and unit testing applications for performance and functional accuracy isn’t sufficient. It must be taken forward to ensure that the mobile application is responsive, intuitive, and engaging enough to engage users and serve their necessities well.
• This incorporates suggestions to product users and their needs while correcting and improving the quality of the mobile application to serve them with a complete solution that serves client requirements well, speaks with them in the manner in which they understand, and connects with them to the degree of delight.

Here Are Some Of The Crucial Characteristics Of Usability Mobile App Testing

• Incorporates strategies that will be utilized in the testing system.
• Have an assignment list that presents and portrays different exercises and practices to be followed.
• It is all-integrated with the necessary facility, condition, and tools for testing.
• It should have clearness of the area and extent of testing.
• It has a section on analysis and reporting for delivering test results.
• To get detailed insights on how users use the application, we can also implement Alpha and Beta testing. The idea here is to provide two unique variants of an application to the same segment of the end-users to check which variation performs better.
• By analyzing the behaviour of the user, we can modify the components and features to the good manner in which the target audience likes it more. The practice can guide advertisers when making some growth-oriented strategic decisions.

Security Testing

• The increase of digitalization has made security testing extremely crucial.
• A completely functional yet insecure application can show severe results. So, the application should always be tested based on

Confidentiality: Are legitimate encryption techniques used to secure private information?

Authorization: Is the application requesting access to just the necessary information on your device?

Authentication: Is the application authenticating a user appropriately before giving him the data access?

Web Services: Is the application of interacting with web services utilizing secure protocols?

Storage: Is the data that is stored locally on the device appropriately encrypted? While performing security testing, authentication must be your first need to guarantee the safety of your business and your clients. It incorporates authorization. You decide who will get the accessibility and how much access is permitted to an authenticated user.

This ensures that your data remains safe from external and interior breaches. Hire a tester who is well-versed for the job. The right individual will create numerous user accounts, including various jobs. When you are done with accessibility testing, you should also test the security level of the data of your application.

Legitimate security testing measures are needed to ensure the viability of data storage. But, you need to test first to check the vulnerabilities.

An expert mobile application tester can test the database for a wide range of critical data, for example, user account, billing, passwords, and others. Other functionalities that require testing are document transfers and payments.

These things again require intensive testing.

While usability testing pays attention to the look, feel and convenience, compatibility testing focuses on deciding whether the hardware and software together permit the application to function appropriately.

Compatibility Testing

Mobile Compatibility Testing is performed to check that your application performs as expected overall browsers and mobile devices that your users will be using to access your application.
As per research, there are various issues related to compatibility that affect user experience, including

Content: A full website, as a rule, doesn’t fit on a small device.

Navigation: Mobile navigation may require different navigation strategies than the full-size site.

Size: Smaller screens require texts and objects to be estimated properly.

Feature And Functions: Component behaviour is not always expected on the various devices and OS. The native app brings even more issues, like:

• Installation and design upgrade issues
• More depending on the operating system than with responsive web design applications
• Various versions are required for each working framework.
• Your compatibility mobile application testing methodology should be flexible.
• The tools or methods you choose should be dependent upon the specific condition. In the meantime, it is additionally positive to change your procedure according to the functional testing condition.

Conclusion

Mobile application testing has become a critical part of mobile application development. Majority of problems that an application faces, could be addressed through a successful mobile application testing. This also increases the go-to-market time and ensures the success of the application. A professional IT organization with its profound team can assure the functionality and quality of work to render applications that will work seamlessly.

Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.