Mobile App Testing Best practices

During the past ten years or so, testing has grown to become an important element of any kind of development; however it is so very important in creating mobile applications, in which users’ needs have always been very high. Testing is essential to find any kind of errors which is required to be eliminated. All from the functionality to user interface and the usability should be estimated and perfected by a regular testing process. Among the greatest concerns within the world of mobile apps are higher expectations from user. Mobile users expect a lot from mobile apps and devices as compared to Web or desktop. For that reason, knowing your targeted customers and also their requirements is very important. 

You should collect some information like age of the user, gender, mobile usage habits, geographical location and so on to have a better idea about your customers. This information will help you to learn about usage patterns and will help mobile testing properly in the business. Having some detailed information about the user, it will be easy to reduce your testing attempts by focusing on what exactly is important for the user. You could be able to even minimize the number of devices for the testing, as you simply need to test only on the devices that your customer uses.

Professional software testers have an understanding of software testing names as well as the techniques like boundary values, classes, equivalence, many coverage types, along with acceptance criteria. All of this understanding is very useful as it applies to the mobile testing. Also the functional and the nonfunctional testing techniques from Web or the desktop applications are needed, with a little change for the mobile testing. Testing in different type of data networks is among the most essential situations for testing mobile applications. A mobile app that needs an Internet connection to carry out a task might come across various data networks for the customer is on the go.

In case a mobile app that would be used in different nations, make sure that the app needs to support many languages. Then, mobile app testers need to test the app with the different languages which it supports. Language testing is important since each language has unique characters and are with different sizes. One of the important things is that both the developers and the testers need to make sure consumer and the business critical apps fulfill performance, functional, needs to be user friendly and has to meet compatibility requirements. Besides the capabilities of cloud-based mobile testing services, there are some tried and tested practices which mobile app testing could adopt for effective and efficient testing. Below are some of the best practices for testing mobile app.

• Planning of testing strategy helps in making some guidelines that every tester is expected to adhere to. This gives uniformity in the testing and makes adequate test coverage.
  
  
• Although emulators and the simulators are useful for testing during the early phases of development, but the app should be tested adequately upon actual devices too. Testing on the real devices helps ensure test results are practical and provides the tester a much better understanding about the appearance and feel about the app as well as about its general usability.
  
  
• Start with testing the moment development has got to a logical stage. It will help to find problems early prior to when they turn out to be very expensive to fix later on. Keep a track for every test cycle.

• It is not possible to test extensively on every device, network and on OS combinations. Make a decision in the beginning itself as to what kind of devices and the OS the app is going to function on and then begin the QA.
  
  
• Automation minimizes time to market and produces high ROI other than providing the advantage of repeatable testing. However, do remember about regular maintenance for the automation test suite.
  
  
• Performance, security and stress testing help make your app robust and that can avoid financial liabilities due to user distress. Look for known or unknown weaknesses; those are due to third party and from open source software packages.

• No matter what the variations in performance for any network-aware mobile app that may be using WiFi, 3G or may be 4G connectivity, the users will probably blame it on the app instead of their connectivity. Testing can document bottlenecks by which the app could adjust during the low bandwidth situations.
  
  
• Battery consuming apps probably gets deleted. Make sure that you check out just how much battery your app is consuming. In addition, you need to check how good it functions along with other popular apps as well as how it is easily adjustable to negative conditions such as different network strengths or the suspended connections.
  
  
• The app would be popular worldwide provided that it adjusts to different geographies. Make sure that it supports different languages, currencies as well as popular social networks of popular markets.

Around 50 percent of users who come across a bug never come back. To choose a good testing partner to progress with will make the real difference between great results or failure to your app.

Mindfire Solutions, an ISTQB Gold certified partner company, is one of the leading software testing companies in India and has been providing software testing services to its esteemed clients for over 15 years now. We have dedicated teams for enterprise, web and mobile app testing. If you need any kind of assistance in your software testing process or you need to augment your team by hiring QA testers, please feel free to get in touch with us now and our Software Testing Team will revert back with a free quote within one business day. Also as a special offer, you can avail the limited period Risk-Free Trial Offer.