Since mobile devices first hit the scene, their use has expanded beyond communications to every aspect of our everyday lives. Thanks to mobile applications, their use has skyrocketed - both personally and for business.
Mobile applications have quickly become a way for organizations to expand their businesses and reach a broader audience. Due to this surge of hybrid, native, mobile web app development, testing these applications has become essential.
With the proliferation of mobile devices around the globe, demand for mobile applications has skyrocketed worldwide. A recent survey reveals that revenues are forecasted to reach $613 billion by 2025 in this fast-emerging industry.
What Is Mobile App Testing?
App testing or mobile application testing involves the evaluation of developed apps for usability, security and performance to ensure it satisfies business and technical requirements. Tests of mobile apps often involve scrutinizing both their functional and non-functional elements, with professionals testing for compatibility, consistency, usability and performance issues. By 2023 there will have been estimated total downloads of 255 billion mobile apps - this evidences how carefully designed applications must capture users' interest to remain successful in today's mobile marketplace.
Given their demand, testing mobile applications is critical before being launched. Testing involves functional, performance and security testing of apps for smartphones. Using different testing methodologies, mobile app testing covers various screen sizes, OS versions, and bandwidths. Mobile app testing aims to verify security measures within apps and their user experience and performance characteristics.
Why Mobile App Testing?
At its heart, mobile app development should aim at reaching as many users as possible around the globe. But if apps developed don't function smoothly or are challenging for their target audiences to use, users could leave and switch over to competitors instead of sticking with what works well - mobile testing provides invaluable information regarding an app's functionality and usability.
Test mobile applications thoroughly and adequately to meet end-user expectations and needs. Otherwise, bugs or errors that disrupt functionality could develop, creating poor user experiences that lead them to delete or uninstall their app entirely. Mobile app testing must therefore take priority over other activities when developing software products for mobile.
Testing mobile applications thoroughly before they become available to end-users allows developers to detect potential errors and bugs that could impede performance and functionality, which in turn allows the end-user to receive satisfactory mobile apps. Thus, rigorously testing mobile applications before release ensures they remain safe, reliable, and easy for end users.
Apps For Mobile Phones
Before embarking on mobile app testing, one must understand mobile applications and the differences from traditional web pages or websites. Mobile apps refer to software explicitly designed to run on mobile devices like phones, tablets and wearables such as Apple's App Store and Google Play Store. These marketplaces act as sources where apps may be purchased/downloaded based on device operating system providers such as OS. Three categories of mobile applications exist which make mobile testing possible:
- Web Apps: Web applications, or "web apps," are websites accessible via desktop and mobile browsers, making them less costly than their mobile equivalents. Web apps online tend to be cheaper.
- Native Apps: Native software is specifically tailored for one operating system and may only run on Android, iOS and Windows; thus, it cannot be run across other operating systems such as iOS and Windows. Unfortunately, it is impossible to run native Android applications on these other operating systems.
- Hybrid Apps: These apps combine elements from native apps and web apps, enabling developers to utilize code on various platforms without significantly modifying scripts or platforms.
To gain more knowledge, look at our previous mobile app testing guide on hybrid apps vs native apps for further reading.
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App Testing For Mobile Apps: Benefits
App testing is an integral component of software development, and testers are essential in this endeavor. Before undertaking such tests, be aware of its many benefits - here are just a few.
Usability of User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)
Testers can assess apps from a user-centric viewpoint using app testing. By simulating users and testing look-and-feel elements of mobile applications, testers can examine usability and friendliness as they simulate using them on various devices or screens - an invaluable way of testing the UI/UX of an application.
Ensure Proper Functioning
Testing mobile applications allows you to ensure they're operating as intended without errors, with testers checking if users can download an app to multiple devices simultaneously and verifying with infrastructure whether the mobile app works smoothly and can interact. Testing allows for verification that everything's going as intended.
User Loyalty At The Highest Level
A practical user experience is more effortless when your mobile app meets users' usability, functionality and performance expectations. Users will quickly embrace it as the application becomes more popular among end-users who may recommend it to friends, thus building up its market reputation.
Find Security Flaws
Testing an app helps detect any vulnerabilities, such as data leakage or unauthorized access, helping avoid data breaches and security concerns.
Lower Mobile App Development Cost
Early and quickly during the development phase of your mobile app development project is when bugs or errors can be identified and fixed - this can save you money in the long run by fixing early errors and saving you from costly downtime issues.
Testing Mobile Apps
Mobile app testing evaluates an application's usability, functionality and overall quality. Testing doesn't refer to just one type of examination. Still, it includes several forms to guarantee quality for users of an app. Each feature and aspect must be thoroughly examined before passing testing with flying colors. This section discusses this in greater depth.
Functional Test
Functional testing in mobile app testing determines whether an app functions appropriately. It verifies that all components conform to their intended uses, meet all required standards, and meet regulatory guidelines. Functional tests may take various forms. For instance: functional, performance or load testing could all fall within this evaluation category. Functional testing can be divided into subcategories: functional usability testing, load testing, or function performance.
Testing Non-Functional
Mobile application testing employing non-functional aspects aims at validating its performance, reliability and utility while simultaneously assessing any other non-functionalities not covered by functional testing.
- Testing For Compatibility: Non-functional testing techniques verify whether an application will perform as promised on various hardware configurations, devices and operating systems.
Compatibility testing can be broken into two distinct categories.
- Testing For Forward Compatibility: Forward compatible testing enables you to ensure mobile apps will function on the latest operating systems or components, like Android 11 (for instance). A forward-compatible test checks how the mobile app performs when upgraded from its initial configuration on Android 10.
- Testing For Backward Compatibility: Testing an app against older OS versions and components allows you to ensure it will function perfectly with older systems such as Android 9. If it was designed for Android 10, testing must occur with Android 9 first.
- Testing Usability: By conducting usability testing, the user experience is prioritized. This test determines if mobile applications require patches and how user-friendly it is for end-users to utilize them. Usability tests offer comprehensive reports about how people experience an app's user interface.
Mobile App Testing Strategy
Experience is at the core of every app's success story, and most successful ones employ rigorous testing plans and processes to guarantee their delivery in optimal condition. Quality must remain constant across devices your users use, you will require an effective mobile testing strategy to accomplish this.
Decide Your Device Before You Start Testing
Compatibility testing mobile software can be complex due to the limited testing devices available. Therefore, you must review documentation to identify which Android version your app requires to run correctly before creating a matrix that shows compatible devices for testing your software. Below are steps that may assist in selecting the ideal device:
- Share Of The Market: share data can help you to select which devices should make up your matrix, including operating systems such as Android. Since mobile devices can be expensive and manufacturers only release three significant updates annually, many customers must rely on outdated versions. Thus, assuming that most Android users are running the most up-to-date versions would be inaccurate.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics stats allow you to identify which devices are likely to utilize your app, whether existing websites are converted into mobile applications or vice versa, and give access to competitor analytics if available.
A Good Understanding Of Tools
Understanding tools is integral for creating high-quality mobile app tests; use this strategy to select suitable ones:
- Manage Your Requirements: Although many tools share similar features, you must view each as distinct to choose an effective one for your project requirements (mobile app development projects are an exception here). To save time by eliminating multiple unnecessary tools quickly. It should not be chosen if a tool cannot meet them all. To find your ideal tools faster, organizing project requirements was done before narrowing your selection down further.
- Assess Your Team's Skills: Once your criteria have been defined and organized, it's time to evaluate your team. When selecting tools for their evaluation, be sure they use those with which your staff feels most at home.
- Look At The Current Frameworks And Tools: These tools can assist in optimizing the strategy behind your app, with issues encountered during its testing being more easily identifiable by team members than you when discussing tool issues or making decisions on whether it should continue being utilized.
Read More: Why Mobile Application Development Service Is Essential Today?
Prioritize Documentation
Documentation is critical in improving software and mobile app testing strategies, even though its purpose may differ from testing/coding activities. Documentation must always remain an important aspect.Here you will find important documents related to testing mobile applications.
- A document that contains the Software Requirements Specifications.
- Test design documentation.
- Test cases Specification.
- Test technique specification.
- Reports on Test Strategy and Results.
- Test log documentation.
- Test plan documentation.
- Bug reporting documentation.
- Documentation of test results.
- Report on an incident that occurred during a test or a problem.
- Tests and their analysis.
Cross-Platform Testing
Cross-platform testing frameworks and tools offer an efficient means for testing Android and iOS apps simultaneously - saving time and resources! This approach may save your team considerable effort during development cycles. Now you can conveniently edit all test scripts from one place and focus on developing new scripts instead of duplicating existing ones - this framework may even reduce future work!
The Scope For Automation Testing
Automated testing has become essential to software development life cycles to save time and resources. To meet our goals, automated testing must first be understood as something separate from software management: how can we maximize productivity concerning mobile app automation tests.
Project requirements will often dictate how to divide automation tests. Each project entails its challenges and unique demands; when starting, carefully separate your automation tests into separate portions as your app may undergo successive updates - this information can be found in our mobile app strategy tutorial.
What Is The Best Mobile App Testing Software?
The initial goal should be to find an app testing and development tool and scripts suitable for automated mobile testing. Once chosen, configure your test environment to begin testing apps or games as soon as possible.
- App testing tools that enable testers to generate test cases in multiple programming languages are preferred by app testers.
- Cordless tools allow for creating test scenarios and running them smoothly. At the same time, solutions designed for mobile testing can reduce test execution times significantly.
- Ensure that the mobile app testing tool you select supports multiple operating systems like Android and iOS.
- Tools must recognize, record, playback and automate each action taken within scenarios.
- Mobile quality assurance tools must provide reports with details such as plans, screenshots and defect points.
This section discusses some of the more popular app testing tools.
- It is an advanced cloud-based testing platform for digital experience evaluation that supports real-time app and browser testing in real-time, both real-device cloud testing and virtual device cloud. Tests may also run online using different operating systems and devices, allowing visual regression testing and real-time debugging testing as some exciting features of its unique offering.
- Apptim is a mobile test platform designed for manual and automated smartphone testing, enabling manual user experience testing and crash reports. Apptim integrates seamlessly with various development tools like Slack, Jira, and Jenkins for further convenience in testing.
- TestComplete This software automates the testing of iOS and Android mobile applications with specific features like object recognition, test script creation and visual testing, and integrations with Jira/Jenkins/other development tools.
- Kobiton is an online cloud platform designed specifically for mobile testing, offering real devices from both iOS and Android to be assessed. Furthermore, this software integrates Jira project tracking, programming languages, and development tools into one seamless package for optimal test execution.
What Is Mobile App Testing, And How Can It Be Performed?
Conducting end-to-end tests of mobile applications wholly and accurately is necessary to guarantee the seamless functionality of mobile apps.
Step 1. Create A Test Plan
As with any test, begin with creating an outline. Include all test cases and plans on this list before selecting an expected short test for a sprint test session.
Step 2. Selecting The Test Type
Now that your test plan is in place, the next step should be deciding the type of mobile testing to employ. Manual or automated methods could work; when making this choice, it is essential to keep several factors in mind - this part of our mobile app tutorial covers some cases where automated testing might make sense.
- Test automation is recommended if the result of the conditional test can be predicted: This applies to any test where the results are known.
- Automate the test if it's routine: If you have to run a regular, repetitive mobile app function testing regularly, then automate that.
- Mobile devices have different resolutions and screen sizes. Manual testing on different devices is too long to ensure compatibility. Automation is recommended.
Step 3: Creating Test Cases
Create Test Cases Now in this step in your tutorial on mobile app testing! Choosing an effective methodology such as requirements- or business scenario-based tests may require selecting appropriate methods of mobile app testing; furthermore, define which tests you wish to run, as there are generally two categories of mobile testing:
- Functional Testing: It covers unit testing and system testing as well as acceptance testing, regression tests, etc.
- Non-Functional Testing: It includes volume testing (volume testing), performance testing (performance testing), load testing (load testing), compliance testing etc.
Step 4. Manual Testing
Important when choosing an Agile testing framework is using manual and automated tests for maximum effectiveness in testing mobile apps, with exploratory tests starting every sprint as exploratory tests to maximize the effectiveness of testing. Initial stages tend to favor this option because no significant financial investment is required. You should document each testing session using Excel or Word files for recordkeeping.
- Test On simulators And Emulators: These tools simulate real mobile devices on your computer to test them.
- Test On Real Devices: Real devices are hardware components that can be used to test software or systems. Real devices are anything physical. This includes smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, servers, and anything else connected to the Internet.
Step 5. Automated Testing
Manual testing can be time-consuming and exhausting; you must manually test every mobile app function. Therefore, for efficient regular and expected testing, it's recommended that automation testing should be used instead.
Automated testing saves time and human effort when performing load, performance, spike and stress tests. Testers usually utilize automated tools like Selenium and those featured in mobile app testing tutorials for load testing.
Step 6.Beta Testing & Usability
Beta testing and usability evaluation are crucial steps in discovering critical and hidden errors within mobile applications before their release to market. Usability tests should begin during the design stage to gather feedback from real users; this enables developers to display potential features to users that reduce those not receiving their app perfectly, thus potentially decreasing user complaints about it. In contrast, beta testing occurs after development has been completed on an app and developers are ready for feedback on it from end-users.
Step 7.Performance Testing
Performance testing of mobile applications helps determine their complete functionality. After testing each feature of an app individually, its overall performance should also be thoroughly examined in case of high-end-user traffic to identify its scalability and speed quickly; any system errors must also be checked for.
Step 8. Security Testing
Before releasing your mobile application, it must undergo thorough security testing. Conduct a security evaluation against data security standards like HIPAA and PCI DSS to assess any associated risks from hackers or viruses that might compromise it.
Step 9. End-To-End Testing
Developers should conduct an end-to-end testing sprint once all testing for mobile apps has been completed to verify that it functions as expected on both servers and backend systems. After completing an end-to-end testing sprint, any major bugs must be fixed before uploading to App stores; otherwise, it should go live immediately.
Cloud-based Mobile App Testing
Cloud-based testing of mobile apps is increasingly preferred by quality assurance analysts and developers, offering access to multiple devices and operating systems for testing mobile applications efficiently in various environments.
Cloud-based accurate device testing enables users to connect directly with real devices (Android or iOS) from their desktop browser and test for functionality and compatibility without purchasing multiple devices; testing mobile apps will become faster and less time-consuming this way.
Cloud testing offers several key advantages; you can simultaneously test on multiple devices, OSs and platforms, ensuring mobile apps work flawlessly across platforms.digital experience testing platform can provide a fantastic means for testing mobile applications.
Mobile App Testing: Challenges And Solutions
Testing mobile applications is no simple feat, and this section of our mobile app tutorial addresses some of the challenges testers may experience while performing this testing process.
- Device fragmentation remains one of the primary challenges associated with app testing, given the growing diversity of mobile phones running apps simultaneously.
- Many global businesses manufacture smartphones in various screen sizes and resolutions. Their respective models may contain various variants with specific screen requirements that must all have apps developed alongside each new screen specification.
- Mobile app testing cannot be considered complete without performing network bandwidth tests on both ends, with fast apps for the end users on one end. At the same time, data transfer becomes an issue for apps that struggle to deliver faster results on another side.
Following, we will discover some best practices in mobile testing.
Best Practices For Mobile App Testing
You have gained knowledge about mobile application tests and their challenges from this tutorial on mobile app testing. To ensure testing important mobile components without leaving important ones untested, optimizing mobile testing processes while meeting challenges effectively is vital in optimizing testing strategies and mitigating potential hurdles to successful app testing.
- Understanding how your mobile app operates before commencing testing can help ensure you create the appropriate test cases and measure test coverage effectively.
- Before initiating any test, creating a comprehensive testing strategy is vital, outlining objectives, scope and methods. Doing this will simplify testing by streamlining each test in your pipeline.
- Proper testing of an app on real devices is vital as this helps identify any issues more readily.
- Mobile app testing focuses on user experience. To guarantee an excellent one, ensure a seamless test run by testing the usability, performance and accessibility aspects of an app.
- Consider all possible real-time conditions when testing an app - time zones and GPS locations are two elements to keep in mind - and network conditions to fully evaluate it.
- Mobile applications must continue working correctly as OS versions change, so testers must keep an eye out for OS updates and ensure their app stays functional by regularly upgrading it to ensure proper functioning.
- Test-driven approaches should be utilized when testing mobile applications to ensure tests are run at each development phase and critical moments during design to create a stable app.
- Automating testing can save time and effort by efficiently testing apps across devices for functionality, compatibility and performance issues. Automated tests should include functional, compatibility and performance tests, which help determine their status on each platform.
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Conclusion
Mobile applications have quickly become part of our everyday lives. Their many uses become more transparent every year - everything from entertainment to shopping. According to estimates, users spend an estimated 200+ hours daily using them. For businesses wanting to grow and remain visible, using this medium as part of a marketing plan may be ideal because everyone knows it is available - everyone develops it together.
As the market becomes ever more competitive, mistakes that cannot be afforded in your app are critical for its success. Testing mobile applications is of vital importance; in this blog on testing mobile apps, we hope you have learned everything there is to know about doing it effectively using as part of this journey.
