Mobile App Testing Techniques For A Winning App

What do you think, which is the most important step in developing successful mobile app? App idea, design, framework or testing? According to the survey, it has been noticed that 58% of mobile apps fail in app stores because of poor performance resulting from improper testing. Generally users have no patience for apps that stuck or crash continuously. Imagine that, your app is getting lots of negative reviews and poor feedback. In such cases your app nearly dead in the market. Quality is necessary for success of an app and it cannot be achieved without continuous and thorough testing. Let us know the goals of mobile app testing-

• Check that functionality works as specified
• Ensure easy-to-support code as per standards
• Detect bugs and fix them immediately This results in seamless working app and satisfied users. Here we’ll see the various mobile app testing techniques.

Is Mobile Testing Different Than Desktop One?

Screen size of mobile devices are smaller than desktops and laptops. Generally mobile devices have less memory
Network connections are different for smartphones and computers
Not each tool for desktop app will work on a mobile app
On a desktop or a laptop, an app is tested on fewer machines. With mobile devices, you need many devices to test your product.
Mobile app testing needs lots of effort and generally beginners don’t know, from where to start. But not only beginners face issues about testing. Testing techniques for ios and android apps are similar but challenging too. Let us see the mobile app testing techniques.

Things To Follow While Testing Mobile Application-

Plan-
Create a list of priority and requirements as per your idea. If you do not have test scenarios, data and criteria it will become so complicated. So you should plan first.
Create Checklist-
Checklist is used to be kept for a variety of tasks to be tested particularly for repetitive tasks. For instance, you are testing an app at various levels of battery. Then create a checklist of how it behaves at 25, 50, 75.
Field Testing-
It includes on field testing such as using app in an atmosphere of too much traffic, in areas of having less network coverage, out of coverage areas, while on the drive etc.

Test In Various Settings-
Test app in various environments such as, low to high brightness, with Wi-Fi turned on and off, in airplane mode or silent mode, while using a keyboard etc.

Automation Plan-
It is necessary in the testing aspects that are repetitive. Also it is handy while developing or updating applications. You won’t have to go through complete app creation and this is one of the main advantage of automation testing.

Types Of Mobile App Tests-

1. Unit Testing-
As the name suggests, this kind of test analyses the small units of code like functions or classes. Every time whenever a developer finishes working on a small part of code, he/she has to test it. Unit tests are written by developers themselves and it is easier for developers to change the code they’ve written because they can see where something went wrong. All development environments have unit test frameworks – programs that drives testing process. Testing frameworks allow developers to test each function. Bugs detected at this stage are generally fixed in the code without describing in bug tracking system. Obviously, it is not possible to test everything, but you should test as much as possible. Every small part of feature should be unit tested. All unit tests are connected, hence you get a chain. If a small part of this chian fails, the complete test will fail.

One of the best practice for mobile app testing is writing automated tests before starting the development process and this is called test-driven development or a test-first approach. If you use this strategy, you initially create small part of code. Then you launch the tests that you wrote prior to coding. Development goes on until all tests are successfully passed. It seem too time consuming. Lack of time is the most serious problems in testing but unit tests can save more time and improve development speed. Also, it can serve as a kind of documentation for your library. Unit testing can take up to 30% of the estimated development time.

2. Auto Testing-
This type of tests are complex than unit tests and are written by QA engineers by using Ruby or Java. Mainly, they used to test unexpected user behavior and check how app copes. For instance, user may give incorrect data such as wrong address or phone number. Auto tests are created based on test cases, and it includes unexpected behaviors and other circumstances like- memory shortage, low battery, device lag, interruptions etc. Such things can be checked manually, however generally auto tests are used due to many functions have to be repeatedly checked.

In auto testing, QA engineer just has to write a test once and can then use it throughout the development process. While unit tests check just positive results, auto tests are interested in any result – positive, negative, or even odd.

One disadvantage of auto testing is that such tests are rather expensive and complex. In case of any changes in an application, the QA will have to rewrite the auto test. Hence, such tests are generally used for only core features. For instance, for an ecommerce app, features like search, ordering and buying probably won’t change, hence you can write auto tests for them. For some small changes, manual testing can be used. If you have an expert in auto testing they it will be an advantage as auto testing is powerful to test mobile apps.

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