Everyday, thousands of apps are launched. Over time, the tech industry is speeding up and making smart and big changes rapidly such as new OS versions, a bunch of new devices, development platforms, frameworks and many more. In all between this, a mobile app tester job has become much more complex and challenging. So in this blog, we are going to share some hacks of mobile app testing that will make app testers job much easy.
So first of all lets discuss about some common challenges of mobile app testing. OS fragmentation, multitude of mobile devices, different mobile app types (Native, Hybrid, HTML5), variety of testing tools, numerous test interfaces, performance testing under natural conditions are some common testing challenges of mobile. How to overcome all these challenges? What to do if stuck in between one challenge? Below is the all information that every mobile app tester should know and follow.
Essential Things a Mobile App Tester Should Take Care of
Understand the Nature, Scope and Goal of the Application:
A good mobile app tester always make its first step of app testing with a great understanding of the project. A mobile app tester needs to go in a deep of the project to understand its nature, scope and ultimate goal.
Know Your Customers:
According to today’s scenario, mobile users expect much more from the mobile apps and mobile devices than from web or desktop. So knowing your target customers expectations are essential. If you know the target audience of the app for which you are applying your testing skills, you can downsize the testing efforts by focusing on what is important to the them related to functionality, UI /UX, like/dislikes and many more.
Testing Strategy and Plan:
Formulate a testing strategy helps to wager necessary guidelines which all testers are expected to follow. This brings consistency in testing and ensures sufficient test coverage.
Test on Real Devices:
Emulator and Simulator are very useful for the early stages of development, but testing on real devices ensures the real test results and it also give better idea to tester about the look and feel of the app.
User Experience Testing:
User experience testing is the most important task for every tester. 80% of the app success is depend on users. So a mobile app tester should properly test the user journey execution, UI consistency, UI behavior, visual issues, user interaction visualization, custom device feedback, responsive design behavior and application-specific functionality.
Compose the List of the Devices for Testing:
Create a list of devices and OS on which you are going to apply testing strategies. You can also avoid the devices that are no longer supported by the manufactures and vendors. You can take help of emulators in case if you want to test on older version. So this will definitely increase the testing cost without the reward of the higher user satisfaction rates.
Test Native and Web Based Mobile App differently:
Native Mobile App Considerations – When you are testing for native mobile app, the app testing cycle should start from the installation and launch process. The access of the device ID is needed and if the app uses third party API, the API connection testing is also required.
Web Based Mobile App Considerations – If the application required internet connection, then the connection testing is important for Wifi, mobile data, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, GPRS, etc. The application pages will look different while checking on different browser, so check things according to visuality. Load and performance testing is one of the major factor to test in web based mobile applications.
Perform Automation Testing:
Mobile app automation can improve the development process. If you are developing app on agile environment, automation testing can save much hours. It is very easy to add new test cases without interfering in the development process with the help of automation testing.
Performance and Connectivity:
Check the memory leaks, remove the redundant code because it can lead to higher battery consumption. If the app uses GPS and Camera, make sure it will freed after the application closed because it can higher the battery issues. For connectivity, application memory & processor usage, application transition behavior when switches between Wi-Fi and 3G/EDGE, weak signal conditions, network bandwidth usage are the necessary functionalities to test.
Security Perspective Testing:
Check for encryption and authentication of data, proper encoding of sensitive data, check for the interaction of app with third party software or services, check for potential areas of the app that can receive malicious information.
Application Globalness Testing:
If the application have worldwide appeal, you have to properly check that the app adapts to various geographies, supports languages, currencies and popular social networks of prominent markets.
Test for Updates/Install and Uninstall Processes:
As we all know, the versions of mobile app platforms changes frequently, so in that case, app’s update and installation processes testing is an essential task to do. Mobile app tester should do testing in order to replicate updating from an older application version to the latest one. During the update and installation tests, mobile app testers must take care for crashes and other issues like that. They must also check that after doing uninstall the application, the app data has been completely removed from device storage.
Check All log File and Restrict Permission:
Everybody who uses smartphone are very sensitive about their private data. The apps which required unnecessary permissions, users straightly not like to install that app. For example, if the app require only camera and internet connection, there is no sense to get permission for SMS, contact numbers kind of things. In this test scenario, mobile app testers required to connect the mobile device to a computer to check the log files, stack traces, device storage kind of information that is not allowed to be there. They should also check for log cases, make sure the log is on release mode and avoid showing too much app information to other people.
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