Kick start your journey towards automated mobile testing — a faster, reliable and cost-effective option for better results and wider coverage. Here’s everything you will need to know about it.
Have you been looking to move from manual to automated mobile testing to save costs ?
With the advent of digitalization, the landscape of mobile applications has been witnessing a boom across the world. Look around and you will find every other person on their mobile phone !
Be it for leisure or for work, it has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. Digital and social media have further increased the number of mobile phone users and the number of hours people spend on their devices. This is largely due to the excellent usability of mobile applications.
In order to tap mobile users and convert them into customers, organizations are increasingly finding ways to create the perfect app that is easy to navigate and provides a great user experience , attracting potential customers and expanding their customer base.
But, do you know that one element that’s common for almost every successful mobile application development, besides a killer UI ? Mobile app testing strategy.
The right strategy ticks all the points off the checklist and ensures that customer expectations are met and helps organizations move closer to their business objectives.
With the requirement to support various kinds of mobile devices, this testing can pose certain challenges, especially when it comes to cost optimization. This is why companies need to have a well-thought-out plan in place that defines the scope of automation and choose the right tools that they can leverage for the same.
A good automation strategy not only ensures success but also improves ROI, giving companies an edge over their competitors.
We will take you through it all — from the importance and benefits of automated mobile testing to the right ways for getting started, and the tests that should ideally be automated. End result ?
What is automated mobile testing?
Automating mobile app testing is the key to testing faster and extending test coverage on both platforms and test scenarios, making it a cost-effective and time-efficient technique. Mobile app automation can seem to be complex, however, in most cases, it can successfully be automated with an informed and insight-led strategy in place.
What are the challenges that automated mobile testing can help you overcome ?
Testing mobile apps is the first step to ensuring that they will work on different devices and, operating system versions which is a challenge owing to the diverse range of hardware and OS versions.
Here, we’ve compiled a list of challenges that developers often face while testing mobile applications:
- Multi-platform compatibility issues that increase the complexity and time that is required for testing applications.
- Managing IT complexities with automation.
- Lack of reliable testing tools.
- Different types of connectivity and network types, including mobile data (3G, 4G, roaming) and WiFi.
- Tedious end-to-end testing as a result of integrations with varied platforms and technologies.
These are some of the challenges that you might encounter. Having an understanding of these will help you plan, mitigate and overcome, making the process seamless.
For mobile automation testing to work efficiently, the software company needs to keep these pointers in mind :
- Set reasonable and realistic expectations.
- Consider test automation a part of the software development cycle.
- Create a focused strategy.
- Allocate adequate resources for automation
- Improve flexibility to learn and adjust as per changes
What sets automated testing apart and how is it better than manual ?
Testing establishes that the app functionally conforms with the expectations. Automated Testing, as the name says, is a form of testing that gets done automatically. One has to create programmatic tests to perform repeated actions automatically.
On the other hand, carrying out tests manually is time-consuming, have a greater scope for errors and costlier. It is a time and manpower intensive effort.
Not just this. It is also practically not possible to manually test all the apps using a thousand combinations of the different kinds of devices and operating systems that exist today.
The time constraints in the manual testing methods make it extremely difficult to test each feature of an application, and this may leave several weaknesses unchecked, which might later affect the performance and user experience when the app enters the market.
Coming back to automation, it has a wider coverage, is scalable, and has the ability to perform the tests quickly, efficiently, and at lower costs. In fact, automation has the potential to reduce the testing time and cost by 40%.
Benefits of automated testing
It’s easy, it’s quick, it’s automated testing!
It can spot regression errors much faster. Automated testing offers benefits such as :
- Performing tests quickly as compared to manual methods
- Run tests on multiple devices, simultaneously
- Reusing tests that Quality Assurance teams can use on different versions of the app
- Wider coverage
- Gives a better ROI
- Reduces manpower requirements and costs significantly
- The ability to run tests literally anytime
Some of the top tests that you can automate
- Unit Testing
This is the fastest method of testing and is highly reusable, easier to debug, and has a low cost when it comes to fixes. Unit Tests are written by app developers. - Integration Testing
Integration Testing is performed to ensure that all interfaces and integration points behave as expected. - Functional Testing
Functional Testing, ensures that the application conforms to the functionality as specified by the stakeholders. With the mobile landscape being extremely fragmented, now this also includes Cross-device testing where the functional tests are executed across various device and OS combinations.
Here is a list of a few test automation frameworks that you can consider :
- Appium
An open-source and leading framework for mobile app testing, Appium has an active community, which can be beneficial for those who are just venturing into the domain of automatic testing. - XCUITest
This is an open-source testing framework, but only for iOS apps. Since it is developed and maintained by Apple, it is perfect for iOS-specific UI test automation. It is a developer-friendly framework for unit and functional testing. - Espresso
Created by Google, this is an Android-specific open-source framework for mobile testing — making it best suited for Android UI testing. - Bqurious
Bqurious is the world’s first Cloud based Test Automation and management Platform. It is a no-code Automation Testing Platform that makes it extremely easy to create end-to-end automated tests spanning multiple technologies. In addition, cross-device testing can be performed at the click of a button.
Using real and virtual devices together could play to your advantage
Real and virtual devices work perfectly together, just like your favorite cup of coffee on a rainy day — making it a recommended best practice to use both types of platforms in your mobile app testing strategy. Based on the phase it’s in, tests should be spread between emulators or simulators and real devices.
When it comes to virtual devices, they are best during the early stages of development, and real devices later in this cycle.
When the features are taking shape during the early sprints/phases, you should be running smoke and unit tests, along with fast validations against virtual devices from the developer environment.
A little later in this process, when the application has taken shape, launching the full testing scope in parallel against real devices is better.
What kind of testing infrastructure do you need?
Let’s come to the next consideration for text execution — should it be done in the cloud or in premises?
It is recommended to test in a cloud-based environment for a large number of reasons.
Here are some of the reasons for using cloud infrastructure :
● Easier to scale
● Access it from wherever you are — it’s fluid and has no geographical barriers
● 24/7 availability
● Allows you to extend test coverage for different devices and test scenarios
● A faster way to access new and rare devices
● Pay as you go translates to Lower costs.
Conclusion
No doubt that mobile app testing automation is a complex task but it is an equally crucial one. Using tools as per the selection criteria, effective automation testing and budget can be achieved. All we need to do is keep the above-mentioned factors in mind and plan accordingly.
This will give your organization an effective automation project that is delivered on time and makes the app stable and bug-free. Over time, this helps to earn customer satisfaction and appreciation.
Now that you are well-versed with the range of benefits it offers, are you ready to take the leap and get started with automated mobile testing?