The smartphone industry is at the forefront of technological advancement. More than half the world’s population now has access to smartphones. Numerous development and mobile application testing companies continue to join the market, flooding it with millions of products to increase consumers’ options. As each strives for a share of the highly competitive market, the rate of technological advancement is always rising. Companies are under constant pressure to keep releasing upgrades back to back. But of all the participants in the production process, more pressure is put on testers, who have to assess application quality within limited timeframe.
Why Is Mobile Application Testing Necessary?
The central goal of creating an app is to capture and address user’s need. Therefore, the success of a product depends on consumer’s opinions. In the brand environment, testers act like the in-house consumer. Different experts who participate in the development process, from developers to designers, depend on testers to critique their work. Therefore, companies look upon testers to standardize the quality of the final product that goes to the market, which determines the company’s image.
Still, most users weigh their choices from the reviews of previous users. Therefore, testing the product before every release remains the company’s only way of maintaining a stellar reputation. This make or break situation coupled with unique Mobile Application Testing challenges, put undue pressure on the testing community.
Let us talk about some of the these mobile application testing challenges and ways to mitigate them.
Delivering highest quality in ever-shrinking timeline
Companies have to stay competitive by making stable releases within short span of time. The consumers are all about user experience, and the app that delivers the best experience, bags the most users.
However, tight deadlines have a negative impact on the testers. Mobile Application Testing effectively requires a lot time to cover all the use cases. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that development eats into most of the release time due to the last minute urge to squeeze in that additional feature leaving even lesser time for testing. This forces the test teams to cut corners and it’s a very real problem.
So what is the solution – throw more bodies at the problem? I don’t think so. Mobile Application Testing Automation is the only solution. This allows your test team to focus on new features while letting the automation take care of regression tests. Bqurious Mobile Application Testing Automation Solution allows your manual testers to easily create automated tests.
Multitude of Mobile Devices
New mobile devices are launched almost every day. Each of these devices comes with a different screen size, different battery characteristics and even different hardware, depending on their target market segment. This adds to the challenge of ensuring optimal user experience to all target segment. It not only requires substantial time and effort to test the application across different devices but also requires a lot of money to maintain all the target mobile devices.
With the advent of affordable Cloud based mobile devices labs like Browserstack and Perfecto, companies now have a way to move their capital expenditure to operational expenses. However, this does not alleviate the need for time and effort.
Bqurious’ codeless Mobile Application Testing Automation Solution seamlessly integrates with these third party mobile device labs out of the box.
OS Fragmentation
Any organization worth its salt would have atleast two versions of the application – one for iOS and another for Android. Operating Systems upgrades have a high adoption rate, especially among IOS users. Android, on the other hand, takes longer. This causes a wide fragmentation of operating systems in the market. A tester needs to ensure that most versions on the market works well with their products. A rule of thumb is to support the top 80% currently in-use OS. This further adds to the challenge. Now, not only you need to support different hardware but also a different OS for that same hardware.
One way to address this is to use simulators and emulators. They perform well and do not have that great a cost. Bqurious Mobile Application Testing solution supports running your automation tests in parallel across multiple simulators and emulators. In addition, with Bqurious you can write a single test that supports both iOS and Android.
Different Mobile Application Types – Native, Web or Hybrid, TvOS
A mobile app can be a native app, a web app or a combination – hybrid app. Testing of each such app type is different than another as their implementation is quite different from one another. As we see each app behavior from installation to functionality is different from one another, we understand that their testing and test coverage will also be different.
For a web app or a hybrid app running on a mobile device, all the challenges of testing web application also need to be factored in. The most important being cross-browser inconsistencies. Therefore, testers must test for every browser independently.
Bqurious Mobile Application Testing Solution supports all the different types of mobile applications including TvOS out of the box.
Power Consumption or Battery Life
While the industry-wide trend is that battery life is on the rise over the past few years, the jump is not as dramatic as most people might expect or hope for. As battery life growth increases at a fairly slow pace, the trend in power consumption from ever-more-demanding applications is trouncing battery growth quite handily. As apps trend towards more demanding needs — such as higher quality video or face detection for attendance — the mobile hardware must chug along to keep up, and battery power is drained that much faster. Therefore, testers must test different power capacities to ensure a balance. This means a higher operational cost and more time allocation.
Network Compatibility
Network connectivity is something you can’t define based on presumptions. A user with 4G/3G connectivity might not always have sound connectivity. Also, there are good chances that your app users might be dependent on a 2G network. However, irrespective of the network conditions, user experience needs to be consistent. Test Teams, thus, have to test the mobile app on varying network conditions.
One solution to address this challenge is using crowdsourcing for your Mobile Application Testing. With Bqurious’ cloud based platform you can easily engage crowdsourced devices to run your tests from anywhere in the world.
Location Dependence
Another challenge for proper mobile application development is recognizing and handling the location-based information your application might need to utilize, depending on where the user is located. GPS systems are the most frequent user of such modern mobile features, but a wide range of applications now utilize location-dependent algorithms to provide real-time information about the user’s surroundings or provide alerts to other users of the same app nearby.
Testers should ensure that any location-dependent functionality is properly tested through simulation tools that emulate changes in location on the device itself or physically take a device to different locations and test the results.
With Bqurious’ Mobile Application Testing solution, you can easily set the required geo-location as part of your test.
Conclusion
An ideal way for organizations to address the above mentioned challenges is to use Mobile Application Testing Automation solutions like Bqurious coupled with third party device labs like Browserstack and Perfecto.