What is Mobile testing? The perfect approach
The digital landscape is constantly evolving and quickly moving towards a mobile-centric ecosystem. Mobile devices have become a primary tool for communication, shopping, entertainment, and more. Mobile apps need to offer unmatched functionality and performance – which puts mobile testing into the spotlight.
Businesses need to put mobile testing at the center of their testing strategy in order to maintain a competitive edge. Only then will they be able to cater to today’s mobile-savvy audience with confidence.
What is Mobile Testing?
Mobile testing is a software testing type that tests mobile applications for usability, functionality, and performance. Using manual or automated testing tools and techniques, it enables organizations to verify if their mobile applications work as intended and meet the needs of end-users.
Types of Mobile Testing
There are several types of mobile app testing to ensure that mobile apps meet requirements. They include availability, scalability, functionality, and security.
Let’s look at some of them:
Functional testing
It involves testing every function of an app, including user flows and every feature that comprises the user flows. Such testing ensures that the apps function flawlessly, offer a robust user interface, and work seamlessly across different platforms. Functional testing confirms whether app installs, launches and performs with the appropriate functionality. It basically checks if users can easily log in, icons function correctly, and notifications and transactions happen as intended.
Performance testing
It lets testers verify how mobile apps behave in a low or no internet environment and under extra load. It also ensures that the apps function correctly in extreme conditions. Performance testing makes it easy to check the app’s load time, battery and memory consumption, speed of data transfer, and recovery capabilities.
Usability testing
It allows testers to test mobile apps for their user-friendliness: from the ease of use to the degree of intuitiveness. Such testing ensures a seamless and bug-free user experience. It involves testing the app with real customers on real devices. Through usability testing, testers check for the layout and design of the mobile app. Also ensuring they are both smooth and visually appealing to end-users and offer a quick response time.
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How to Perform Mobile Automation Testing
Since mobile device testing presents unique challenges, testers need to keep up with new mobile OS updates, configurations, features, application frameworks, and more. Instead of manually testing complex devices, using mobile automation to test the performance and function of the app is a more efficient method.
While performing mobile automation testing, here are some things to keep in mind:
- Before embarking on the mobile automation testing journey, make sure to understand your end-users and their requirements thoroughly.
- Since test strategies will be different for different apps, choose frameworks based on the app’s platform—native, web-based, or hybrid.
- Build test cases that allow you to test mobile apps end-to-end: from functionality and load to performance, security, user-friendliness, and more.
- Embrace cloud-based device management platforms to test mobile apps on more devices instead of physically maintaining an entire inventory of mobile devices.
- It’s essential to invest time and effort in refining and optimizing your mobile automation testing strategies. Constantly incorporate user feedback for the best experience possible.
How is Mobile Testing Different from Web Testing?
Mobile App Testing is very different from testing a web app. Mobile apps are harder to test primarily because of the various elements that make up today’s complex mobile apps. Although testing mobile is similar to web testing in many ways, it also differs across multiple factors:
Mobile Vs Web Testing
- Mobile apps need to be tested on a wider range of devices and should function across different channels. However, their reliability stands in contrast to that of web applications.
- For mobile apps, testing procedures must be applied across various environments, conditions, and configurations. It requires the adoption of different testing methods.
- Unlike web apps, mobile apps have to be tested using real users and real devices. This ensures that the app meets the needs of real-world users.
- Since mobile app users use gestures like scrolling, zooming, and pinching, it is necessary to perform mobile app testing for their workflows and gestures.
- With mobile apps ranging from mobile web apps, native apps, and hybrid apps, testers need to test them for compatibility issues across different devices and operating systems. This includes tablets, smartwatches, and fitness trackers.
- At the same time, mobile apps bring about several technical challenges such as storage and RAM limitations, a wider variety of interactions, different application types, and behavior with and without connectivity. Each of these has to be dealt with uniquely.
Mobile Test Automation Frameworks for Different Apps
To stay competitive, many companies are adopting modern mobile automation testing frameworks. This allows them to quickly and efficiently test their apps for bugs and other issues.
Here are three mobile testing frameworks you can use:
- As a cross-platform, cross-technology mobile UI testing framework, Appium is a great framework for testing native, hybrid, and mobile web apps. Organizations can use this platform to run tests on both Android and iOS devices while writing just one test script in any WebDriver-compatible language such as Java, C, or JavaScript.
- Selenium-based test automation frameworks like Selendroid allow testing on Android devices – including emulators and real devices. They help accelerate the mobile device testing process. Moreover, they can also be integrated into the Selenium Grid for scalability testing.
- The Robot Framework makes mobile test automation independent of operating systems and applications a generic automation framework designed for web and mobile apps. This framework automates Linux, Windows, Mac, and other applications that are written in popular programming languages like Python or Java.
Final Thoughts
The constant explosion of mobile devices with varied configurations requires mobile apps testing for performance, functionality, security, and overall usability. No matter what your target user or their device type is. To provide the best user experience on mobile, test should be your priority. It can go a long way in ensuring that the mobile app experience you offer to users is seamless, consistent, and secure.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the purpose of mobile testing?
Mobile app testing enables the verification of an app's appearance, functionality, and performance on a variety of devices. Apps that are optimized for popular mobile-OS configurations among their target market enable smooth user experiences across all platforms and devices.
Is mobile testing in demand?
According to Grandview Research, the mobile application industry is rapidly growing on a day-to-day basis and expected to reach USD 170.52 billion in 2020. Along with this growth, mobile testers have become one of the most demanded talents.
What are the challenges faced in mobile testing?
Device Fragmentation The largest problem the app development team is trying to solve is device fragmentation. It alludes to an application running on a variety of hardware and operating systems. Here, the QA teams must test compatibility across multiple OSs.
What is meant by mobile testing?
Mobile testing is a software testing type that tests mobile applications for usability, functionality, and performance. Using manual or automated testing tools and techniques, it enables organizations to verify if their mobile applications work as intended and meet the needs of end-users.
What are types of mobile testing?
There are several types of mobile app testing to ensure that mobile apps meet requirements. They include availability, scalability, functionality, and security.
GEOSLEY ANDRADES
Director, Product Evangelist at ACCELQ.
