What to Test in a Mobile Application?

Users' expectations from a mobile application have grown as they did in the past. Default test mode for a mobile application has shifted to native and back ends to microservices. Cellular network coverage has expanded, both Android and iOS operating systems deliver the application. Over the years, the applications have changed, and with that types of defects change too. A tester needs to know what to test in a mobile application and what not.

Test component reliability

Mobile applications don't exist in a closed ecosystem. For example, a mobile app will require microservices that validate login credentials, and these are validated by a subsystem, such as a catalog or a checkout. A quality assurance professional can independently test these requests with unit tests or service level tests. A tester needs to test each component to make them reliable, because if the dependencies are slow or unreliable they will impact the system too.

When there is an issue where the development team believes that the software performs correctly, but another team says it's not. In this situation, the testing team or consumer-driven microservices testing solves this issue. A tester will use and test how a system calls a service to create a test for the provider. When these tests are performed continuously on a CI/CD loop and catch the exact point to break build in production.

Mobile failure modes

Many issues and challenges are associated with a mobile device rather than a laptop or desktop computer. Such as, when you tilt a mobile phone this will change the app in landscape form and look while there is no similar such issue in laptop or desktop computer. A user on the mobile device can face these issues every day like an interruption in-app notification, loss of network connection. 

App and device simulation

Once a tester identifies what to test in a mobile application it's time to find out the tools to facilitate testing. There are automated testing tools that can simulate a slow network, inject different values into the GPS or check the packet loss on the network. Web browsers like Chrome and Firefox both have layout simulators for mobile. There Web browsers Chrome and Firefox both have mobile layouts. There are emulators for iPhone and Android that can be used to drive the UI of emulation, generally through code.

Continuous and synthetic monitoring

Meantime to identify an issue and mean time to recover are two metrics that are used to reflect how long it takes a quality assurance team to detect an issue. This can be used as a KPI to measure how well the IT team is responding to the defects and how programmers, architects, and testers collaborate to fix them. DevOps is a way to respond to mobile app issues and can continue monitoring with reporting and alerts on errors in the system. There is another way where a tester can run synthetic transactions. End-to-end user actions like login, search, add to cart, and checkout.

Importance of mobile app testing

To understand the importance of mobile app testing services, we first need to understand how a user decides to download an app for a particular purpose? A decade earlier, there could be different opinions depending on the personal choice and whatnot, but today it all depends upon two things - 

• Ratings
• Reviews

Daily millions of smartphones install new mobile applications and based on their personal experience with the application shares their reviews and ratings. This increases the importance of QA and mobile app testing than ever before. A QA needs to test a mobile app compatible with different operating systems, screen sizes, functionality, and other aspects of the app during the software development process. Testing ensures that the user enjoys the app without any issues and quick resolution of bugs make sure that nobody uninstalls the application making testing essential for the app's survival.

Approaches to Mobile Application Testing

When it comes to mobile app testing there are two different approaches based on how they perform. These two different approaches are manual testing and automation testing.

Manual Testing

As the name suggests, manual testing is a human process focused on user experience. To ensure that your application lives up to expected standards, the analysis, and evaluation of mobile app functionality, security, usability are done by the tester manually. Manual testing is time-consuming as it takes more time to recognize bugs. So, to speed up the process a QA tests 20% of the application is tested manually with the help of alpha and beta releases, while the rest of the process is automated.

Automated Testing

The next approach for testing a mobile application is automated testing. In automated testing, 80% of the process is tested with automation, however, this is not a general rule while testing an application. A tester automates the test cases and lets the computer handle assigned testing tasks. Here is a list of test cases that are generally performed through test automation:

• tedious manual test cases.
• cases that are easy to automate
• automating frequently used functionality
• automating predictable test cases

Automation testing advantages

Automate Software Testing is used to test mobile applications as they offer various advantages over manual testing. Here are some advantages that come along with testing a mobile application testing - 

• increasing test efficiency
• enhances the execution of regression test cases.
• time-saving by executing more test cases.
• same test scripts can be used again
• allows scripts to run parallel on multiple devices.

With this, we end this 'what to test on a mobile application' blog to end. Have any query related to 'mobile app testing' share with us in the comment section and we will try to answer your queries.