A lot of non-IT folks are aware of mobile application development but very few know about the nitty-gritties of mobile testing. With mobile apps growing in demand every day, testing has assumed even greater significance. Mobile testing essentially means testing of mobile apps to ensure that they deliver a seamless experience to end users.
The important elements while testing mobile apps are almost the same as web applications. It includes:
- Usability testing
- Functionality testing
- Performance testing
- Security testing
- Compatibility testing
While mobile testing may sound easy, it comes with its own unique challenges. It is quite difficult to perform mobile testing since testers have to take care of different factors such as mobile devices with different screen sizes, OS platforms, versions and networks, among others. It is also a time consuming process since you have to test the mobile app on different devices. If you test the app for limited mobile devices, there is a chance that the application may not work in the desired way for certain customers. This is done through actual testing on real devices or on emulated devices.
Performance testing is a major area and should be preferably done on a slower network like 2G. This is because if the application works well with a slower network, it is likely to perform well on faster networks like 3G, 4G or WIFI. Again, the performance of the application may vary from device to device.
During mobile testing, you should check for battery consumption, disk space, data consumption, processing power the app requires, crashes and performance while other applications are open in the background. For native apps, you have to ensure that if any updates are made, then updated applications should be pushed out quickly so that end users can access the updated app. Some users opt for automatic updates while some prefer manual updates. You should make sure that the updates of the application are sent out through a message.
While the field of testing does offer some challenges, it also offers interesting problems to work on. There are some tried and tested strategies such as using emulated devices, real device cloud and automation, among others. There are also useful tools available such as Appium, Calabash, Monkeytalk, UI automater which make the lives of testers easy. We will look at some of these strategies and tools in the upcoming blogs.
References:
http://blog.smartbear.com/mobile/tips-for-strategizing-your-mobile-app-testing/
http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/beginners-guide-to-mobile-application-testing/
