The growth of mobile technology is miraculous. Certainly, the hardware components have improved drastically over the years, but it’s the software that truly unleashes the potential of devices. To think of what’s really driving the incredible success of smartphones and tablets – it’s the application market. The mobile app market is projected to grow year on year.
QA departments are leaving no stone upturned to test apps properly before they are freshly baked. Testing for the mobile market is indeed a challenge. In the fast pace of software industry that’s constantly changing and growing a lot of unique problems and issues are propped up.
QA Challenges in Mobile Application Testing
The goal of any application testing exercise is to understand the quality and performance of features offered. However, some critical factors that make mobile testing a far greater challenge are:
1) Device Variation – The Biggest Mobile Testing Challenge
Mobile Application Testing is difficult due to compatibility issues as a mobile application can be deployed across devices that have different operating systems (iOs, Android etc), manufacturers (Samsung, HTC, Nokia etc) and keypad types (virtual keypad, hard keypad).
Further the team cannot be 100% sure if a tested application works well with a given device, it will run smoothly on the other device.
2) Tools Availability
As mobile testing is still in its infancy the tools at your disposal are limited when compared to traditional testing. There is an evolving arsenal of tools available for mobile testers who know where to find them. A complex scripting technique and new tool development is required for mobile app testing.
3) Network Bypass
The performance of a carrier’s network can have a huge impact on the user’s experience with an app. This is another factor beyond the hardware and software that, nevertheless, must be taken into consideration for testing scenarios.
4) Demand of skilled QA Specialists
A completely tested application is liable to be rejected by end users merely due to UI look and feel. The QA specialist need not only access the automation tools but also quickly identify the bugs as UI is critical in mobility. Look beyond the functional aspects of the app and consider end user usability.
5) Industry Standards
Mobile application testing must meet the industry standards for an application to be popular and globally accepted especially in this era of technology.
Recommendations on testing strategies
A practical approach: All the testers know that it’s impossible to cover every possible angle in testing. You can’t cover an exhaustive combination of all devices and OS versions, so it’s best to target the most important devices. Analyze what device has the biggest market share and focus on the OS version with the greatest penetration. Investigate what is popular with the demographic being targeted and you can extract more value from your testing.
The way we interact with touch screens is still evolving and clever user interface design is essential if you want to create an app that people can pick up and use intuitively. You need to cover interactions through virtual buttons, as well as hardware buttons. How is text input handled? What are the navigational workflows?
Avoid a solid base – Go for a fluid structure: Start out using emulators to identify bugs and functional problems. Later, you can move to real devices and possibly remotely accessed devices when you begin testing in real-world conditions and considering security and network impact.
You will validate the quality of the product primarily through functional and usability testing, but keep an alert check that new features may be dumped into the mix during development. Everything must be validated before it goes live. Keep a check on compatibility and the impact of upgrades.
Testing in the real-world: It is always advisable to test on real devices on real networks whenever required. This is important because end users may access application from an area where the network fluctuates. What happens when the network (3G or 2G) drops and you switch to Wi-Fi or vice versa? How does the app operate offline? You need to think about low-level resource usage and watch for buffering problems or garbage data generation.
The challenges of mobile testing are unique. They present you with tradeoffs that you need to consider and choices that you need to make about the mix-n-match of different techniques to be used in testing. The fact is that each testing choice you take up will have pros and cons associated with it and you will figure out that no one testing choice will completely satisfy you. Instead, you will need to consider a testing strategy that combines different testing options that together provide you with the best overall testing which as a result balances the transaction between cost, quality and time-to-market.
