As a tester there are various instances when you are under pressure. Moreover, pointing out mistakes and making someone to repeat his job can also make you the most disliked person in the team. It might not be pleasant for someone who has developed the application; however, it’s a necessary step.
So, to be the best tester you should be ready, prepared, and capable. Today, testing mobile application performance is utterly important in the software industry. While testing such applications for performance, you must be careful and should avoid the following mistakes.
Irregular regression testing
Problem: A tester often focuses much on new tests during the development process at the cost of regression testing. Since regression tests are crucial to uncover the bugs, avoiding them can lead to performance related issues.
Best Practices: You must automate the regression testing to ensure regression tests run on a regular basis. This includes the tests and the communication process within the team.
Untimely use of a device or emulator
Problem: Testers sometimes rely too much on a device or emulator while testing mobile applications. By overusing emulators you will not get information related to network, bandwidth, and connectivity issues. Moreover, over-dependence on devices will not give a clear picture of the performance. In either of the case, you will be missing key information related to performance, quality, and user experience.
Best Practices: You need to balance the use of physical devices and emulation strategies to monitor the performance of your mobile application. This can be done by pairing an emulator with a load testing tool and using real devices in real carrier networks.
Avoiding users’ geographical location
Problem: Technically, users’ access the servers from different location across the globe with a variation in bandwidth and download speeds, thus providing different experiences based on their location.
Best Practices: You need to create the most realistic testing scenarios or an accurate testing environment to simulate load from different geographies. Moreover, the understanding of geo-realistic testing scenario could also be of great help.
Delaying the front end test of the application
Problem: In the initial phase of application development, testers focus more on functional testing rather than performance testing, as the front-end is built after the back-end is ready. This leads to a disastrous situation where the problems are likely to be missed.
Best Practices: The best way to start load testing early is to build tests that interface directly with the back end and then simulate your front end. For best results, you can build test scenarios using web service and an API to test performance and load.
Isolating the front-end for testing
Problem: Though end-user experience comprises of the behavior of front-end, back-end, and communication patterns, testers often miss the end-user experience by focusing on the front-end.
Best Practices: You should set up full-path tests, including both the front and back ends. It includes considering the round trip time, rendering time, packet loss, and other metrics.
Working externally from the code-base
Problem: Since, most testers remain unaware of the internal code, building a test suite without knowing how the code works could make you miss crucial issues.
Best Practices: You can work closely with the developers to identify the areas that must be tested based on their built. By communicating regularly with the development team, you can get away with the fear of the code-base.
The above-mentioned mistakes can be easily avoided if you know what is to be done. To be a good tester, take initiatives, early and often, and fix problems as they come.
