Best Practices For Testing Mobile Apps

We live in the Smartphone age, where a business execution starts with mobiles and ends with mobiles. There is a lot of scope in mobile app development, yet many businesses do not use it because they feel that apps fail to earn the value that they desire.

This dissatisfaction among business owners is due to mobile app developers who sidestep mobile app testing, which is, in fact, a crucial step to surviving in this highly competitive market.

If your app does not work, users will not waste a single moment to uninstall it and switch to the next best app. So, here are a few suggestions to make your app testing and app deployment successful.

Testing Strategy

It helps you to lay down certain guidelines that all testers are expected to follow and brings uniformity in testing & ensures adequate test coverage.

Device Test 

You can choose a proper device for testing mobile apps by analyzing how the apps need to work, such as type of device app can be used, the earliest version of the OS that it can support, Screen size to integrate with apps, & popular device among the target audience.

If you do not possess the required number of devices, you should simulate the relevant parameters and run the tests accordingly.

Test on real devices

Testing on real devices ensures test results are realistic and provides you a better idea regarding the look & feel, including its general usability.

At the early stages of development, simulators and emulators are very much useful, but the application requires to be tested sufficiently on real devices too. 

Know your applications

Before you start the app testing, you must understand its functions and system structures. You should consult the documents and business ideas, including app architectures. Knowing your app in a better way will help you to identify the basic defects.

Start test on time

Please start testing while development has reached a logical stage and track the results of each test cycle, which will help you to identify the issues early before they become too costly to fix.

Proper usability and UI testing

Nowadays, many users prefer a Smartphone for using any application. So, the apps which a mobile app developer builds must be user-friendly and intuitive for the beginner as well as experienced users.

Some platforms set their guidelines against which you have to build your application UI to make it more integrative. Such as Apple has its UI guidelines and rejects apps if they fail to meet its usability criteria.

This is why iOS apps come with the same look and feel, which is due to the strict guidelines of apple. So you have to make sure to include usability and UI testing in your plans for ensuring your app success among all kinds of audiences.  

Set device and OS preferences

You should determine upfront which devices and OS your app will specifically cater to and perform QA on them. It might be virtually impossible to test exhaustively on all devices, OS & network combinations.

Functional testing

Testing your application on different platforms of verifying screen sizes is important to make sure that an app has a consistent look and feel.

You should give more importance to functional testing and test your app on the most popular device used by the target audience. Also, make sure that you have covered all the specifications & have performed the test for all kinds of different platforms.

In the end, don't forget to find out any major functionality defect in your application, and if it does, make sure that you fix those issues first.  

Automate testing

Automation helps you to reduce market time & generates high ROI besides giving the benefits of repeatable testing, but an important factor to keep in mind is the daily maintenance of the test automation suite. 

Real-time environments

 The concern for the real-time environments will make your mobile app testing stand out from the traditional testing. You must include the specific conditions in your test plan such as different time zones and GPS locations, unstable network connections, modification in sound & notifications, interruptions caused by SMSs, alarm and low battery warnings.

Adequate performance and security testing

Security testing will make your app robust and can prevent financial liabilities arising from user distress.

For a better application performance, you should check for known and unknown vulnerabilities, including those arising from a third party and open-source software packages. 

The app developers must take into consideration for battery, disk space, & processing power while testing mobile applications.

Mobile app testing is not just a phase of the app development process. It is a complete road-map to app success. The majority of problems that your app may face in the future can be addressed beforehand with successful app testing.