From the first cell phone that came as a suitcase to the current pocket-sized smartphones, the world has certainly come a long way. While earlier mobile phones were just a means to call people, slowly, features were introduced like messaging, touchscreen, vibration mode, colour screen, 3G network, GPS, Bluetooth, and so on. This made mobiles the complete package they are today.
Currently, people use mobile phones for everything, whether video calling their families and friends across the country, watching a US-based TV show, playing games, shopping for products from a foreign country, or conducting a financial transaction without visiting the bank. All-in-all, mobiles are your personal assistants now!
But how has this been possible? A simple two-word answer to your question is a mobile application. According to Globe Newswire, the global mobile application market is expanding at a CAGR of 13.4% from 2022-2030 and is expected to touch the figure of $565.40 billion by 2030.
These stats clearly indicate the need for mobile applications by individuals. But the biggest worry as an organization is releasing apps that provide consistent quality and engaging mobile experience. It is where your mobile app testing strategy comes into play. A carefully planned mobile app testing strategy helps you to deliver functional applications, leading to low cases of uninstallations.
Do you want to master mobile application testing and achieve your business goals? Then, you are at the right place. This blog will provide a complete guide on creating effective mobile application testing to streamline your testing process.
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Test Strategy For Mobile Application Testing
Building an effective testing strategy has now become fundamental for companies to meet ever-changing user requirements and get a competitive edge in this cut-throat world. Here is how you can create an effective mobile app testing plan:
Understanding Risks and Challenges
The first and foremost thing to consider is the risks and challenges you can face during mobile app testing. These challenges must be addressed carefully to deliver an application that provides a steady experience to all users across all available platforms.
Here are the top two challenges faced by QA teams when they begin mobile application testing:
1. Device Fragmentation:
Device fragmentation refers to the differences in devices based on their operating systems, browsers, screen resolutions, and more. This makes it difficult for QA teams to ensure that their applications are compatible across a myriad of devices.
To overcome this issue, testing teams need to test on as many devices as possible to maintain their user base and not hamper the company’s growth potential.
For this, you can use a cloud-based real-device testing platform to test on actual phone hardware and software remotely. This enhances your device coverage while eliminating the hassle of maintaining in-house real devices.
2. Security:
With the exponential rise in online fraud, people have become more cautious when sharing their information on an app. If they find security loopholes in any application, they uninstall it without thinking twice.
Poorly encrypted apps are now a no-go for individuals as they leak their personal information, making them susceptible to hackers. You can overcome this by ensuring strong app encryption and extensive testing to safeguard your applications from security issues later on.
Selecting Your Mobile Device Mix
With so many mobile device manufacturers in the market right now, you cannot just test on popular devices like Apple and Samsung anymore. It is imperative that you include other famous brands like Huawei, OPPO, Vivo, OnePlus, and Xiaomi in your testing strategy as well.
How do you choose the right mix from so many brands? First, you should consider factors like the target users of your application. Collaborate with your marketing team and get data about your user’s region and the phone brand mostly used there. For example: If your audience is from densely populated Asian countries like India and China, brands like OPPO and Xiaomi should be on your list.
Next, select the right amount of mobile devices for testing. If you are going for manual testing, a small selection of 5-6 devices based on your target market is good for you. In the case of automated testing, you can choose a broader range of 25-30 devices based on your target market. We recommend that organizations opt for automated mobile app testing in their strategy.
Know The Type Of Mobile App Testing
Once you have decided on the device range, the next step is to know the major points you need to focus on. The following types of testing must be included in your mobile app testing strategy if you want to release flawless applications:
1. Functional Testing:
It ensures that your application works as designed by the team. It checks every app function so that there are no broken functionalities that can lead to crashes, freezes, or errors.
2Localization Testing:
To make your app universal, optimizing it for various languages, currencies, and locations is important to provide the best experience to people from different countries, ages, cultures, and languages.
3. UI/UX Testing:
The most important aspect of a mobile application is its user experience. With UI/UX testing, you check that your app is easy to navigate, every element is usable, and in line with the latest software updates in smartphones.
Apart from these testing, you should also focus on security testing, cross-platform testing, and performance testing.
Conduct Mobile Beta Testing
Since we have talked about user experience in the entire blog, how can we let you forget the beta testing of mobile applications? In beta testing, the mobile applications are released to the end user to perceive how they respond.
It helps the development team to unearth glitches not discovered by the internal stakeholders of the app. It provides an objective view to the teams that no other type of testing could ever give. Thus, it reduces the risks of calling back an application post-deployment due to unforeseen circumstances.
Choose The Right Testing Tool
Finally, it is time to choose the right automation testing tool to help the QA teams write and execute test cases efficiently. But with so many solutions in the market, it becomes difficult for teams to select the right tool for their mobile app testing strategy.
To solve this problem, consider the factors like organizational goals, future testing needs, the type of application you are developing, integration into your CI/CD pipeline, budget, community support, and other requirements like usability and speed.
Summing Up
By having a well-curated mobile application testing strategy, you are not only enhancing your app’s performance but also gaining your customer’s trust in your products. This will eventually lead to customer satisfaction and long-term use of your application, and the customers will also be willing to try any new applications you launch in the future.
While this might look like a far-fetched dream right now, we can assure you it is entirely possible when you have a robust and efficient mobile application testing platform to support your strategy.
Keeping this in mind, we highly recommend considering TestGrid, a trusted platform by most enterprises worldwide. This mobile application testing platform lets you test on hundreds of real devices on the cloud so that you can test real-world conditions like battery life and network strength and deliver reliable applications.
You can give your users the best experience as TestGrid finds and fixes bugs early in the process, avoiding the chances of crashes once the app is released.
