Mobile app testing is concerned with testing any application developed for mobile platform. There is a tremendous growth in the number of mobile applications available at our disposal. Mobile applications offer a great deal of flexibility in addressing our regular needs by simply downloading it on our mobile or tablet devices.
Mobile apps, as they are commonly referred to, has eased the process of handling our shopping needs, bill payments, money transfers and almost all sorts of activities which was otherwise a little cumbersome.
It's really a very interesting fact to think about the ways internet has conquered our lifestyles.
So summarising the broad concept of mobile testing, let us understand the ways to perform mobile testing.
Mobile App Testing Checklist:
The major activity to begin with mobile testing is preparation of a checklist. Following points typically comprises of the various ways mobile app testing can be performed.
Aligning business objectives with testing objectives - It is important to analyse the potential risks involved in case an approach goes wrong. The testing activities should be in the interest of the organisation.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is a concept that forms the basis for assessing the effectiveness of testing in the process of attaining the business objectives. KPI's could be - average requests per second, average request response time, maximum response time, maximum response time, average throughput and error rate. These indicators of performance should be well aligned with the goals to be achieved.
Working with the Codebase - Well the fact is very clear that for performing mobile testing and preparing test suites for the same, one must be well versed with the code structure of the application.
Prioritise Test Cases - A combination of various behavioural aspects using the KPI's must be used to perform testing. The emphasis is to verify whether the system is capable of handling the different kind of scenarios that may arise in a real world circumstance.
Load Testing - This testing aims to ensure that the system is capable of handling huge volume of data at any given point of time. Load Test must be carried out under realistic scenario to fetch the right results.
Device Simulation - To create a complete real world scenario during testing, one can resort to emulators. Emulators are devices that let us test a phone or tablet without the need to actually own it. The emulator must adhere to the basic policies of connecting devices such as the number of devices that must be connected at any given point of time.
Network Virtualization - The idea of this concept is to imitate the actual network connection used by a mobile device. It enables testing the device's actual performance during their real implementation and also to check the device's response to network characteristics.
Geographic Location - Now this criteria takes into account a device's performance at a certain geographic location. Hence testers create user profiles based on some historical data of the users.
End-user Experience Testing on Real Devices - The end user's feedback is important to find out the root cause of issues, if it exists, in mobile devices.
Testing in Production - Even after an intense testing process, it is not possible to claim 100% accuracy in an application. Often bugs reveal itself only when implemented in real world.
Platform Preference For Mobile App Development :
Preparation of a mobile application testing checklist also accounts for the choice of operating system to be considered for mobile app development. The rest of the checklist details largely depends on this choice. It is a significant decision in terms of the target users the application is intended to target.
We can recall the few widely used mobile OS, that are quite popular, in accordance with the degree of acceptance in the market.
Android
iOS
Windows (mobile)
Blackberry
Symbian
Now there are versions of each of the above mentioned platforms. A version must be selected on the basis of prevalence of the same in the current market scenario. That is, the one that offers the similar kind of benefits or features as its competitors. One can simply search for the most widely used operating system version on the web and get a concise statistic report for the version for a specific platform. For instance, Google provides statistics for Android versions, Apple provides statistics for iOS and so on.
Conclusion :
A checklist is a way to ensure we do not miss out on important factors. A tester can sort out or prioritise as to which task should be done first and then move towards lesser prone-to-defect issues.
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