Short Lesson on the Importance of Mobile Application Testing
Nowadays, smartphones are becoming more an increasingly important part of our life. Modern devices successfully replaced communicators, organizers, GPS navigators, photo cameras, music players and many other important gadgets, by simply combining all their capabilities in one compact, powerful device.
Mobile devices impact our business and everyday life. But our smart devices are just useless multimedia toys with bright screens, and their main power is applications.
Mobile applications are basic elements that bring sense to your smartphone. They make our gadgets satisfy our needs and wants. Bad quality undermines the marketing. Applications that are not tested well, with obvious bugs uploaded to Google Play or App store markets, will cause user’s indignation, low ratings, unsatisfied comments and a decrease in use, which would result in loss of market share to competition.
That is why mobile app testing services are a very important part of mobile application development which would help to avoid such troubles.
What is a hot point of mobile testing application?
The quality of mobile application depends on its type, as well as the main features and abilities.
A product could be either a simple app with 1-2 screens or a very complicated program with system integration and additional requests to location, camera, network or accelerometer. So it would require different ways of testing and would lead to more time-consuming tests.
The second main factor is the OS. It is very important to understand that, in spite of platforms being similar today, they still have key features and platform guidelines which should be followed.
Nevertheless, the applications that work on mobile devices have a few basic differences that are important to emphasize:
- Native apps – a native application that is created for use on platforms like mobile and tablets.
- Mobile web apps – server-side apps that access websites on a mobile device, using different browsers like Chrome or Firefox, by connecting to a mobile network or a wireless network like Wi-Fi.
- Hybrid apps are combinations of native and web apps. They run on devices or offline and are written using web technologies like HTML5 and CSS.
Mobile applications testing is more challenging than desktop testing. Here are some main differences:
- Great range of smartphones and tablets with different screen sizes and resolutions, different hardware configurations.
- Different mobile operating systems, such as Android, Windows phone, IOS.
- Different versions of operating system, such as Android 4.2,4.4, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 7.1 or iOS iOS 9.3.5, iOS 10.0, iOS 10.3.1, etc.
Among the great variety of mobile testing, most important types could be categorized as follows:
Functional Testing ensures that the application is working according to requirements (and specifications?).
Performance Testing – is the process of checking the application’s behavior under certain conditions such as low battery, bad network coverage, low available memory in your device, and other similar conditions.
Interrupt Testing: during application’s performance, it would definitely face some suspend events such as:
- Incoming and Outgoing SMS/MMS or calls.
- Incoming Notifications from system or other apps.
- Battery Removal.
- Cable Insertion/Removal for data transfer or charging.
- Network switch or its total loss.
- Media Player on/off.
Usability testing is one of the most important parts of mobile testing, as mentioned above, which checks not only platform guidelines, but also the convenience and comfort of using an app.
Installation testing is the component that should also be checked thoroughly since it includes app installation from a particular store, app update, and removal. Since different devices may have different versions of hardware and operating systems, installation problems may be caused, data could be lost during an update or some files may not be deleted from the device after application uninstallation.
Therefore, mobile testing is not only important but is definitely a critical part of the development.
Author: Maxym Rudenko