Testing Strategies and Tactics for Mobile Applications

With the constant increasing in the adoption of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, the growth of mobile applications has been increased in the recent years.

Across the world, mobile devices have become the key medium of interaction for consumers and businesses whereas mobile applications are pouring these interactions.

In addition to this, mobile applications have put the business operations in the hands of the consumers and apps are truly running businesses and influencing the business decisions. To make mobile app compelling and bug-free, mobile app testing plays a significant role that ensures your consumers have a positive and interactive experience whenever they use your mobile apps.

It is important for you that you make sure the experience is a great one for every consumer whenever they are using your application, beginning with every first time. In any case, if you fail to do a good job app testing, it will result that your customers are doing it.

Not like your testing team, your customers do not have the right tools to report back the issues that your app might have. If your customers find any problem or issue in your app, they will never come back.

It is true that your developer has done a wonderful job, but instead of finding errors or bugs, you can comprehend the quality of your application. Talking about mobile app testing, it presents exceptional challenges.

However, there are choices that you need to make regarding different techniques and strategies for mobile application testing. Every single testing method has its own features and benefits, and you will realize that there is not a single testing method that is fully satisfying. Instead of it, you can consider a testing strategy that will combines different testing options as one.

Here, we have mentioned different testing strategies and tactics for mobile applications that you can check out and opt for:

Web Applications

Similar like the web, a mobile web application is viewable and accessible by users across the world. Though if you are targeting only users in a single country or a single network it will help you to comprehend worldwide dynamic.

Considering a consistent web application approach in mind, it decreases the need of developing multiple code lines based on operating system. At the time of testing both native as well as mobile web apps, you will face a lot of challenges.

However, you need to understand the nature of every challenge, an exploration to manage issues and alleviate risk is done on different technology options. Introducing right solutions needs a valuation of the advantages and disadvantages inherent to each of the testing options obtainable to you and decisive the technology, which suits wonderfully your app testing requirements.

Native Applications

Today, mobile apps have become the identical with native applications and hybrid applications for many people worldwide. These apps are mainly downloaded from an app store and give users a rich user experience, maximizing the capabilities of the device and operating systems.

Often the app download is controlled by the gate-keeping app store with different devices in place to charge potential consumers. Within the development community, the simple yet effective monetization model has fueled app popularity. They also enable enterprises to serve productivity tools to a progressively mobile workforce.

Whereas native applications can also serve a unique experience to the user and probably a lucrative one for the developer – they also add some complexity to the lives of those tasked with testing them.

Talking about the testing, it needs to regulate whether the application can be successfully downloaded to the device, executed on the device, and interact with supporting back-end content infrastructure. Moreover, it is essential that you become sure about the application as it can be pushed out to and accepted by the end user when updates are made.

A lot of people have confusion that testing of app’s functionality on one device gives an assurance across all others of the same operating system. As native applications are fundamentally tied to the hardware and operating systems for which they are written. It is also important to test on the physical devices supported by your application so that you can face challenge of testing for native apps.

Network – Considered as a Regional Challenge

Around the world, there are 400+ mobile network operators, and each mobile operator may support varied network technologies, including CDMA, LTE, GSM, and some are using less common or local networking standards like iDEN, FOMA, and TD-SCDMA.

Every single network has its own collection of network infrastructure, which channels the packet-based protocols used by mobile networks into TCP-IP protocols used by the mobile web. Moreover, these network operators have also executed different systems, which behave different from vendor to vendor to perform the needed tunneling.

There are various mobile network operators that have implanted mobile web proxies to command how, when and if you can connect to a website. It will restrict the flow of information, which goes between your server and the test client whenever a network operator implements a mobile web proxy.

However, some proxies also restrict the websites that can be accessed through a phone to only those approved by the operator. Rest of the proxies use transcoding to cut back fixed web content to better fit into mobile phones.

As you know that the network challenge is quite difficult, so it is not possible to discuss the network challenge without talking about the location. You need to be connected to the target network to completely test the full network stack on an operator’s network infrastructure.

Well, the challenge can be made more complex by the reality that the radio signals are not strong on cellular networks; therefore, you might be together to a cell connected to the operator’s core network to run your test.

Devices – A Biggest Mobile Testing Challenge

All those mobile devices that utilized by consumers create the most realistic challenge to mobile testing. Possibly, thousands of client devices could be used to access your mobile app or website, and they must thus all be considered when testing your mobile apps.

You can also sacrifice coverage across multiple devices and OS combinations to an extent; however, when you reduce the number of devices types that you test against. You can handle the device challenge with three different options, including you can test exclusively using real device, you can test with emulated devices or you can also use a combination of both.

The devices that are real have the benefit of having all the limitations that are obtainable in the actual client operating, hardware and firmware combination that are utilized by the target consumers. Well, it is true that testing with the real devices can be quite expensive as it depends on how you are approaching it.

They are expensive to purchase and for those are the operator-subsidized prices that come only with a contract that has its own cost insinuations. Apart from this, emulated devices are a lot easier to manage, and you can switch device types by loading a new device profile and you can quickly have a new device, which will show itself to your native mobile app in the same way that the real device would.

As the emulators are running on more powerful PCs and different servers and were specially designed with testing in mind, they are completely instrumented to capture detailed diagnostics about the protocols, which go back and forth between client and server at the different levels of the heap.

At the time of testing when you see that an app has a problem you can have the information and thereby correct it. All those solutions that compete with mobile devices are affordable as a single platform with frequent updates of device profiles can be utilized to test every device on the market.

Advices to Adopt

Now, you have got much information about the challenges that are associated with mobile testing of native and web applications. But what’s the use of this information? What should be done with this information for mobile app testing?
There is not only one tool or a method that you should adopt as there are lots of tools and you need to use a combination of testing tools and techniques to meet your quality needs. Usually, you can narrow down your choices on the mentioned advices:

Invest in a Real Device Cloud: Many a time, you might face such situation where you wanted to test on a remote live network, but you don’t have the required device. You can have an account with one such vendor, which allows you to access remote real devices at anytime and anywhere. It is a wonderful tool you can use.

Take Benefit of a Device Emulator: As you know that emulated devices deliver a wonderful means of performing the huge testing in a great test environment wonderfully. You wanted to make use of your device emulator with different options like bypassing the network with the help of live network through moderns and a right scripting language, so you can look different features while selecting the process.

At the time of looking at device emulators for testing, you should ensure that they have the instrumentation and the network options to deliver you with the flexibility that you need. You also find out the emulator that whether it has the required diagnostics to isolate problems and the flexibility in network stacks required to test different network options.

So, these are the testing strategies and tactics for mobile application that you should adopt and make your application successful. However, if you are getting any difficulty while testing the mobile app, you can hire mobile app Development Company that has expertise in designing and developing a mobile app.

Sohel Ather

Sohel Ather is Digital Marketer and specializes in content marketing, Guest posting, community engagement and lead management strategy.