Mobile App Testing Guidelines

21 September 2021

Today, mobile applications became a primary business enablers for all industries across domains. These mobile apps are primarily used by users to perform various tasks such as online shopping, reading e-books, ticket booking, medicine orders, insurance payments, etc.

What is Mobile App Testing?

Mobile app testing is an essential step in mobile application development. The application testing process is the set of activities that are conducted by the software tester after the development process is done. In simple terms, we can say the application testing process is conducted to verify the quality, performance, compatibility, user-experience, and reliability of the application.

Different types of Mobile App Testing:

Testing is a most important process of SDLC. We need to test applications from a user point of view, below are the different types of Mobile app testing:

1. Installation testing: It’s successfully to check that the application successfully installed, uninstalled, updated, or not. We have to ensure that the mobile apps work as expected after installation.
2. Storage testing: It is a process that ensures that the application’s data is stored in a suitable format and the app does not terminate unexpectedly.
3. Functional testing: Functional testing verifies that all the app’s functionalities are working as expected or not.
4. Performance testing: The main focus of this test is to eliminate performance bottlenecks before the application goes live, it checks speed, responsiveness, operating capacity, scalability, and stability of the application under various workloads.
5. Usability testing: This type of testing combines functional testing with overall user experience. In this testing, the app is given to the users to perform tasks on the new application. The actions performed by the users are observed and based on the suggestions given by the user the necessary actions are taken up to improve the app’s usability.
6. Compatibility testing: End uses will use the apps on various devices with varying screen sizes in different networks. It is essential to test the app’s compatibility on various devices, platforms, OS, browsers and networks, etc.
7. Localization testing: The behavior of an application is tested for a specific region, locale. It is the process of customizing the application as per the targeted language and country.
8. Accessibility testing: It focuses on how a person accesses or takes benefits from application. Accessibility is an important part of designing your application and should be considered throughout the development process.

Steps involved in Mobile App Testing:

Mobile app testing process goes through below one-by-one step

1. Identify need and scope of the test:
   • In this step we need to prepare a testing strategy and determine what features and functionality have to be tested
   • We have to Identify the types of mobile app testing required, such as functional, usability, compatibility, performance, security, etc.
2. Plan the test:
   • In this step we have to determine how to test the app. Define an action plan and decide what type of tests to be conducted, who will execute the test, and at the timelines involved, We have to Prepare a test suite and write test cases for test modules
3. Execute the test:
   • Whenever new changes come into the app we need to execute the added Test cases and have to check all the functionality of the application.
4. Track and manage bugs/defects::
   • While executing the test cases reports the found defects in bug tracking tool, and prioritize the defects according to their severity level.
   • Log defects in the particular test case which is going to fail because of that defect.
5. Prepare test reports:
   • The last step is to review the entire testing process and prepare a test report. The test report should describe the devices and OS combinations tested, bugs identified, bugs resolved, passed and failed test cases, etc.

Common challenges with Mobile App Testing

1. Screen Sizes: The screen sizes of mobile devices is varying, such as for an iPhone6, iPhone 8 differs from android and some other smartphones. Mobile apps need end-to-end testing to ensure that the apps work properly on different screens. Testers have to check different layouts on different screen sizes.
2. OS Version Fragmentation: Nowadays numerous versions of the operating systems are available in the market. Testers have to test supportive each combination of OS version and device to ensure that the app acts correctly across all OS versions. Most of the time the app does not work correctly on the older version of the OS.

How to overcome Above challenges?

Testing using a combination of different OS and devices, We (testers) need to test application on each combination of OS and devices to ensure that the app performs correctly across all OS versions to overcome OS fragmentation. Best way to do this is first to identify the most common devices and supporting OS versions of the app and testing them on a priority basis.