Pro Tips to Ace Your Mobile App Testing Strategy

So you’ve finally started reviewing your mobile app and preparing your testing strategy. Your team has identified the bugs and you’re ready to start testing. It’s a great feeling, but not without its fair share of questions and concerns. Does the team have the right skills? What kind of testing will we need? Where should we start? If you’re like most testing professionals, you’ve wondered how to test your mobile app. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but you may be surprised at how many great resources already exist that can assist you in testing your mobile app strategy. Read on for our top 10 tips on how to test your mobile app.

Plan your testing strategy before you start

First things first: You should know why you’re testing your app. What are you trying to find out? Why are you collecting data? Not every app is good for business. Some are just a hobby that someone in your team enjoys. When you’re not sure what to test, you can start with a quick customer survey and see where it leads from there. Next, you’ll need to decide how you’ll test your app. You’re probably familiar with some of the most-used testing methods, but what about the lesser-known techniques? — Walk-throughs: During this type of testing, you and a tester walk through your app and look at specific areas. — Step-by-step: This method is all about collecting every possible data point in one specific step. — Event-based: This method relies on the idea that users will perform certain actions while your app is running.

Set up continuous integration tests

Continuous Integration (CI) is a unique approach to software development that lets you easily test new code as it’s added to the mainline. CI tools such as Jenkins, Azure pipeline, GitLab, and Travis CI make it easy to build, test, and deploy your code every time you push. Continuous Integration is generally considered to be one of the best practices in software development. CI testing has several advantages, including: — Early detection and correction of issues — In a CI environment, if a developer makes a mistake, they can quickly and easily correct it. Two types of tests should be candidates for CI tests, unit, and functional tests. Unit tests are fast so should be part of the build. Functional tests are slower and are a post-build activity, so the time taken to generate a new build is not dependent on ever-growing slow tests.

The right tool for the job

Don't evaluate lots of tools that the team will not be using. Recommended tools to be ready at all stages are a device farm like Sauce Labs, AWS, and BrowserStack. Device farms help in testing mobile apps across a wider range of real devices. The next recommended tool is Appium, there are more tools that can perform as well as Appium if not better but the recommendation for Appium is because of wider community support and easy integration with all the CI tools as well as with device farms.

Think about your unique business needs

Not all testing methods are right for all apps. And not all business needs are the same. It’s important to remember that what works for one mobile app may not work for another. It’s important to know your unique needs and how to effectively test those needs. For example, if your app is used to order restaurant food, you may want to focus on collecting information about the user’s eating habits and preferences. If, however, your app is used to schedule meetings, you may want to focus on identifying common navigation and issues with scheduling and canceling meetings.

Use Simple Tests

We’ve all been there: You’re excited to start testing your app and you’ve got a list of awesome ideas. But you don’t know where to start. How do you decide which tests to conduct first? Simple tests are the perfect solution to this problem. They’re a type of user-centered design review, and they’re easy to create. You just need some paper and a pen. You can use simple tests to identify common issues your users face while using your app. For example, you can use a simple test to find out what happens when a user tries to sign up for your app. Does the user get an error message? Do they see a sign-up form instead of a real account?

Empower User-Centred Testing

User-Centred Design Review is a type of simple test, but it’s also a type of user-centered design. This method is all about empowering your users to help you understand their problems and issues with your product. You can use this method to create a detailed feedback survey that gathers specific information about your users’ problems and frustrations with your app.

User-centered testing helps in understanding apps from the end user’s view point and sometimes its different than dev teams. This will enable testers to think about test scenarios which were not considered earlier.

Test your behaviors

Usability testing works great to identify common design problems. But it can also help you identify some of the most interesting user behaviors. You can use feedback from these tests to help your team understand their users and their navigation preferences.

But what about the extreme behaviors? What about the behaviors that are so unexpected or out of the ordinary that you might not even know what to do with them? For example, what happens when a user opens your app after hours of inactivity? Or when a user has a poor internet connection? What happens when a user tries to open your app from an unusual location? How the app will respond if device orientation is changed during app use?

Ensure there is sufficient coverage for behaviors. With ever-changing technology used in mobile development, you can never depend on build toolsets to ensure behaviors will not change say for example after an upgrade of the development platform version.

PS: Not everything can be automated.

Test your core features first

We’ve already discussed how you can use the User-Centred testing method to identify design problems. But what about your core features? What about the most important parts of your app? This is another commonly-used testing method. You can use this method to test your product’s ease of use and your app’s performance. You can also use this method to test your product’s ease of use and your app’s performance. You can also use this method to test your product’s ease of use and your app’s performance.

Summary

When working with mobile applications, there’s a constant hunt for ways to improve the user experience and reduce the number of cases of user rejection. From a quality perspective, the main challenge is to find and test the most critical user interactions. In this article, you learned about the importance of testing and the most important strategies to improve the test coverage and reduce the time to test your application.