CHAPTER 7

Mobile Application Testing

Here we will discuss “What is mobile app testing?” and “Why is mobile application testing important?”

You will get to know “How Does Mobile App Testing Work?” and “What Can You Test In Your Mobile App?”

Mobile Application Testing

The number of enterprise and consumer applications has grown in these recent years, facilitating users to choose over a wide range of mobile apps.

But mobile app testing is required to keep the users’ using your mobile app and retain a user for a long time. This is because you always need to make your app up to the mark for the users, and you can do it by iterating app testing.

So let’s start by understanding what mobile app testing is.

What is mobile app testing?

Mobile app testing allows you to provide fantastic software applications. App Testing helps your app succeed by testing its usability, functionality, and stability while increasing your user base.

Mobile application testing is a type of A/B testing in which different user sections are given various types of in-application experience.

Developers have to figure out which testing aspect leaves the positive effect on the application key metric and inspires the desired action from the user point of view.

One of the significant differences between mobile app testing and standard A / B testing is that mobile application testing is implemented on the server side, not on the client-side.

Learn more about Top 10 Tools and Rules for Mobile App A/B Testing

Why is mobile application testing necessary?

Why is mobile application testing necessary?

It’s true that when there is an optimum number of downloads of your app, it ultimately increases the opportunities for your business.

  You want to expand your business, and for that, keeping a close analysis of regular and new users coming to your app is mandatory.

  Mobile app testing is the best practice to get accurate reports on gross app traffic and users' behavior.

  This technique is one of the best to check the user’s interest in an app.

  Here are the top 3 benefits of mobile app testing:

1. Optimize In-App Experiences
When it comes to analyzing the performance of an app, in-app engagement is considered the deciding factor. You can improve it by generating ideas for mobile app testing.

The test will ensure that you continuously have the solutions to make your in-app experience more comfortable.

2. Mobile app testing ensures an increased conversion rate
With the help of mobile application testing, you can attract users and convert them into buyers.

In A/B testing, you run different tests in which two different mobile app versions are compared for quality and performance parameters.

3. Mobile app testing helps in reducing the bouncing rate of apps
It feels awful when your users jump to other pages without looking at your app or spending time with it.

Mobile app testing reduces this risk of bounce rate because it helps businesses or developers to analyze, discover, and fix the issues to provide the best user experience.

To deeply understand the concept, you need to know how mobile app testing works.

How Does Mobile App Testing Works?

Mobile testing is done in several stages that are given below:

1. Documentation Testing

• A developer needs to inspect the requirements for completeness and discrepancy in documentation testing.
  
• Whatever discrepancies are found at the documentation testing stage must be resolved before development begins.

2. Performance Testing

• Performance Testing ensures that the app performs as per the expected performance requirements within the various load circumstances.
• Performance testing determines whether the present network coverage supports applications at minimum, average, and peak user levels.

3. Functional Testing
It helps a developer test whether mobile application functions work according to the defined specifications.
When performing functional testing for your application, remember the critical elements like Business functionality, Target audience, and Distribution channels.

4. Usability Testing
Usability testing guarantees that your application gives easy browsing to your users and makes an attractive user interface that follows industry standards.
Usability testing also provides easy-to-use and fast applications.
This test confirms that the application is terminated from different states and verifies whether it reopens in the same country.

5. Security Testing
Security testing is done to validate networking and application data security and whether they meet the guidelines.
This test verifies if an application does not allow hackers to access functionality or sensitive content without proper authentication.
Security testing ensures that the password protection of the application is robust.
There are many more features of mobile testing that you can understand in detail in this research paper, “Mobile Application Testing: A Tutorial.”
We have understood how mobile app testing works, but do you know what elements you can test in a mobile app are?

What Can You Test In Your Mobile App?

You can test in-app experiences, user flow, push notification, features, and mobile application functionalities.

Mobile App Testing Checklist

In-App Experiences

• Messaging: Message is one of the things that will either make or break the user experience.
  You can run tests on popups or in-app prompts to ensure that the correct message is delivered to the users at the proper time.
  
• Layout: The layout of your mobile application is the first impression that users have about your app or brand.
  Strictly testing your mobile application layout can be quite beneficial as it will help you understand your users and how they like to interact with the application's design.

User Flow

• Onboarding Flow: A perfect application flow is vital to provide the best user experience. For this, you need to make sure that the onboarding process is running smoothly.
  
• Subscription Flow: You also need to ensure that your subscription flow is flawless, and users can easily make the payment of the service or product they have selected.

Push Notification

You need to ensure that your push notification's timing, copy, and frequency are as per requirement. All these factors are essential for the success of your app campaign.

Push Notification

• Apart from UI testing, it is also necessary to test the functionality and features of mobile applications.
  
• Testing functions and features help fix the bugs, segment the user base and continuously roll out the features.

In this manner, mobile application testing helps businesses streamline the whole function of a mobile app and increases conversion rates.

To know more about quality testing, you can refer to the “DIY Quality Assurance Checklist For Your Web Application – A QA Testing Guide For Business Owners.”

What are the tools used for mobile testing?

The tools we will discuss here are useful and can make the mobile application testing process easier.

Top 5 mobile app testing tools:

1. Calabash

The number of enterprise and consumer applications has grown in these recent years, facilitating users to choose over a wide range of mobile apps.

But mobile app testing is required to keep the users’ using your mobile app and retain a user for a long time. This is because you always need to make your app up to the mark for the users, and you can do it by iterating app testing.

1. Calabash

The number of enterprise and consumer applications has grown in these recent years, facilitating users to choose over a wide range of mobile apps.

But mobile app testing is required to keep the users’ using your mobile app and retain a user for a long time. This is because you always need to make your app up to the mark for the users, and you can do it by iterating app testing.

1. Calabash

Calabash is an open-source testing tool that enables developers to write and conduct Android and iOS applications tests.

Calabash is an automated acceptance testing tool that Xamarin supports.

It has two different libraries for Android and iOS that helps test both hybrid and native applications.

It works with Java, Ruby, Flex, .NET, and many other languages.

Know more about Calabash.

2. SmartBear (TestComplete Mobile)

With SmartBear’s TestComplete Mobile, you can build and run robust and repetitive UI tests in hybrid and native mobile applications.

TestComplete provides support for both iOS and Android devices.

You can automate the tasks of UI with TestComplete, and user scenarios by using replays or script-free records on emulators and real devices

Also, by creating automated scripts in languages, such as VBScript, Python, JavaScript, and JScript, you can automate your tasks.

Know more features of SartBear’s TestComplete Mobile.

3. WebLOAD

WebLOAD is a testing tool that provides a powerful performance. Fortune 500 teams use WebLoad to validate complex systems under stress and pinpoint problems.

WebLOAD is a combined tool to conduct performance testing, load testing, and stress testing of web applications.

Load testing tool combines scalability, performance, and integrity as a single process for testing mobile and web applications.

If you want to know about WebLOAD’s solutions and features in detail, then check “WebLOAD.”

4. Experitest (SeeTest Continuous Testing Platform)

The tool executes several automated and manual tests parallel to more than a thousand Android and iOS devices in the cloud.

With this tool, you can make Appium tests effectively from your IDE. Also, you can experience live bugging and real-time testing and simultaneously get access to advanced analytics and visual test reports.

Quickly run the Selenium test and automate your cross-browser testing on more than a thousand browsers types and operating systems using this testing tool.

Know more about Experitest.

5. Testdroid by BitBar

Testdroid is the most flexible mobile app testing solution based on the cloud.

You can use any framework to run automated or manual tests on thousands of devices.

With unlimited users and concurrency, you adapt natively to your existing CI/CD processes and tools.

To know more features and services, you can check “BitBar.”

Going through the above mobile app testing aspects might seem easy to digest and implement, but some challenges often restrict developers from accomplishing the app testing task.

What are the significant mobile app testing challenges?

Most organizations either don't have time or don't have the proper tools for testing mobile applications.

There are various real-time challenges to conducting mobile app testing. Here, we will discuss three significant real-time challenges of app testing.

Top 3 Real-Time Mobile App Testing Challenges

1. Non-linearity of mobile UX because of high test complexity

Unlike mobile sites, conversion funnels, application flow, and user experience in mobile applications are not linear.

2. Involvement of developers for end-to-end implementation

Mobile app testing enables you to test on the server-side to optimize your whole stack. However, this enhanced scope requires SDK download and needs a developer to run the test successfully.

3. Delay in publishing app in the market

A/B testing of mobile applications includes several processes that delay making apps live in the market.

For each application update, App Store approval is required, and for this, you need to wait, and after the approval, users can update the app.

This was all in the mobile application testing section. We have covered all the major topics. Let’s now move forward to Mobile App Developer.