Modern smartphones serve a broader purpose than just making calls or sending texts. When equipped with various applications, they transform into versatile virtual assistants. In a digitally mobile-focused world, providing a compelling mobile device lab with unwavering quality presents a significant challenge, placing the QA strategy in a crucial role.
The initial essential step toward delivering fully operational applications, ensuring high retention rates, and meeting business objectives involves meticulously planning the execution process.
Explore the inner workings of a robust app testing strategy, encompassing decisions such as device selection and adopting agile methodologies, to comprehend the foundation of effective app testing.
Why Establish a Mobile App Testing Strategy and Its Importance
A strategy is vital for reaching a goal, as it delineates the necessary testing components to attain quality objectives while maximizing coverage within the available timeframe. In the realm of mobile applications, the window for launching is diminishing rapidly.
To outpace competitors, launching a mobile app with exceptional quality promptly, or preferably ahead of rivals, is crucial, underscoring the significance of a testing strategy. Such a strategy aims to secure good quality, high performance, and extensive test coverage within a restricted timeframe.
Key aspects to consider within a mobile app testing strategy include:
- Device Selection: The market boasts an extensive array of mobile devices, a number that continues to grow exponentially. It is nearly impossible to test an application on all available devices. Hence, crafting a strategy that selects devices based on market adoption or expected user base is a more practical approach.
- Emulators/Simulators: Opting for emulators and simulators presents a more feasible solution. This approach allows broader device coverage at a relatively lower cost.
- Testing Varieties: A crucial aspect of formulating a test strategy involves outlining the diverse types of tests required for the mobile application. Factors such as app functionality, launch markets, and anticipated user base, among others, dictate the testing needs.
Test Plan v/s Test Strategy
Here are some key distinctions between a test plan and a test strategy:
Test Strategy:
- Defines the software testing approach and sets testing standards.
- Typically developed by the project manager or business analyst.
- Encompasses objectives, scope, test processes, documentation formats, team reporting structure, and client communication strategies.
Test Plan:
- Derives from the Software Requirement Specification (SRS).
- Prepared by the test lead or manager.
- Includes test plan ID, features to be tested, testing tasks, test deliverables, responsibilities, and schedules.
- Focuses on testing details and execution specifics.
In terms of purpose:
- Test plans aid in identifying potential issues, dependencies, and risks specific to a project.
- Test strategies are long-term plans to retrieve non-project-specific information and establish an overarching testing approach.
What are the Varied Types of Effective Mobile App Testing Strategies?
Here, we explore diverse testing strategies integral to a comprehensive mobile app testing plan for achieving a high-quality product.
● Integrating QA with Business and Product Teams during Early Development Stages
In many cases, QA involvement occurs in later phases of the development lifecycle, compromising the effectiveness of app development. To address this, QA and testing should be integrated early in the design phase before the app is built.
Consider multiple test cases and identify potential issues during development, allowing for bug elimination and enhancing the app’s seamless performance for users.
● Cross-Platform Testing
In today’s diverse device and OS landscape, ensuring flawless performance across multiple platforms is essential. A critical step after determining supported OS versions is selecting devices for testing. Emulators can complement physical device testing to make testing more cost-effective and yield excellent results.
Leveraging the capabilities of a cross-browser cloud-based platform like LambdaTest can greatly help. LambdaTest is a test orchestration and execution platform powered by AI that empowers developers and testers to perform automated and manual testing on web applications across over 3000 browsers, devices, and operating systems.
This enables quality assurance teams to perform comprehensive testing on real device cloud, guaranteeing the functionality of their mobile applications across a wide range of real devices with certainty and assurance.
● Security Testing
Security is paramount for users, as apps often handle sensitive data. Executing comprehensive security tests to safeguard against malicious attacks is crucial. Building a robust security testing strategy involves understanding potential attack vectors, employing varied testing tools for static, dynamic, and forensic analyses, and conducting tests from an attacker’s perspective to identify weaknesses.
● Network Connectivity Testing
Users may encounter variable network conditions affecting app performance. Ensuring seamless functionality across different network speeds (1G to LTE to WiFi), handling sudden network changes, and maintaining performance despite disruptions are vital tasks for the QA team.
● UX/UI Testing
The success of a mobile app often relies on its UI/UX. Efficient UI testing ensures usability, consistency, accessibility, and user interaction. UX testing focuses on user experience aspects, including navigation, transaction speed, product information accessibility, and integrating user feedback.
● Testing Across Multiple Screen Sizes and Specifications
Considering and ensuring device specifications and dimensions during testing is crucial. Screen size testing is essential to identify layout-related bugs affecting the user experience and ensure elements are properly displayed and fully functional on various screens.
● Battery Testing
Apps with battery-intensive processes can significantly impact the user experience. QA teams should conduct battery tests to identify battery-draining components and optimize or modify them accordingly.
● Application Size and Storage Testing
Optimizing app size without compromising usability is essential. Testers should monitor the app’s size with each update to ensure it remains within acceptable limits, preventing users from avoiding the app due to excessive storage usage.
● Application Permission Testing for Privacy
Maintaining user privacy is crucial. Testers must ensure that app permissions are relevant and eliminate permission requests for unused app features. Testing proper permission combinations is essential.
● Testing Application Upgrade Scenarios
Ensuring smooth upgrades without crashes or data loss is vital. Retaining user preferences and saved data during upgrades is critical for an uninterrupted user experience, especially for apps like food delivery, cabs, or digital wallets.
● Functionality Testing
Testing should focus on the app’s intended functionalities. A thorough examination of every aspect of the app’s functions and flows is vital to ensuring seamless operation.
● Type of Application
Testing across different mobile app types—native, mobile web, and hybrid—ensures stability and performance across varied application structures.
● Backend Testing
Backend testing validates accurate data storage, retrieval, and association with user profiles, ensuring data integrity throughout the application.
● Data Flow Testing
Evaluate the app’s and external systems’ data flow, ensuring seamless connectivity and operation.
● Localization Testing
Conduct testing for language, maps, and other location-specific elements for location-based apps, adhering to legal requirements where necessary.
Considerations for working in an agile app development project
These factors have become increasingly important in recent times due to the shift towards agile environments and methodologies, emphasizing enhanced flexibility, improved readiness, and accelerated speed-to-market.
Below are essential considerations for app testing in agile projects:
● Suitable Test Environment
In mobile app testing, authentic devices are ideal for validating app functionality in real-life scenarios. However, acquiring numerous physical devices can be time-consuming and may disrupt Agile project deadlines. Moreover, the waiting time for testing on specific devices can hinder progress. Test leads might opt for cloud-based access to multiple mobile devices to mitigate these challenges.
Nevertheless, cloud devices have limitations on performance testing, manual and automated testing duration, and the maximum app file sizes allowed. Hence, it’s crucial for test leads to precisely determine the number of physical devices needed, blend real devices with cloud resources, and strategize the types of test cases suitable for cloud-based device farms.
● Development and Testing Alignment
Ensuring seamless alignment between development and testing is pivotal. Agile projects benefit from regular meetings, video conferences, or ongoing communication platforms to set common goals and track code modifications and bug fixes through continuous integration and varied source code management tools.
● Early and Efficient QA
Collaboration between Quality Assurance (QA) professionals and Business Analysts (BA) ensures a clear definition of user stories within the testing scope, delineating what is included and excluded and establishing interdependencies between them. This collaboration facilitates creating a clear test plan, enabling ample time for validating crucial app functions before user adoption.
Additionally, it allows test teams to develop basic test cases early in the process, prioritize ongoing testing efforts, and align with agile project iteration deadlines.
Mobile App Testing Strategy in Agile Projects
Agile, a relatively recent buzzword, emphasizes quicker time-to-market, increased feature flexibility, frequent releases, and superior outcomes. While the significance of testing and quality is universally acknowledged, the testing time frame in Agile methodologies is typically constrained.
Supplementing the previously discussed aspects, here are additional considerations integral to an effective mobile app testing strategy within Agile projects:
● Early Commencement of Testing
Initiate testing at the earliest stage possible within the sprint, even if separate QA or staging environments aren’t available. Testing in lower environments initially can yield preliminary results for the team to address.
● Establish Dev-Testing Alignment
Create robust communication channels to inform team members about ongoing developments and testing changes. Leveraging tools for code check-ins and bug tracking enhances team awareness.
● Infrastructure Preparedness
Effective mobile app testing relies on real devices and simulators. Ensure sufficient availability of these resources, including a buffer to mitigate issues arising from damaged or non-functional devices, especially within the constrained testing timeline. A stable test environment pre-sign-off should also be part of the strategy.
● Embrace Exploratory Testing
Leverage mobile app testing experts to identify application problem areas based on prior experiences. Incorporating exploratory testing into the strategy maximizes coverage in a limited time, aiding in prioritizing testing areas efficiently.
● Automation Testing Integration
Initiating automation of requirements and features from the project’s onset allows more time to focus on critical business-centric features. The mobile app testing strategy should prioritize implementing a scalable, adaptable automation framework across various iterations and future endeavors.
Conclusion
The strategy serves as the guiding force that unites the team toward achieving the ultimate goal of optimum quality and performance for your mobile application. Hence, crafting a comprehensive and forward-thinking mobile app testing strategy document is paramount.
A mobile app testing strategy acts akin to an anchor for a ship, directing its course and ensuring a safe and successful journey towards its destination.
