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Top 5 Challenges and Solutions for mobile app testing

Top 5 Challenges and Solutions for mobile app testing

1 February 2022

There has been an enormous rise in mobile devices recently, and the immense demand has led to attracting users worldwide. Mobile apps are the next big thing that has and will continue to transform our lives at various levels. With such transformative capabilities that the apps possess, it is important to test them to ensure the users are having a seamless experience. With the increasing number of mobile devices, testing apps across all of them has become important and challenging at the same time. Organizations should address the challenges and come up with practical solutions to resolve them and create apps of higher quality.

Identifying and resolving the challenges associated with mobile app testing is a crucial process that companies cannot neglect. Addressing the challenges opens up a new array of possibilities to improve the app quality, thereby, offering a seamless user experience while also helping the companies improve their ROI metrics.

Key Challenges of Mobile App Testing and Best Possible Solution

There are a number of challenges associated with mobile app testing. It is essential to address these challenges and build a strategy to implement the most feasible solutions. Here are the top 5 challenges that are faced during mobile app testing and discussed are some of the solutions that one can consider to resolve them.

Device Fragmentation

Device fragmentation is one of the serious challenges faced by organizations today. Fragmentation is the issue arising due to differences in the device types, operating systems, network types, and browsers. With more than 24,000 Android phones available today, fragmentation makes it difficult for the testers to perform cross-browser testing. With fragmentation, cross-browser testing will not yield expected results and mostly prone to errors. The increasing Android fragmentation is a serious issue; however, the fragmentation issue is lesser in iOS due to the smaller number of devices.

Solution: The issues of fragmentation can be addressed by adopting a well-planned cross-browser testing strategy. Elaborate testing will help to identify any bugs arising from cross-browser testing and offers scope to resolve them. A good cross-browser strategy can also help in resolving unexpected errors arising due to fragmentation. Here are some of the steps to implement for getting accurate cross-browser testing results.

  • Automating the testing process: At the technological front, we have made advancements and moved beyond manual testing. Automating testing is the need of the time and organizations should automate their testing processes for accurate and consistent results.

  • Cloud: The rate at which the Android devices are released in the market have added to the high fragmentation rate. Cloud testing offers better product accessibility matrix by providing access to all old and new devices. Further, the Cloud is integrated with automated scripts that makes the whole process easy and cost-effective.

  • Performance: The fragmentation issue can affect the performance and scalability during peak load, however, an elaborate and well-planned performance testing can help resolve the issue.

Different UI

With the market brimming with new mobile devices, it is to be noted that there are different variants for the same phone model made available in different screen sizes and resolutions. The different UI for the same model is to expand the user base across different budget brackets. It is considered an excellent strategy to expand the business; however, it is proven to be a major challenge in testing apps across all variants.

Different UI can be difficult for testing the app’s adaptability across all the screen sizes and resolutions. Hence, testing the app’s consistency becomes highly challenging.

Solution: The challenges associated with conducting testing on different UI can be resolved using a codeless test automation framework, Device farms, and emulator-simulator-and real device strategy.

  • Codeless Test Automation Framework: To match the speed of production and advanced agile practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), organizations are moving to codeless testing frameworks. Codeless testing helps organizations to adopt to modern practices and yield faster and accurate results across all devices with different UI variants.

  • Device Farm: Testing of apps across various handheld devices like smartphones, tablets, and the different variants of the same model can be quite challenging. Introduction of Device Farms help the testers get accurate results across all devices. The device farms take care of device management, which lets the developers focus on important aspects of developments. As it operates on Cloud, it makes the testing easier to scale, offers remote access from anywhere, proven to be a cost-effective solution, and a reliable solution for long-term use.

  • Emulator/Simulator/Real Device Strategy: Emulators and simulators are virtual devices that mimic the features and functionalities of real devices. They are used as a cost-effective alternative for real devices. To yield the best test results, a combination of simulator/emulator/real device is required and proven to give great results under different UI scenarios.

Security

The use of open-source platforms and public Clouds for app testing is raising security concerns. Poor encryption and easier access to the caché are increasing the system vulnerabilities and making it easy for the hackers to steal private information.

Solution: To address the security issues, it should be made sure that the application is encrypted end-to-end in a safe manner. An elaborate security testing should be carried out to check for any vulnerabilities or breaches and allow developers to fix them. Further, when testing is performed on Cloud, it is recommended to choose private or hybrid Cloud over public Cloud to ensure higher security.

Different Types of Mobile Applications

There are different types of mobile applications that are built to increase brand visibility. Some apps, known as native apps, are built to operate on their native operating system i.e., either Android or iOS. They are specific to the operating system and may not work on the other operating systems. However, another type of app known as web apps are explicitly downloadable from the web browser. In addition to these two app types, there is a third type of application that works on both web and native apps known as the hybrid apps.

The different types of mobile apps make testing difficult across different devices. Companies should create a strategy to test different types of mobile applications easily and accurately.

Solutions: To test different types of mobile applications it is important to understand the application type and segregate it to the team with required technical expertise. Diversifying the application testing based on the type of mobile app improves the app quality considerably. Further, repeated regression tests should also be conducted to refine the process.

Seamless user experience

No matter how innovative the app idea is or how much investment has been made to create the app, what matters is how it’s accepted by the mass. Creating a flawlessly working app by incorporating the right testing strategy is the major challenge that lies ahead of the app’s success.

Solution: Creating a flawlessly working app to offer an exceptional user experience can be achieved by creating an organizational specific strategy. Every organization should understand their operational and infrastructural process and come up with a testing strategy accordingly. For example, organizations working on agile CI/CD process being carried out in the DevOps environment will need codeless, continuous testing approach. Similarly, organizations operating on advanced AI/ML models will need AI-integrated testing process. The approach is specific to the organizational process.

Why Choose Tenjin Online for App Testing?

Tenjin Online is a powerful SaaS-based mobile test automation platform that supports both Android and iOS. It is a codeless, easy to use, and self-serviced platform that leverages the power of automation testing to ensure that the application has flawlessly working features, navigates as expected, performs without any hitch, is aesthetically pleasing, and completed safe, secure, and scalable. It is capable of handling testing of UI/ UX, API, and performance of the mobile applications with minimum or no human intervention. It’s the only test automation platform you will ever need to perform end-to-end testing of an app.



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