The mobile apps market has been growing rapidly for the past few years; different industries want to take advantage of this technology: Retail, Education, Media, Finance, Social, Health care, and Travel; and with this, the complexity of each mobile application is increasing too.
For Testing and Quality Assurance professionals, all these changes in mobiles apps introduced a whole new set of challenges to deal with.
Having a large number of different mobile devices and technologies has become a challenge for the Testing Teams: different OS versions, screen resolutions, screen sizes, button placements, and also don’t forget the differences in features like GPS, front/back cameras, video, and accelerometers for motion and orientation-sensing.
For this reason, is not possible to test mobiles apps in all the devices that support them as it would involve too much time and resources. Companies that develop and test mobiles apps can’t invest to buy each mobile device available in the market but there are some alternatives that can be used to identify which devices to test on:
One of the important aspects for every mobile app is the way they work under different network conditions. It’s necessary to test a mobile app under the most popular and available connectivity’s modes: 3G, Wi-Fi and 4G, LTE. And some factors to consider are:
The rapid evolution of mobile technology causes the need for a faster, wider, shorter and more effective Testing process. Automated testing is a very helpful approach to run a set of test cases into different platforms, operating systems and devices, reducing the manual testing process.
There are a lot of tools available for Automated Testing, but before choosing one, it’s necessary to do an analysis to figure out which can be the best for a certain mobile app. The coverage (platforms, browsers, OS), technical support, ROI and business logic are factor to have in mind to select a tool.
Here are three helpful tools to improve the Automated Test process:
The growth of the mobile applications market is increasing the complexity and rigorousness of the test process. The variety of devices, OS, connectivity modes and other features increase the number of test cases that should be execute to verify if an app is working. However, the alternatives for Test Teams are increasing too, allowing the simulation of actions in a specific device and the record of it to be reproduced in a different device will definitley increase the overall quality of your mobile application.
Have any questions or thoughts? Don't forget to leave your comments!
Abel Gonzalez is a Software Engineer with more than 2 years of experience in Quality Assurance. He works as a Software Engineer at iTexico specialized in Mobile and Web Testing.