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The leaps-and-bounds growth of the mobile industry is pushing most organizations to deploy a dedicated mobile application as a touchpoint for customer interaction. Mobile apps enable companies to present their offerings smoothly and facilitate the movement of customers down the sales funnel. A mobile app is much more convenient, personalized, and reliable. Implementing a mobile app for business purposes can help companies communicate better to target users and improve business productivity and profitability.
But before launching an app in the market, the stakeholders must subject the app to rigorous testing standards. To meet stringent deadlines, they often overlook the importance of mobile app testing. App testing is an integral part of the mobile app development lifecycle. Customers expect a mobile app to deliver rich content, unobtrusive experiences, and a host of other features that are crucial elements to contribute to a great UX. Anything less, and the end-users may abandon the app and pick its alternative, which promises an enriched experience. Hence, any existing bug, bottlenecks, and performance glitches in the app, which are not eliminated due to poor, inadequate, or no testing, can compromise UX. It can significantly impact business revenue and customer loyalty.
Mobile apps abandonment is a prevalent issue for most mobile apps. The stakeholders need to ensure that the app is tested thoroughly to optimize its stability, consistency, and performance to overcome this issue. The app should be intuitive, logical, easy to use. Proper functionality and quality of an app are essential aspects to boost customer engagement and retention rates. A comprehensive quality assurance process will help deliver an optimal app or website to the target market. Mobile device website testing helps build confidence in the software system to stand upright on the business objectives. It helps monitor both the front-end and back-end functionality of the app to become confident about the app launch that guarantees a perfect performance.
There are various factors that the QA must cover during mobile app testing. These may include the following:
Compatibility
Before getting started with the app development lifecycle, it is crucial to decide which devices the target customers would be in abundance. It is imperative to identify the specific metrics to evaluate during the testing process. The test engineers must check the feasibility and compatibility of an app across the target browsers, devices, OS, and its various combinations. The test suite must include adequate cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility tests. A browser’s incompatible HTML and CSS rules and frameworks can impact the UX of your end-users. Such bugs and performance gaps can be eliminated with cross-browser tests. Since the mobile device market is rapidly expanding and is prone to change, it is essential to check the app across real devices to assess app performance in real-world scenarios.
Stable Network Bandwidth and Carrier Networks
Network connectivity significantly affects the app performance. A bad or slow internet connection severely impacts mobile app behavior. The testers can check app performance under simulated network conditions to know how the software system will function across different network environments. It will help preempt network failure and manipulate network data flow, including its upload speed, download speed, latency, loss percentage, packets corruption, and more. You need to watch three common areas for network testing: testing for jitters, packet loss, and network speed. Jitters refer to the delays in receiving information on a network, which may arise due to issues with pack switch networks or connectionless networks. The network may experience packet loss when data that travels across networks fails to reach the destination. Network availability and speeds may suffer due to various reasons, including software and hardware limitations, bandwidth, traffic, distance, and more. By replicating a range of network conditions, the testers can create a robust platform to test an app against real-world scenarios and remove various network glitches.
Validate Functional and UX Test Cases
A mobile app needs to deliver a smooth, consistent, and intuitive user interface. Functional and UX test cases are a vital part of the testing process. Functional tests help ensure that the software system behaves as per the functional requirements without considering the design principles. Usability testing focuses on customer acceptance and how the customers can use the app to get through the intended task. It covers various aspects such as the overall structure and behavior, navigational flow, layout elements, and content clarity of an app. The testers must cover both tests in their test suites to ensure that the app is optimized for end-use.
Reliable And Stable Performance
Performance testing is an indispensable part of the mobile testing cycle. Load testing is an integral part of performance tests that simulates a real-world load for an app. It helps determine how many users an app can handle under varying conditions. It enables the testers to gauge performance bottlenecks to make critical decisions for improving the app. Some common bottlenecks may include slow response time, poor scalability, prolonged load time, system downtime, and more. The QA team can enable the app to deliver its critical functionalities without losing work speed and quality with adequate performance tests.
To Conclude:
The list of factors is certainly not exhaustive, but the QA team must ensure that they cover these factors to strategize their app testing process. It will help them release a high-quality app that can contribute to an enhanced end-user experience.
