It is expected that by 2025, there will be approximately 27 billion connected IoT devices, which seems to be a mesmerizingly whopping figure. It should also be noted that a similar trend has also been observed with respect to the emergence of mobile apps, as every day, new apps are being rolled out on app store by an increasing number of businesses and organizations.
Mobile Applications Testing
Mobile applications are the major means of operating businesses today and evidently, play a critical role for their business survival. However, these mobile apps to be successful in the marketplace, should enable great user experience(UX) and deliver excellent performance. In order to achieve high performing apps, mobile app testing should necessarily be taken up. Testing mobile applications ensure the best possible UX and deliver great performance for end-users.
Moreover, in today’s technological era with hypersensitive customers all around, mobile app quality matters the most as the market is very competitive; the user experience is critical as well as the performance of the app.
Typically, mobile apps that don’t deliver excellent experience tend to get negative ratings, thus affecting their overall reputation and downloads. Hence, it is important for all businesses to get high performing apps through effective mobile app testing.
It is interesting to note that the mobile application testing services market is valued at $13.3 B by 2026 and it is anticipated to witness significant revenue growth during 2016 and 2026. A recent study published by an eminent market research analyst envisages that the mobile app testing services market would record an impressive 19.5% value CAGR between the forecast period (2016 to 2026). This growth is expected to be primarily driven by an increasing number of applications and the effective need to improve mobile app quality.
What are the types of Mobile App testing?
Functional Testing:
This method of mobile app testing ensures to validate the functionality of the app and verifies whether the app functionality is according to the requirements or not.
Performance Testing:
This method of testing is referred to determine the app’s resource consumption, stability, and operability under various conditions.
Usability Testing:
Usability testing helps to determine the application’s behaviour to user operations. This method helps to ensure whether the app is providing a positive user experience or not.
Compatibility Testing:
This method of testing is performed to verify the performance of the software across devices such as mobile, networks, and platforms.
Security Testing:
This method of testing helps to analyze the data leakage risks and find the possible gaps that can influence cyberattacks or unauthorized access for sensitive information.
Localization Testing:
This method of testing is performed to ensure that the app is responding with respect to the language and culture of the target users. This is one of the important test practice to maintain your business standards globally.
What are the pros and cons of Mobile App testing?
The pros and cons of mobile app testing under manual testing are:
Benefits of Manual Testing:
– The testing practice is cost-effective in a shorter-term period.
– Manual testing is more flexible; and provides a simulation for the user-actions.
Disadvantages of Manual Testing:
– With the manual process, it is difficult to reuse the test cases.
– The process to run the test cases is much slower.
– The test cases of Manual testing cannot be executed manually.
The pros and cons of mobile app testing under test automation are:
Benefits of Test Automation:
– The tool is cost-effective for a longer period of time.
– Test cases are processed faster.
– The test cases can be reused.
– The test results are easier to share.
Disadvantages of Test Automation:
– The tools used for test automation may have certain limitations.
– The tools have a probability of less efficiency to maintain user-friendliness.
Major Segments where Mobile apps are leading the business arena:
– M-commerce apps
– Messaging platform apps
– Voice recognition apps
– Banking transaction apps
– Online shopping apps
– Finance apps
– Travel destination apps
– Healthcare apps
– Pharma apps
– Fitness apps integrated with smart wearable devices
Henceforth, all businesses continue to understand the criticality behind testing mobile applications and the need to keep an eye on the dynamic trends this segment is undergoing. These key insights help businesses to achieve full business potential while procuring effective mobile apps.
Mobile App Testing Trends:
1. Performance Testing to shift towards Performance Engineering (PE):
Mobile apps UX is the key to success and it is necessary to shift from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering to enhance UX. Moreover, PE focuses more on the intricate app architecture and implementation criticalities that ensures to deliver a preferred app which meets all the underlying performance specifications. It also ensures reduced costs and quicker return on investment (ROI).
2. Security Testing to Take an Uptrend:
With a lot of cyber-attacks ramping the cyberspace and it seems to be a similar situation even with mobile apps security; Mobile app security testing is likely to take an uptrend with so many latest functional/ manual testing or automation tools in the market. Such automated mobile app testing ensures businesses are having threat-free mobile apps. Eventually, secured mobile apps are bound to improve the business outlook of enterprises and promise to deliver good ROI.
3. Growing Demand for Automated Voice (Voice First App) Testing:
The Automated Voice Testing (AVT) has been there in the industry for some time now, and this approach primarily uses a speech recognition engine to automatically control the device conversationally as a human user would perform it. It is interesting to note that such an approach is both device and platform agnostic, as the automation of tests is done at voice level. Such automated tests can be executed on any kind of voice app running on any device which derives a lot of significance for the end-users.
4. M-Commerce App Testing on High Demand:
Undoubtedly, along with e-commerce, mobile commerce has also become essential for modern businesses. Today, most businesses continue to launch customized mobile commerce apps to generate more sales and stand up in the competition. Customers, continue to use the trending purchase options such as e-wallets and other digital pay channels. Zoom in the usage of these m-commerce apps has made it critical for these apps to be tested thoroughly. They should be tested for their UX, performance, and security, else it adversely affects customer loyalty.
5. Device (5G Devices) Integration Testing to lead the path:
Today’s market is flooded with handsets having different configurations, operating systems, screen sizes, and with unique dimensions. These different variations require software testing to be automated and the usage of new test automation frameworks is likely to rule the world of automated mobile app testing.
6. Cloud-Based Mobile App Testing to Trigger:
Mobile cloud platforms enable testers to assess the application’s look, feel and performance across multiple devices without buying any extra devices or hardware. Testers can make good use of these cloud platforms to create a customized testing environment that helps to work with a good number of real-time devices connected to the network. Thus, cloud testing is more in demand currently and investing in such mobile cloud platforms helps organizations to reduce their costs and save time.
7. IoT Testing to be high in Demand:
It is interesting to know that many organizations continue to adopt Internet of Things (IoT) as this has a huge impact on the development of modern web and mobile applications. Businesses continue to build mobile apps that can be smoothly integrated with various connected devices. At the same time, users will expect these apps and technologies to perform flawlessly. Hence, mobile app testers will have to assess the performance and functionality of the app, in addition to checking its performance with other connected devices while testing them.
8. The dominance of Open Source Automation Tools:
Open source tools are extremely flexible and fundamentally support the testing of all kinds of mobile apps i.e. android and iOS, Windows and Hybrid apps. Besides, most of the open-source tools include the code libraries for any programming language and are easily customizable to modifications in the technological landscape. Hence, the usage of these tools is more towards implementing test automation initiatives.
9. Adoption of AI and ML in Mobile App Testing:
Every segment of today’s innovation has AI and ML around its corner. Evidently, the usage of ML has revolutionized the global mobile application testing scenario by enhancing the processes and workflows of the testing cycle. It continues to contribute towards the predictive analytics of test cases and with log analytics, helps identify automated test cases. New ML algorithms are sure to rule the world of testing in the near future and eventually will deliver quality @ speed.
10. Impact of 5G in Mobile app testing
By using the 5G network in mobile app testing, the focus will be on areas such as walk tests, signal diffraction, mm-Wave signal proportion etc. Mobile app developers will be able to obtain 5G testbeds to conduct design validation. The impact of 5G will be connected through a blend of 5G and legacy networks. This mixed network environment needs to go through ample testing in order to understand mobile app interaction and performance across various settings.
11. Impact of DevOps in Mobile app testing:
The role of DevOps is to speed up the entire mobile app development and testing process. Developers and testers must work unitedly for full-fledged app development and deployment process.
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) being a core part of DevOps, there has to be solutions for certain key points of mobile app testing, through which CI and CD can be measured. Some of the important points to ponder upon are as follows:
- Deployment frequency and number of tests executed (against each regression)
- Calculating the percentage in-line with failures vs successful tests
- What is the exact timeline for the mobile app to get published?
- Does automation works really well or manual testing needs to be implemented
Conclusion
As the consumer expectations continue to soar high for mobile app user interface and performance aspects, organizations must adapt and deliver them effective apps to stay ahead in the competition. With immense and constant upgradations in the technologies and with the range of mobile devices in the market, it eventually signifies the need for an effective mobile app testing strategy and testing process with a primary focus to shorten the mobile app delivery. Hence, the choice of right mobile app testing tools and mobile app testing services plays a significant role in achieving a high performing mobile app. Connect with our Mobile testing experts to discuss more.
