As mobile applications become the most popular trend today, they bring a plethora of options for everyone involved, including developers, app owners, and consumers. As a result, mobile applications have caused quite a stir in the industry, and as a result, the competition is fierce.
As a result, simply creating a functioning and appealing app is no longer sufficient. Instead, developers must guarantee that their software is free of faults, bugs, or malfunctions that might detract from the user experience and discourage consumers from using it.
That’s when TESTING enters the picture. The importance of quality assurance in the development of mobile apps cannot be overstated. Unfortunately, many people overlook the first stage in this process.
To ensure the successful creation of any app, QA must be involved in all stages of development, from ideation to breaking down requirements, developing test specifications, and delivering the finished product. QA may also use it to conduct post-development checks.
Testing The Bigger Picture
Performance testing is an important part of the smartphone app testing process. You’ll be able to detect and forecast performance changes due to increased network performance (3G, 4G, LTE), user location changes, greater traffic loads, and other factors.
In addition, whenever it comes to digital apps, you should test the app on various devices to check if the screen size influences the speed. In this article, you’ll learn more about what it means to undertake performance testing on mobile applications and tips and tricks for improving the tester’s workflow.
What Is Smartphone App Testing, And Why Does It Matter?
Before making a mobile app available to the end user, it is necessary to evaluate it to guarantee that it is operating as planned under various performance indicators and forecast a user’s experience.
As a result, mobile app performance testing guarantees that app features work as expected by locating and resolving issues and detecting and removing any application performance bottlenecks.
The purpose is to understand the characteristics of a program, including performance, robustness, proper size, and scalability. Your end-users may face poor application performance, customer experience, and accessibility across many mobile devices if you don’t test your mobile apps.
Smartphone app performance testing applies to mobile apps, including native, hybrid, and web-based applications.
Mobile Application Performance Testing Types
Let’s look at the many methods you may use to assess the performance of your mobile applications for a
better understanding. Let’s start with the app test procedure in detail in the next phase.
(1) Load Testing
Load testing determines whether a mobile app’s performance can manage the needed number of users while still operating and performing at its best. In addition, it analyzes an app’s performance during daily peak conditions (when many people are using it) to find any application software bottlenecks.
(2) Stress Analysis
Stress testing evaluates an app’s performance under high-stress situations. It deliberately overburdens a program to determine which components break first. It indicates the app’s breaking point, which aids in determining the app’s resilience and capacity to handle data and respond to high-traffic quantities.
(3) Testing In Large Numbers
Volume testing, also called flood testing, assesses an application’s capacity to handle & process enormous volumes of data without slowing down, failing, or losing any data. It influences an application’s total capacity.
(4) Soak Or Endurance Testing
Endurance testing (sometimes known as soak testing) is a technique for determining how well the software works under demand over time. It is a type of load testing that involves simulating or applying heavy traffic for a lengthy period to verify an app’s capacity to withstand high traffic and other performing load requirements.
(5) Spike Testing
Spike testing is like stress testing in that it assesses an app’s capacity to function amid abrupt increases in workload or volume. It’s done by fast raising the workload created by many users to check whether the app can manage the unexpected increases in load. Spike testing is essential for apps that see significant increases in user numbers.
(6) Capacity Evaluation
Capacity testing determines how many customers an app can support before performance degrades to unacceptable levels. It aids in the prediction of scalability and future user-base expansion difficulties.
(7) Scalability Testing
The capacity of an app to manage and process a growing demand is determined via scalability testing. Response time, CPU consumption, Network capacity higher than the current ratio, hits, queries per second, transaction processing speed, and other metrics are measured.
Scalability testing aids in the cost-cutting and mitigation of potential performance difficulties during planning and design development.
Mobile App Performance Testing Key Challenges
The testing process for mobile apps, just like every other development process, has its challenges.
Among the difficulties you’ll face are the following:
- Observance of industry rules and standards.
- Usability on mobile devices.
- There are a variety of device-specific features and sizes.
- Battery life, location, memory, resource usage, and touchscreen motions are all limits on devices.
- Simulating network connectivity such as Edge, 3G, 4G, 5G, and Wi-Fi, among other things.
- Variations in UI.
- Choosing the right diagnostic tools and testing settings.
- Hardware procurement bottlenecks.
- A high level of concurrency.
- Scalability in a hurry.
- It’s time to go to the market.
- Step-by-Step Mobile Application Testing ProcedureFollow the step-by-step mobile testing procedure below to optimize your mobile app testing approach after compiling mobile app testing checklists.
Strategizing & Preparation
After completing your development process, this is the first and most important phase. This phase necessitates the creation of a strategy and a work plan to describe what the company wants to achieve for your app and the limits it may face.
This is a critical phase since it determines the course of the remaining phases. The following are the actions that are taken out at this stage:
- Affinity for a variety of systems.
- Inspect and make a list of the necessities.
- Observe the frequency with which data is used.
- Study the frequency with which space is used.
- Examine the practical requirements.
- Any way to integrate the app with other programmers?
- Determine which devices are being targeted.
- Is application testing limited to the front-end?
- Does it also include back-end testing?
- Handling of various kinds of load spikes
- Each feature’s usefulness
- What if the app is going to be a native, progressive web app, or hybrid?
Sorting Of The Many Testing Types
Since the end-users may own a range of devices, it is a must that the program function on all iOS & Android devices. To ensure that the app works on all devices, we used testing tools, automated testing, and cloud simulator testing.
This involves practical simplicity of use, resemblance, execution, and security testing on the target devices. Determine what kinds of practical requirements should be tested as well.
Test Case & Script Design
The test case is a series of steps that guide us through the process of running a particular test on the app. Similarly, the test script is similar. The main distinction is that the word test case is used during human testing, and the phrase test script is used during automated testing.
Writing a test case with every feature and capability included in your smartphone app is critical. In addition, several additional test cases must be supplied.
Set Up An Appropriate Testing Environment
A testing environment collects code and devices used by workers or automation scripts to execute test cases. In a nutshell, it aids in testing hardware, software, and systems. The test rig or testing process is set up according to the App-Under requirements.
On a few occasions, the testbed might be a combination of the testing environment and the test data it uses. Successful mobile app testing requires the proper setup of the test environment. Any flaws in this procedure might result in the consumer incurring more costs and effort.
Automated & Manual Testing
This step includes sprinting manual test cases and automated test facts on numerous devices, emulators, and test structures. At present, these manual test gears & mainframe test fillings are steered on the application’s indispensable abilities.
This action is done to confirm that there are no software bugs. It might be a bit hard to track bugs with manual testing. However, we will further discuss how to test the mobile application manually.
Keep track of the defects you find in the mistake management system, and stick to the work plan you made in the first stage.
1# Beta Testing
Beta testing is an important part of the software distribution process. After engineers have thoroughly tested their program (a process known as alpha testing), they distribute it to real clients for testing. They can now address major flaws before releasing the application available to a wider audience.
What are the plans for the beta testers? First, they use the program consistently throughout a set period. Then, they report any problems or difficulties and share their opinions on the software.
This assists app distributors in determining not whether their application is ready for their target audience. If it isn’t, they can improve it further before it is released to the app stores.
2# Performance Testing
Performance testing determines how a framework behaves in terms of responsiveness and soundness when performing a certain activity. Performance tests are commonly used to evaluate speed, strength, unwavering quality, and the size of an application.
There are many performance testing challenges, especially when it comes to mobile game performance testing. Performance testing brings together all tests that evaluate an app’s speed, strength, steadfastness, and accurate estimation.
It examines a variety of indicators, including programmer, page, and system response times, server query handling time, the number of permissible concurrent customers architected, CPU memory consumption, and the amount and kind of errors that may occur when using an application.
Hire our expert testers for high-performance android apps. We have both manual and automated testers ready to be hired immediately.
3# Security Testing
Approve SQL injection, info dumps, session grabbing, bundle sniffer, SSL, & gate crashers to make sure that the project is safe. Because mobile apps typically have less memory and power than other programs, they must handle it correctly.
Similarly, switching from 2G, 3G, and 4G to broadband and WIFI may test the application performance. As a result, an application’s responsiveness, flexibility, and strength are tested during performance testing.
This gets a bit tougher with mobile game performance testing on the record. But with experience and proper tools, it’s nothing but just a piece of cake.
4# Device Testing
The mobile device testing matrix entails a variety of tasks, such as analyzing and correcting problems and content or administration on real phones. Confirmation & approval of technique focus and programming applications are all part of the testing process.
The mobile app performance testing will be established on a range of operating systems and devices to verify that it works when released in the market to end-users associated with the cloud.
The major goal of this phase is to get enough test coverage across a variety of devices, operating systems, and OS versions. Stay tuned for our upcoming blogs focused on performance testing tools for android mobile applications. Our experts love to share the experience with vision.
Reporting
Finally, the QA administrator creates the test summary report. This project, from inception, comprises assessments of the testing effort’s form, the structure of the frameworks during the test, measurements collected from frequency reports, and any pertinent data supplied by the tests performed.
The report also includes information on the various tests conducted and while they were finished. This will aid in the planning of future tests. This final report shows if the production process under test is fit for use and meets the venture participants’ acceptance criteria.
Who Needs To Test Mobile Apps For Performance?
There’s a tendency to neglect the mobile app testing process when development teams are pressed for time. On the other hand, that is a no-no; otherwise, a tester might overlook obvious faults, and the software would be rejected by distribution.
The list of goals that a tester may achieve through performance testing is rather long. It contains the following items:
- Demand & Validation
- Validate Hardware’s Usage
- Determine The Application’s Capacity
- Always Assess Rite
- Don’t Forget The Stress Situations
Final Takeout
Any application development pipeline must include performance testing for mobile apps. It isn’t, however, a piece of cake. Instead, it’s a big, ongoing project that demands input and cooperation from everyone involved in the app development process and proper deliberation of your end customers.
When it comes to mobile app performance testing, it doesn’t matter whatever technique or tools you use. But yes, the frameworks do matter.
What further matters are a dedication to a comprehensive testing strategy that tailors’ app features to user requirements. Your mobile app performance testing strategy should specifically address customer demands and provide good value to them.
Need Help With Your Mobile App Testing?
The benefits of mobile application performance testing will be worth the time and effort. You can outsource your mobile or web app development requirements to a trusted technology partner.
Clustox falls among some of the top-rated mobile app development companies, according to Clutch reviews, and has also gained a lot of recognition for our groundbreaking technologies and expertise.
Talk to us or write to us to draft an MVP for your ideal mobile app today. Let’s transform your idea into a real app together!
Frequently Asked Questions
How does mobile app testing work?
In order to ensure an optimal user experience and design, a mobile app is analyzed for its graphical appeal, functionality, consistency, and usability across different mobile devices used to access the application.
Which tool is best for mobile performance testing?
Multiple testing tools and platforms are used in order to check high-quality performance of a mobile application, such as:
- Test Project
- Apptim
- Perfecto
- BrowserStack
- Kobiton
- Headspin, etc.