Performance Testing of Mobile Applications

The users of mobile application are very demanding. They look for feature rich, fast and responsive mobile apps, no matter the network, location or the device. They want immediate fixes in case of glitches. In case they are not satisfied with the performance or the service, they are very fast to uninstall the app and look for the next application in the market.

Performance Testing is an important aspect of the overall performance testing. A proper performance testing of mobile applications ensures that -

• The response time of the mobile application is well within the acceptable performance boundaries. This can be referred to as UI based performance testing.
• The load generated on the back-end infrastructure is manageable. This check falls under load generation or stress testing.
• The performance of the application remains consistent after its release. This can be referred to as performance monitoring.

The mobile platform offers a wide range of new challenges that requires to be taken into account while testing the performance of the mobile application. Processor and memory constraints are more on mobile platforms. Additionally, the network connectivity between the mobile device and the data centers or the cloud are also more constrained. The impact of the network layer is considerable while testing the response time of the application. Tests executed close to the data centers on high bandwidth, low latency networks may not generate the same performance as that experienced by the users. Integration with Network Virtualization for Mobile allows to siulate the various mobile network conditions across the globe, allowing to assess the performance of the application in a specific geography without even having access to devices in that geographical location.

As the popularity of the application grows, more and more users start connecting to the back end servers. Load generation allows simulating the load generated by these users.

The same techniques can be used in UI based performance testing to measure the response times experienced by the users. Load can be generated at two levels: at the protocol level and the UI or device level. The device level load generation is a more precise match of the load generated in production. But the protocol level load is easier to set up and configure. Both physical and virtual devices can be used for generating the load.

It is obvious that the mobile testing of a mobile application is a continuous process. With the increase in app usage, the back-end infrastructure becomes overloaded, which may lead to degradation in the app performance. Additional factors such as network reconfiguration and changing user patterns also impact the performance of the application. For monitoring the infrastructure, the existing performance tests an be re-used. This saves from re-implementing the same test scripts all over again.

Conclusion

There are various automated solutions available in the market for performance testing and monitoring. However, the choice of the tool does not depend on the analysis and achievement of your objective. Once you get the results, you need to analyze them carefully for uncovering inconsistencies and further run more tests to verify the cause of these inconsistencies. Cross verification of tools is also necessary in order to rule out any inconsistent performance characteristics.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.