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The Foremost Challenges in Mobile Load Testing Services

Author: Bug Raptors
by Bug Raptors
Posted: Sep 26, 2016

It is apparent that mobile is here to stay. Smart devices are now the major media of interaction for customers and businesses globally. The growth of these smart devices has made organizations to integrate these with the computing environment.

Hence, mobile testing, integrated with mobile applications now offer complex functionality on the platforms with restricted means for computing. This necessitates a performance assessment of the applications to ensure that an app performs optimally under load with a huge number of users.

Let’s review the main challenges in Load Testing Services for Mobile:

1. Network Simulation

Mobile devices assess servers over networks that are usually slower than those used by the desktop computers. Network conditions have a significant effect on the user experience and this effect can be big or small, depending on the application.

The testers while testing an application access the first class server operating user using an ideal phone network. It is tested with an assumption that the network conditions will be the same for all users. The real challenge arises when a user in a rural area has a hard time executing the functions that in modern suburbs which makes the network virtualization a top priority.

2. User Simulation

During a typical functional test, the user actions like swiping, tapping, zooming, text entering are emulated on the device emulator. The basic aim is not to evaluate the interaction experience of a user but is to see the handling requests from a large number of users and evaluate the response times.

An effectual load testing service needs to simulate a large number of concurrent users via the application under test. At this time, it is practical to use emulators and real devices as it needs acquiring, configuring and synchronizing of thousands of machines that run emulators.

3. Simulating Browsers and their Capabilities

When a web browser requests the web server for a resource, it categorizes itself through the user-agent header sent with each request. This head comprises the information about the browser and the platform on which it is running.

For mobile applications, the content is delivered accordingly with lesser text and smaller images for smaller screens which ultimately lead to bandwidth ingestion and variable load time, contingent to the platform and the browser that are being used. While load testing, it is imperative for the testing tool to be able to manipulate the user-agent header.

4. Ascertaining the most appropriate settings for realistic tests

Defining the most appropriate values for test settings can be challenging. The key test settings can be the bandwidth, user-agent, and the number of concurrent connections. The advanced load testing tools can be used to define these values.

The process is eased further when the tools can evaluate the most appropriate settings for uploading and downloading the bandwidth based on the technology used.

5. Testing through Cloud

For consumer facing apps, it is quite difficult to predict the number of users that the application may have to handle. The traffic spikes relating to special days such as promotions, offers, social network buzz and the like can be significant. Generating such loads in-house needs access to various hardware resources. Here, the cloud provides an opportunity to increase the testing scale and provide resources economically.

However, it is to be noted that moving to the cloud is not the solution, it depends on the selected testing tool and efficiently it uses the cloud technology for this purpose.

6. Evaluating Results

The default mobile load testing results are usually quantified in averages. But these averages do not provide the exact picture of the application performance. Thus, to get meaningful insights and validate the SLAs and performance requirements for each condition, it is imperative to go beyond the averages and analyze the results for every kind of user.

Inference

Load testing services are similar to web application testing in many ways. Yet, there are some very particular parameters that need to be addressed. Addressing the above listed challenges is important to ensure that the mobile web applications are tested adequately prior to the release and that they are proficient enough for performing well under load in the production environment.

For highly efficient load testing services for mobile and web applications, try Bugraptors. It is a CMMi 5 certified quality assurance outsourcing company with extensive experience as a third party testing vendor. Visit the website here for more insights.

About the Author

BugRaptors is one of the best software testing company providing manual & automation testing services worldwide. We offer a range of services from mobile app testing, web testing, to game testing services.

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Author: Bug Raptors

Bug Raptors

Member since: Sep 01, 2016
Published articles: 10

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