How Can Your Business Strategy Be Influenced Through Mobile Test Automation?

The mobile phone is no longer used as a medium of communication alone, but has been scaled up and transformed as a multipurpose device. With the advent of mobile based applications to carry out a host of functions, customers are spoilt for choice. So, whether it is hiring a cab, shopping, buying a movie, rail or air ticket, or playing games, there is no looking back for the humble smartphone. Moreover, with the humongous spread of the smartphone users across the world, businesses are trying to woo this segment on the go in order to remain competitive.

While catering to this highly mobile segment, which majorly influences the marketing trends of the day, businesses are caught between the devil and the deep sea. The challenge is to accelerate the time to market with new applications and also to ensure they remain qualitatively superior as well. In many cases, enterprises are caught between the two imperatives and in the process, choose one at the cost of the other (read quantity over quality.)

The need for Mobile application QA testing

However, no matter how many applications an enterprise can come up with, unless they pass the muster on the standards of quality assurance, they run the risk of being rejected by the customers. This calls for a renewed focus on ensuring the quality of applications to meet customers’ expectations. This, however, is easier said than done, for, in order to meet the customers’ expectations, an application has to provide a rich user experience. This should be across devices, platforms, frameworks, operating systems, and networks, which incidentally can be quite diverse and complex.

Why does manual testing not pass the quality test?

By taking recourse to the manual testing of applications, ensuring their quality can be at best a half- baked exercise. The reasons could be many.

• Manual testing can falter when the tests are repetitive and complex
• The test coverage area can fall woefully short as the human element is likely to take shortcuts
• A lot of glitches can remain unidentified as the manual tester is not likely to test every possible scenario and consider variables
• Manual testing is inherently time consuming. This can impact the turnaround time
• As applications take more time for testing, they lose out on competitiveness

The answer to overcoming the above inadequacies is by undertaking mobile test automation. By following a robust mobile application testing strategy, businesses can see the application meets the quality metrics, be it in functional or non-functional areas. Moreover, as mobile applications embrace cutting edge technologies of the day such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and IoT amongst others, Mobile test automation has become the sine-qua-non to ensure their quality. In an increasingly Agile and DevOps driven test environment where continuous improvement and testing are the objectives, adopting a suitable mobile application testing strategy is a must.

Businesses have realized the need to provide customers with a unique experience to stay competitive. In their quest to add value to their products and services in line with their business strategies, they need to uphold quality. The quality parameters should be uniform across platforms, devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks. To achieve optimization of the business strategy, enterprises need to meet the challenges of mobile test automation head on. These are discussed as under.

Cross platform testing: The mobile phone market is deluged with devices of various sizes and brands. Each device has its own architecture mostly customized by OEMs through updates and releases thereby making the device a standalone one vis-a-vis others. The presence of various platforms and browsers has led to the application taking different runtimes. The mobile application testing approach should take into account each of the devices’ architecture and sizes. The final test outcome for any application should be to ensure its seamless functioning across platforms, be it Android, iOS, Windows or BlackBerry.

Network testing: Mobile devices work on networks with varying speeds, types, and functionalities. For example, there are various types of networks such as GPS, CDMA, GPRS, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max that are spread across geographies. An application needs to work seamlessly across networks with varying architecture, speed, and runtimes. The same can only be achieved by undertaking a rigorous mobile application testing approach.

Device architecture challenges: Each device can have its own hardware challenges in terms of architecture, size, processor, and memory size, I/O protocols such as WAP or HTTP, etc. A robust mobile application testing framework should consider the differences and develop suitable test outcomes.

Continuous integration: This is the imperative of a DevOps environment where the writing of mobile app test automation scripts should include an end to end integration of codes as well.

Choosing the right test platform: The testing of a mobile application needs the usage of the correct test automation tool including emulators and simulators. The tool, be it an open source or licensed, should be flexible and convenient enough for the testers to write test scripts in any programming language. Moreover, the test automation platform should provide the right framework, IDE’s or subroutines to write the script. Finally, the tool or platform should have a robust reporting mechanism that records the details of bugs detected, KPIs used, and the test coverage area for further analysis.

Conclusion

Mobile application testing has challenges that span across dimensions such as device make, platforms, frameworks, operating systems, browsers and networks. The only way a business strategy related to the development and deployment of mobile applications can be optimized is by undertaking a suitable mobile application testing approach to meet customers’ expectations.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Software Testing Services Company to be appraised at Cmmi-Svc v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also Iso 9001:2015 & Iso 27001:2013 certified.