Category: Quality Assurance

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The world of mobile app developers is struck with more intense challenges because of constant advancements in technologies, mobile app development trends and fickle nature of customers. Users are not willing to compromise on performance and quality, which means developers of modern era must consider users’ demand for high performance.

Not all the mobile apps become hit when they are launched. Some of them are never recognized. A study from digital trends confirms that merely 16% of mobile users think of using the mobile app again once they are dissatisfied. Optimal mobile app quality is therefore seen as a driving force for app success.

This blog will delve in how mobile app quality is critical for ratings, revenues and brand reputation followed by the tips to improve its performance.

How to perceive mobile app quality and performance?

Mobile application development is in a way a broad term that includes addressing a range of modern user requirements, technical challenges, resources management, testing and deployment, user experience, marketing and successive updates releases.

The success of the mobile app development process depends on whether or not your mobile app behaves to users’ satisfaction and fulfils all their needs. People who actually install and use it and navigate its different features will ultimately be the deciders of the quality of your mobile app. Hence, performance is key to deciding the measure of app quality.

Mobile app performance is subject to various components such as:

  • The server
  • Network quality
  • Integration of APIs
  • Interactions with device environment
  • Coding methods

Sometimes users may experience abrupt app crash incidents or slow loading of content especially at the time of high rush in user activity during festive season or promotions. This implies poor experience for which app itself may not be entirely responsible. Hence, for anybody working in the domain of mobile app development, it is necessary to define a great app.

What is a best mobile app?

The great mobile app is the one that remains consistent in its performance even in inconvenient situations, face challenges of time, satisfies customers needs, loads faster and has pleasant user interface, impressive visuals and exciting features.

An ideal mobile app might be focused on single functionality, but it should do it exceedingly well.

How mobile app quality impacts on its success

Users are evolving in their expectations though young demographics are growing more demanding when it comes to exploring mobile apps, which adds challenges to the job of mobile app development. In one survey run by Dimensional Research, more than 90% users responded that app performance is quite critically important. A good performance can even compensate for the price concerns of an app.

Today’s users can’t tolerate even 3 seconds of delay before they see an app fully loaded on their screen. The optimal response time taken by the app to load usually comes down to 2 seconds.

A mobile app survey by Akamai says 47% of customers want web pages to load within just two seconds whereas 20% of them expect mobile apps to open instantly. This goes to say how important is it for mobile app development specialists to ensure optimal performance and quality of mobile apps.

Volatile nature of modern users

While many apps are joining the list of top grossing apps in popular App stores, apps that fail to engage users are losing on interest and revenue as well. Users are openly judgemental and are prepared to abandon your app the moment they realize your mobile app performance doesn’t go with their expectations.

The question of App ratings/reviews

App store ratings are quite an important part of ensuring your mobile app offers everything users want to buy. If your app doesn’t have quality enough to impress users or has minor errors or crash issues, they will leave unpleasant reviews and ratings and all the efforts invested in mobile app development will go in vain. Low ratings means less number of downloads, too. Even the slightest of drop in ratings affects the download rates to a great extent.

Benefits of commendable app performance

No doubt, users expect great returns for each penny they spend. If you app’s performance is flawless and smooth, you will gain more loyalty and spending from them.

Therefore, mobile app development veterans should know how performance directly impacts customer acquisition and revenue. For example, a case study by SOASTA revealed that even one-second drop in average page load time results in a 27% boost in conversion rate.

Another example goes to claim that after President Obama’s fundraising site increased its page load speed by 60% in 2011, it could raise $34 million more for the campaign.

This indicates how performance and app quality should be the primary concerns of any mobile app development company. Performance testing is an integral part of quality assurance and offers mobile apps a competitive strength.

How to improve Mobile App Performance

We have reached the part in our discussion where we should check the important actions needed to improve your mobile app quality and performance.

The app security

App security is the top priority for maintaining the highest quality of the app and keeping the download numbers up. In case of Android, the risks of your app being subject to cyber threats are likely. Personal information especially regarding payment is sensitive for users. Therefore, to ensure your app is appreciated by them, you should protect their private data with robust password layers and SSL certificate.

Personalization

Users adore personalized elements in the app if it is used in suitable places. Mobile app development should emphasize the important of personalizing settings, fonts, size, colours as it gives app users ability to interact with your app in their own style, which inspires engagement among users.

Compress the size of images

Compressing the image to resize it without lowering its quality is the best mobile app development practice to increase the app performance and cut down the load time. Choose the adequate size of the image for compressing it. compressor.io is one of the reliable image compression providers you can opt for.

Load the data economically

This factor is unknown to many emerging mobile app development firms. If your app contains a lot of data, try to load it as per the need. Users hate waiting to explore a tiny part of the app. Break down the content components and try to pre-fetch data so that when users want it, they get it without excessive load time.

Also, bring down the number of HTTP requests for page resources. It will not burden your app and let users enjoy quick loading.

Turn on the offline mode

If the network connection of user’s device drops during any action inside the app, it is a good practise to inform them the reason of incomplete action. Allow them to save the data for later so that they can start off where they left off after securing strong network. This approach helps sooth customers and win/ their loyalty.

Test frequently and proactively

Testing is a crucial part of mobile app development process. Make sure there is no compromise made when it comes to maturely testing the mobile apps. Your app must fulfil variety of tests to ensure it works consistently across all devices, platforms and networks and performs well without crash incidents.

Test the app for usability often during the development. It saves time and money and offers ease of fixing bugs when the app is tested through the development process.

The use of APM system

If you have a mobile app, you must understand the vitality of having an application performance monitoring (APM) system that helps buoy up the app quality by sensing and diagnosing performance issues for your app. Such performance management tools is dedicated to keeping your mobile app development on the right track while ensuring users enjoy uninterrupted service and your app serves computing functions healthily.

Some of the companies that offer APM tools are New Relic, AppDynamics, HockeyApp and Flurry.

Concluding notes

The quality and performance of your mobile app act as oxygen to your mobile app development phase. It decides user retention, ratings, number of downloads, conversion, and ultimately, revenue. Since users have become smart in their choices, you must maintain the app quality to observe more traffic to your mobile app. If you create a high-quality app that satisfies user’s expectations, users will rush to your app more often, elevating your brand reputation.

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After mobile app development, mobile testing relishes the crown of being the fast-paced industry touched by brilliant innovations of modern times. As app market is booming with smart phone users, the demand for well-crafted, engaging and feature-rich apps is surging high. This requires mobile app testers to build perfect app testing strategies so that mobile users receive intelligent, flawless functionalities and frictionless user experience.

The application testing phase often puts certain challenges on app developers. Whether it is manual or automation, these challenges must be overcome with smart tactics and meticulous strategy.

Here you will learn key challenges and their solutions that software testers need to learn:

1. OS Fragmentation

With newly launched mobile devices, operating systems also observe frequent updates, which may create complications while using the apps. New updates means your mobile apps need to grow compatible with changes introduced in the platform. It is a big challenge to make mobile apps compatible while it is deployed across smart phones with different Operating systems such as iOS, Android, Windows, and Blackberry.

Solution:

Certain development practices preferred by mobile app development companies can help alleviate this challenge of OS fragmentation. You can adopt the following recommendations to address the issue:

  • Mobile app developers are expected to build apps that support the OS version that is in trend, easily available, and that smart phone lovers popularly use
  • It is a good practice for software testers to identify the issue using emulators and then test it across mobile devices of similar OS
  • Think of opting for modern testing methods like cloud-based solutions and internal mobile lab for effective and rapid mobile testing. It also helps address security and network issues
  • Know your target audience and most preferable devices in specific geography. This will further narrow down your focus to resolve small issues in time

2. Offline Functioning

Online connectivity of a mobile app depends on the network supplier. The performance of many apps revolves around how strong the mobile network is. While making transition from high to low coverage area, they are likely to face fluctuation in the network connectivity. This affects mobile app’s performance and functioning.

Solution:

First of all, such issues should be addressed at the time of development phase. Developers should build a robust app that is resilient to such cases.

From the testing perspective, they should consider similar use cases and scenarios where app is tested for:

  • Offline performance and operations
  • Connection drop out events
  • Different Wi-Fi speeds
  • Offline support capabilities
  • Low signal strength

3. User Experience

Giving the most exemplary user experience to your app users is the heart of both app development process and mobile app testing phase. Too many features are not always the key to pleasing users. The best app is the one that appeals and befriends its users, offering them seamless, delightful and intuitive user experience.

Solution:

  • Be creative and have a unique approach while designing UI for your app
  • Check the suitability of all the features
  • Measure the user engagement level through Beta testing
  • Test the app for ease of navigation inside the app
  • Make sure user feedback are properly implemented
  • Avoid unnecessary contents and extras

4. Performance & Security

Mobile app performance and security are crucial points of considerations without which app can never be launched. In interactive apps, there is a lot of data being shared across multiple devices which increases the possibility of security issues. Public cloud is more likely to impose such threats and can also affect app’s usability.

Solution:

Developers and testers should see the issues of performance and security with utmost sincerity. To make sure the app is impeccable, they must conduct all the necessary tests.

  • Check the smallest of factors that may decelerate the app loading speed
  • Try to choose simplicity over complexity to improve app’s navigation
  • Find out about data encryption services and test its functionality.
  • If it is a private server, ensure all the interactions are secure and user’s privacy is not breached.

 5. Advanced Tools

With so many advanced app testing tools coming into the market, it often creates confusion as to which ones to use for efficient and accurate results. Testers are free to use many advanced tools available today to test the app. Also manual testing sometimes fail to test complicated mobile apps.

Solution:

Opt for mobile automation testing since it is evolving a lot faster than expected.

Automation testing also boosts testers’ efficiency, consumes less time and minimizes human errors.

There are some considerable choices for mobile app testing tools that software testers can use. Some of them are:

  • Appium
  • Ranorex
  • Eggplant
  • Selenium
  • Espresso
  • Robotium
  • Jenkins

Conclusion:

Since today users have more options than before to choose the app that satisfies all their expectations, it is cumbersome for apps to remain competitive in the market. They can show intolerance towards apps with issues of performance, compatibility, networks connectivity or poor user experience. On the other hand, businesses wish to launch apps of interactive nature to grab maximum customers. This is why app development firms should design a vast mobile app testing model that includes all the obstacles and solutions to overcome them.

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Inevitable use of internet and mobile apps has greatly inspired enterprises to perform their business operations via mobile apps. Gartner predicts that the worldwide mobile phone sales is likely to reach 1.93 billion units by 2019, which further increases demands for consumer-focused mobile apps. However, not all apps have potential to please customers. Whether or not your app will be a success depends on how good your app is to customers.

User ratings and downloads are key to app success and reflect the measure of customer experience. That is why it is essential for any digital business to invest in mobile app testing and development. Testing of mobile apps with the right tools can ensure that your app is able to deliver personalized and friction-less user experience.

Let’s explore those 5 powerful app testing tools for flawless mobile app:

1. TestFairy

TestFairy is a free app testing tool and contains impressive features that work exceedingly well for mobile app developers and testers.

Features:

Its most compelling feature is its video recording capability. TestFairy allows developers to record a video when the app is being tested. This helps them see what precisely went wrong during the development process and where the problem lies.

In addition to this, TestFairy also offers:

  • Memory logs
  • Crash reports
  • GPS

With such excellent features, it becomes easy for developers and QA professionals to locate the issue through history of occurrences.

TestFairy is one easy-to-operate, hassle-free tool that also keeps you informed of user behaviour through recorded videos.

2. Open Sauce

Open Sauce is another considerable app testing tool by Sauce Labs designed to focus on open source projects. It offers full testing environment to make sure the app is bug-free and has appreciable performance standard.

Features:

  • Users can test the app on 5 parallel virtual machines
  • You can test the app across 700+ browsers
  • Take screen shots of problem areas and errors

The major advantage you receive from Open Sauce is that you can resort to screen shots to check the errors. It also helps improve development process efficiency and app quality keeping its UI intact.

To start using Open Sauce, you can go to its website and get registered using Google code or Github services and add your project URL with a small project summary.

3. EggPlant

This is a unique test automation tool designed by TestPlant for testing Android and iOS apps.

Features:

  • Instead of tapping into apps user interface framework like many traditional tools, EggPlant leverages its intelligent image analysis technology to view the display screen and perform testing tasks.
  • It uses SenseTalk, a simple proprietary scripting language, to achieve scripting of the app.
  • It offers a reliable integrated debugging environment to identify and address problem points in the app.

Users can use one or more scripts to establish test scenario to test app functionality across multiple OS and devices.

The tool is best suited for organizations that intend to develop and launch one or more complex applications.

4. Appium

Appium is a widely popular open source testing tool used to test mobile apps, responsive mobile web apps, and native as well as hybrid apps.

It is a developer-friendly tool and has cross-platform testing abilities. Testers can depend on the same API to write codes for various test cases across both iOS and Android platforms.

Features:

  • Users of Appium tool can test iOS and Android apps using Selenium Webdriver protocol
  • It enables you to write testing codes by choosing your favourite framework from the list of options including JavaScript, C#, PHP, Java, Python and Ruby
  • To provide even more comfort, Appium liberates users from needing any special SDK while testing native apps

Clients likeYammer, Mozilla, salesforce, Zillow, cloud9 turn to Appium to achieve impeccable app quality.

5. Ranorex

Ranorex is a simple automated testing software that allows QA testers to run tests on mobile and web applications.

Ranorex saves you a good deal of time eliminating the need to modify device aspects before starting the tests across chief operating systems.

Features:

  • Users can recognize GUI objects independent of change in their size, colour or shape
  • To help you detect bugs inside the app codes more efficiently, Renorex offers seamless integration with third party tools increasing the speed of app deployment
  • Another benefit Ranorex offers to its users is that they can reuse the same codes to design multiple test cases across different devices

It serves renowned companies such as Adidas, Canon, Siemens etc.

How to choose the most powerful App testing tool?

Passing your mobile apps through a powerful app testing tool certainly contributes to making sure your app is unquestionably a knocker. Checking the app for its quality, performance, speed and usability helps separate the successful app from the unsuccessful one. Important criteria to remember to choose the best mobile app testing tool are:

  • Quick app recognition system
  • Developer-friendly environment
  • Immense testing efficiency, speed and consistency
  • Easy viewing and detection of faults and bugs
  • Ability to run same test codes across multiple devices
  • Minimal time of installation
  • Ability to record and view testing events
  • Seamless integration with different other testing environments

Your takeaway:

As any mobile app developer would agree, testing mobile apps is incredibly challenging and requires immense attention, patience and dedication. This is why you need right tools or a trustworthy app testing partner. Also, automating testing efforts can add speed and efficiency, saving you a lot of time in the process. Make sure your testing partner is aware of the latest trends in mobile app testing. We hope this article will help you pick the tool that can yield the best results.

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Mobile devices look incomplete without mobile apps. If mobile devices account for communication, apps drive engagement.

This is why businesses worldwide develop mobile apps to reach their potential prospects, establish personalized interactions and attain business growth.

And how to make sure your mobile app is perfect and persuasive to customers?

The answer lies in the standards of mobile app development process. A thriving mobile app is the product of flawless app development methods and rigorous testing format.

Through the entire process of mobile app development and testing, consumers are the biggest influencers.

Hence, your app testing must integrate customer’s perspective and business objective. Here is all you need to know about precise app testing process:

Types of Mobile App Testing

To maintain the technical aspects of the app, we recommend these major types of mobile app testing:

  • Usability testing – Checks the mobile app for its ease of use and overall user experience.

  • Compatibility testing – Tests the application across various mobiles devices, browsers, OS versions and screen sizes.

  • Interface testing – Tests the appearance and navigational aspects of the app such as menu options, buttons, tabs, white space, responsiveness, bookmarks, history, settings, etc.

  • Services testing – Tests available services of the application in online and offline mode.

  • Performance testing – Tests the performance level of the application (battery usage, file sharing speed, data usage) when switching its network connection from 2G, 3G, 4G to Wi-Fi.

  • Operational testing – Tests the data backup, loss and recovery options in case of battery problems or app upgrading process.

  • Installation testing – Checks the installation behaviour of the app by installing and uninstalling it on different devices.

  • Security Testing – Tests if the application is capable of protecting private information of users or not.

Mobile App Testing Strategy

Mobile application test strategy ensures all the standards of quality and performance are properly maintained. It usually contains:

1) The Device Selection

While choosing the device for testing, the main consideration should be of popularity of the devices. Run your eyes through the market to figure out which devices are widely preferred by users. Clients or app developers are the deciders for this.

Apart from popularity, other factors that drive the device selection could be:

  • Operating System
  • Form factors
  • Screen resolution
  • Memory capacity
  • Connectivity

Testing must be handled across all widely used OS versions for different screen size and resolutions of devices in use. Check the functioning and compatibility of apps for various memory and connectivity options for accurate analysis.

2) Emulators

Emulator is a system where the app is passed from one environment to another without making any changes to the original version.

Emulators duplicate the features of the app and give a real system to work on. The use of emulators is conducive to primary stages of app development as they assist with:

  • Agile testing with great efficiency
  • Basic app functionality testing
  • Network bypass,
  • Creating an artificial live environment
  • Test scripting languages.

During various phases of mobile app development, three major types of emulators needed for testing are:

  • Device Emulator
  • Browser Emulator
  • Operating systems Emulator

Some of the free open source mobile device emulators are:

  • Mobile Phone Emulator
  • iPad Peek
  • BlueStacks
  • MobiReady
  • Screenfly
  • Responsinator
  • Jar of Beans

3) Cloud Computing For App Testing:

With cloud computing, application testing gets further easier to manage with infinite combinations of testing scenario. Devices are run on multiple systems or networks enabled by internet to deploy, test and manage applications. In order to run tests, it creates a simulated web based mobile environment for a developer to access on-demand mobile devices.

Benefits:

  • Automatic Backup and easy recovery and restoration of app data.
  • Gives the advantage of unlimited storage capacity
  • Highly synchronized, efficient and pre-configured structures
  • No need for creating time-eating on-premise test conditions
  • Quick, location-independent and full access on different devices
  • Controls project costs and increases ROI
  • Speedy and quick deployment.
  • Supports most complicated mobile apps with huge scalability
  • Quick and easy online solutions for defects found
  • Can support multiple for running the same script
  • Reduces TTM (time to market) and accelerates testing pace

Demerits:

  • Due to third party services, users have limited control and access over various functions for testing

  • Since the set-up is entirely on internet, unstable network connections compromise testing process and functioning

  • The entire set-up is on internet, which means security risks and chances of data theft are high

4) Automated and Manual Testing

When it comes to effective regression testing in development phase, automation testing wins over manual one. However, automated testing comes with significant amount of investment.

Choose manual testing if:

  • The application has new functionality
  • The application needs not more attempts of testing

Automated testing is preferred when:

  • There are repeated attempts for regression tests
  • There are complex scenarios that may consume more time if manually executed

There are two types of automated testing tools:

  • Object based mobile testing tools (e.g M-eux test, Rapise, Ranorex, ClicAutomate, Batik)
  • Image based mobile testing tools (e.g Egg Plant, AppVerify, AppLoader, Sikuli, JAutomate)

5) Network Configuration

Network testing for mobile apps validate the application consistency on various popular network connections such as 2G, 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi.

Network connectivity plays a vital role for apps that are hugely dependent on its online status. There are many mobile apps that need proper internet services to ensure healthy functioning.

This requires QA testing experts to test mobile apps for real network environments to measure application’s actual behaviour.

To simulate network environment, many handy tools are available that helps check app’s performance against network speeds, connection failures, bandwidth limitations and other practical scenarios.

Testing process gets more precise with network simulation technique as it determines how the mobile app under the test will perform in real-time network conditions.

6) Mobile App Performance Testing

Mobile application becomes complex software when it gets integrated with a device environment and interacts with its various functionalities. Therefore, it is advisable to test the application for its practical performance when run on the device.

Users store ample amount of data on their devices that have generous storage capacity. This is likely to mean that your mobile application’s performance is subject to the volume of albums, files, messages, images and other content in the app. This is highly important when your app houses user-generated data.

For this reason, the app must be tested for its behaviour and responses in heavy-content scenarios. If the application has a component on its server, the performance must be checked for varying number of users.

7) Mobile App Security Testing

Security of user data is the most crucial part when it comes to building expectations of app usability. Users are so quick to disapprove your application if they encounter security loopholes or vulnerabilities in your app.

Users are possessive about their credentials, so you must remain careful about providing unbreakable security standard for your mobile app.

Some of the checkpoints of mobile app security testing are:

  • Secure network protocols
  • SSL data encryption for enhanced security
  • Storage of payment information inside the app
  • Number of steps or permission levels for full access
  • Use of quality and high-security certificates
  • The process of user authentication and its complexity
  • Number of permissible login attempts

For your app to meet high security level, it must encrypt intimate credentials of users such as username and passwords. To strengthen the security, mobile app development companies nowadays use several modern authentication methods and testing scenarios where apps are tested on Proxy servers.

Special Test Case Scenarios

Some of the other essential scenarios for which your mobile app should be tested are:

  • Battery usage: To monitor the battery consumption while app is being run on mobile devices.
  • Data requirements: To determine the data required for installation and check if the users with a limited data plan can download it.
  • Response Speed of the application: To checkthe application for the time it takes to respond on different devices against parameters like memory capacity, network types, etc.
  • Functionality of the application: To ensure application runs healthily and does not collapse in adverse or changing network conditions.

Your Takeaway

It is hard to build a perfect mobile app without fostering the clear idea of precise mobile app testing. The app testing steps discussed above are core essentials of smooth mobile app testing strategy that drives success.

However, there are many other real-time scenarios that come to challenge the developers and testers throughout the various stages of development. Careful selection emulators and physical devices, manual checking and exhaustive app testing strategy create a ground for launching a high-quality app.