Understanding mobile testing and how to deploy it for your company’s needs is essential for customer success. Learn the mobile and app testing basics and access resources as you dive deeper.
Documentation Live mobile app testing Real & virtual devicesMobile testing continues to grow as mobile devices become more important in our every day lives. According to Statista in 2021, 92.6% (4.32 billion) of internet users accessed the internet through mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). This rate will surely continue to grow.
Mobile application testing (MAT) is the process of testing mobile apps to ensure that mobile apps work as they should on any device or browser. Mobile testing can be done manually on real devices and emulators/simulators or with automation.
Mobile testing helps improve user experience with software, apps, and more. With proper MAT, you can improve QA to catch bugs on the front end and backend, test APIs, and simulate different operating systems.
Just doing device hardware checks has been called “mobile testing” in the past. MAT differentiates itself from the earlier term by widening the scope of testing to include the software of a device (the app), what a user will experience when they use the app, and, ultimately, to aim for increased user satisfaction.
Manual testing is a human input, analysis or evaluation. This approach is user-centric, focusing on explorative ways of monitoring, whether a mobile application meets user requirements and expectations. You should test your app for look & feel and for usability, making sure that it is user friendly. You should not be using manual testing for all your testing, but just for about 20% of them, for the rest you can use automated testing
Automated testing is another mobile application testing approach. While the aim of manual testing is to test the “user experience,” automated mobile testing aims to test all the functionality that characterizes an app, and ensures that all features and functionalities work as expected (for example, regression testing) after code changes and app updates are implemented.
Given the benefits and capabilities of each testing method, an integrated testing approach that incorporates both manual and automated tests is the way to go. And with this approach, a best practice is to automate 80% of your test cases while performing 20% manually.
Here are the specific test cases that should be automated:
Automate the most frequent test-cases Automate test cases that are easy to automate Automate test cases that have predictable results Automate the most tedious manual test cases Automate frequently used functionality Automate test cases that add the most business valueAutomate test cases that can have high cost implications when the associated feature breaks down in production
Beta tests allow mobile development teams to validate the applications with “real users” in real-world environments. It helps teams to get feedback from end users who represent an app’s actual user base. By testing application performance and functionality with a beta group prior to general release, teams gain a deeper level of validation that the software meets end-user requirements. They also significantly reduce the risk that an unforeseen application problem post-deployment will necessitate the application release to be rolled back or require the team to push out an update quickly in order to fix a problem with the production release.
Read more about the best practices of mobile app beta testing to learn how beta testing works, why it’s important, and how to get the most out of beta testing processes.
Mobile app testing has three major points of focus, each complementary to the others.