In other words, we are in an era where mobile apps have become the “face” of companies, and the experience of mobile apps is directly linked to the evaluation of companies. While testing is an integral part of app development, there are also challenges and caveats unique to mobile. Is there a tool or method that reduces the burden on the person in charge and realizes speed that does not miss business opportunities, with less cost burden?
Functional testing can only be done by automation
Let’s list the challenges in testing mobile apps.
- There are multiple OSs such as iOS and Android, and some users are using different versions.
- Some carriers and manufacturers customize the OS
- Frequent OS updates, frequent updates to the app itself
- Users may use it in environments with limited network quality
- We purchase and test as many devices as possible in-house for each project
There are so many things that come to mind right away. Of these, 1 to 3 means “a large number of test cases”. The traditional method of having a large number of testers perform functional tests on a variety of devices and record them in Excel will eventually fail. Some companies may have already gone bankrupt. In other words, functional testing of mobile apps is impossible without automation.
Functional testing cannot be done without automation, but not all tests can be automated. For example, if you tap here while sliding, it will freeze. Finding timing-dependent bugs can only be done manually.
As a test environment, there are functional test tools and manual test efficiency tools under the test management tool that registers test cases, and test scripts are run on the device through the mobile app testing companies.
Performance testing is meaningless unless you reproduce a real user
Another thing that cannot be done with functional test tools alone is load testing. Since it is nonsense to prepare thousands of functional test tools and actual machines, it is common to create a script that emulates the actual description of user operations and communication between servers to apply a multiplicity load. For this reason, it cannot be tested unless a system that applies a load is built.
Performance testing also requires emulation by non-users. For example, four of the issues listed at the beginning are network quality issues. There are several test types, such as unit/component test, integration test, and UX test by the development team, but the pre-release mobile test environment is usually done using in-house WiFi, in which case the network. The quality is very good. For this reason, at the final system test stage, it was found that it did not work well in a 3G environment, and the architecture may be reviewed, such as asynchronous processing. To be agile, it’s best to test with the network quality used by real users from an early stage.
In addition, there are many mobile apps that incorporate external services these days. At this time, if it is a paid service, there is a problem that it cannot be tested very much because a cost is incurred for each test. Furthermore, if the data is cached, the response performance is not measured, so data virtualization is also required.
