12 Tips for Effective Mobile App Testing

The market for mobile apps is incredibly competitive in this era of mobility. Anywhere you go these days, you see people in the same posture: head bowed, barely perceptible movement, eyes focused downward. They’re all doing the same thing, peering intently at a mobile application made possible by mobile developers.

It needs to be a top-quality app to stand out from the crowd, which requires user-friendly design and thorough testing.

Here are a few practical tips for mobile application development teams trying to build an eye-catching mobile app:

1) Know Pain Points of your End Users

To build a successful mobile app, you need a lot of data about your end-users, whether it is B2B, B2C, or B2H sales. You can only make informed business decisions, prioritize development, and refine the user experience if you know the pain points of the end-user and how they are going to engage with your app.

Having End-users feedback and taking a survey is crucial, not only for identifying relevant test strategies but also for making business decisions down the line. One needs to understand the business first to perform better testing.

Through conducting surveys, focus groups, and the analysis of user reviews,you can understand what works and what doesn’t. Moreover, analytics tools integrated within the app allow you to source real-time data on how users are engaging, which informs both your testing strategy and your business decisions.

2) Functionality Check is Top Priority

The core functionality of your app needs to be rock solid as People seek out your app to perform specific functions. You have probably noticed that app specification and testing methodologies for mobile applications may not cover all necessary testing aspects. Ask questions regarding app specifics you think will be controversial in the future. Keep giving heads up and try to uncover all possible hidden risks.

Comprehensive Functional Testing is a must. It means that “do not test features in isolation, but test the end-to-end user journey to find out if something breaks a workflow or if there’s some logical defect.” Proactively ask what potential issues may arise, and include them in your test scenarios. These are pretty much risk factors, which you catch ahead of time to avoid expensive fixes later on.

3) App Usability Check

With the flourishing market for mobiles, the testing of mobile apps has become exciting day by day. Just by running functional tests on a mobile application, you cannot give sign-off of the app. Next to functionality, usability and UX are equally important. An app should be intuitive to use, easy to navigate, and accessible.

Bad UX design can turn the best app into a frustrating experience. There are a few other testing types like UI testing, field testing, network testing, battery life testing, etc. that need to be done.

UI/UX testing is one of the important testing types in mobile application testing and it should not be taken lightly.

Having a good user interface is as important as having intuitive functionality. Testers must consider usability and uncover issues faced. One should not wait until the app is ready for testing to evaluate the user experience, as it is always better and cost-saving to find a defect in the Analysis/Design Phase rather than the testing phase.

You can begin testing the user experience as soon as the prototype or design mock-up is ready and can also suggest loopholes in design.

Additionally, ensure the app is accessible by testing for compliance with accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG) and ensuring it’s usable by individuals with visual or motor impairments.

4) Test Against Stresses and Strains of the Real World

The goal of mobile app development is to deliver a great user experience. This includes not just the functionality and usability of an application, but also how well app performance is.

While functional testing assesses the design integrity and usability of the app, it does so under ideal conditions. It’s vital to find out how your app will stand up to the stresses and strains of the real world, and your testing regime needs to be tailored accordingly.

A good stress test will push the app to its breaking point. It should also expose issues that wouldn’t come up under normal conditions, so you can then fix them – before they affect your end-users.

Timing is important here: it’s best to leave the stress test right up until you’re ready to go live with your product, or update. If, like many developers, you’ve adopted an agile methodology, leave your stress test until the hardening sprint (the additional, final sprint you run when all the other tests are complete.

Also, the performance tests must cover battery and resource usage. Innumerable mobile applications have lost clients due to excessive drainage of batteries or poor ways of managing resources. As well as strive for quick load times (ideally below two seconds), efficient usage of batteries, and very low resource consumption.

5) Don’t Forget Emotional Engagement

Donald Norman has first proposed the concept of Emotional Design. It proposes that a person will find an aesthetically appealing product much more functional and useful because it connects with people on an emotional level. This means that a well-designed and visually stunning product has a much better chance of selling than its blander counterpart.

In the mobile era, there are hundreds of apps serving the same business ideas, but only a handful dominates the market. Many apps are abandoned after single use due to a lack of emotional engagement. Building hooks to encourage people back is important. One needs to test the emotional engagement of the app with a representative group of beta users.

6) Compatibility Testing Scope

It’s impossible to test every combination of browsers, devices, and platforms. Define the scope of Compatibility testing early and revisit it every three months or so to keep up with the pace of the trending mobile market. Analyze end-user data and do market research to identify the most used devices and platform versions by your customers. Most testing should be focused on the combination that represents the largest number of end-users.

7) Cloud Service to Test on More Devices

We need to perform testing in all the devices used by the end-user but what if you are not having all devices? Here comes in picture Cloud-Based mobile app testing.

You can use emulators during development, but eventually, your app needs to be tested on real devices. It’s impossible to maintain a full inventory of all mobile devices. Consider using a cloud-based device management platform such as TestObject, Browserstack, Saucelab, Testdroid which will give the whole team easy access to a wide range of devices and platform versions.

Cloud-based mobile app testing is a way for testers and developers to access a wide variety of tools, devices, and communication. This means that testers can get access to different devices, and OS without physically owning them. To use the services, the app needs to be uploaded. 

8) Refine and Optimize

The aim should always be – Faster and Better. A Delay of a second in response can result in a 7% reduction in conversion. There are no defined targets for mobile app performance, but in general two seconds of loading time or less is needed for users to be satisfied.

There are a few specific types of testing that work very well for mobile apps to refine and optimize them. Use A/B testing to find out what end users prefer and make final decisions on the feedback. Fake-door testing can also be used to determine which new features end-users are most interested in at an early stage of development.

9) Conduct API Testing

Many mobile applications interact with the server and other services through APIs. API testing is the important thing that helps to ensure that the data of your application are correctly transmitted, the responses get in time, and error handling is performed efficiently. 

Testing of APIs can be done by utilizing various tools such as Postman or SoapUI under different conditions: rate limiting, error handling, security vulnerabilities, to name a few. Ensure that APIs are resilient and can handle a variety of edge cases. 

10) Security Testing and Data Protection

While hurrying to go live with an app, security is often overlooked. But testing for vulnerabilities is very important, especially if your app deals with sensitive information.

Mobile applications are basically targeted by almost every type of security threat imaginable, from data breaches to insecure APIs.

Penetration testing along with encryption of data through secure coding will protect your app from a cyber-attack.

Concentrate your efforts on testing for vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting XSS, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Ensure that all data of its users will be kept and, when sent, will be rendered accordingly in a safe manner.

11) Post-Launch Testing and Continuous Monitoring

Once the app is live, your work doesn’t end. Mobile app testing should remain an ongoing process. After launch, keep monitoring performance, gathering user feedback, and reviewing crash reports.

Leverage bug tracking tools such as Sentry or BugSnag to identify and address issues in real-time. Consistently track app performance with tools like Google Analytics or Mixpanel to pinpoint improvement areas and refine the app based on user behavior insights.

12) Incorporate CI/CD for Mobile Development

Set up a CI/CD pipeline to further enhance efficiency and simplify your development process. You can make use of any other service, such as Jenkins, Bitrise, or Travis CI, which automatically creates test scenarios, builds, and deploys your apps. 

CI/CD ensures that code changes are automatically tested and integrated into the main app. It will not allow human errors to happen and speed up the development and testing.

Conclusion

Building and testing a mobile app is a multi-faceted process that requires attention to detail, careful planning, and continuous iteration.

By considering everything from core functionality and performance to security and emotional engagement, you can develop an app that not only meets user needs but also stands out in a crowded market. Use the best practices outlined here, and your app will be better positioned to succeed in today’s competitive mobile ecosystem.

If you need expert assistance or have questions about mobile app testing, feel free to contact Testscenario.

Contact us to ensure your mobile app excels in every aspect of user experience and quality assurance.