Even though 2020 was a highly turbulent year, it made tech enthusiasts explore how to overcome all the chaos through innovation. Throughout the year, businesses moving forward towards the digital world made it imperative that technology was the only way to progress.
Nevertheless, the rapid movement towards digital transformation has given rise to better QA trends and, of course, more advanced mobile app testing. Especially when mobile app testing has made a prominent place on the list of top software trends to watch in 2021, CXOs must intervene in mobile app testing procedures.
Moreover, the agile environment that asks for frequent iterations to meet the aggressively changing requirements of the modern-day software, techniques like test automation and scriptless testing can easily help achieve the quality, speed, and performance goals involved. But still, there is a large community of mobile developers and testers struggling to meet the development and maintenance goals related to mobile technologies.
More importantly, the notion of mobile app testing has drastically changed to allow developers with rapid market launches and maximum quality. Also, the introduction of various low code and no code techniques that developers currently use have shown great efficiency in meeting the relentless demand for faster application launches.
All in all, the involvement of CXOs in mobile app testing could enable the developers and testers to overcome all the challenges associated with mobile app testing. From leading on the right tools to the right approach, framework, and techniques, CXOs could intervene to make the process much smoother.
In this blog, we will highlight all such aspects of mobile app testing while underlining why CXOs need to be part of the entire process when they need to achieve more stable and reliable results with the end products.
Let's begin.
Making The Selection with the Tools
Since planning a mobile test automation project begins with choosing the right set of tools, the timely intervention by CXOs could help improve the test process offering maximum robustness, reusability, and incorporation of AI and ML technologies to create a self-healing mechanism.
According to Gartner, "tools that involve scriptless testing have the potential to eliminate the amount of scripting for tests using data, model, object, and keyword approach."
Therefore, CXOs could encourage adopting such tools to allow business user testing and reduce maintenance costs involved.
As there are no standard rules for picking the tool for mobile testing, picking a single tool for all the testing operations is never a mandate. In short, every mobile test project must be checked for its unique requirements and features for selecting the right set of tools, even when requirements are the same or different for every app you need to test.
As there are so many tools available in the market that can help you with mobile testing goals, it is more important to foster the right team culture and ensure precision with the execution process by the CXOs.
When it comes to tools, the primary focus of CXOs should be the use of tools that can help with easier configurations and better efficiency with the least maintenance. Though this factor needs careful consideration to the project and business requirements, it is always good to stick with the recommended approach for CXOs to strategize the next mobile app testing project.
A New Approach to Mobile Testing
Even when you have the most efficient tools to proceed with your mobile testing objectives, it is the right choice with the test approach that helps your testers to show equal participation, making way towards advanced 'agile' practices and 'shift-left culture.
Besides, the CXOs should try taking the responsibility of analyzing the application under test to plan the possible scenarios of testing while working over existing challenges. Though this might need a holistic approach, this can help have more adaptable solutions by making way through challenges involved with traditional practices and the adoption of modern tools. Such an approach toward mobile testing could help reduce the cost of maintenance and the effort required to meet the technical gaps and make the process more user-friendly for all your manual and automated tests.
Above all, when the global automation testing market is likely to jump at 68 Million USD by 2025, CXOs could use the potential of such technologies to empower the mobile testing practices while adapting to current trends and foster digital transformation that can lead any business towards the greater good.
Though business organizations must stick with the traditional practices that have been doing fine over the years, making way for the new approach could aid in establishing more efficient and reliable test frameworks in place.
Selecting The Perfect Mobile Test Framework
Planning on the above-defined guidelines for selecting mobile tools and working on a test approach could enable CXOs to guide teams on developing time and cost-efficient test frameworks. This new pragmatic approach could also aid in bringing the potential of teams when it comes to rapid deliveries without compromising on the functionality and non-technical aspects of the business model.
Since the old-age test frameworks have matured over time, CXOs could take this opportunity to transform the test frameworks for the modern deliveries by adopting a low code or no code practice that seems to be the essence of futuristic development and testing operations. However, the more critical factors that CXOs could keep in their mind while working on the advanced mobile test frameworks should emphasize on:
- Test scripts that are made to run across different devices and operating systems without any configuration issues.
- To promote the use of test scripts that can be exported in open standard and does not involve vendor lock-in.
- To foster maximum use of no-code or scriptless approach for testing.
Especially when 84 percent of QA organizations working on mobile app testing believe that testing on real devices helps achieve successful results than using simulators, CXOs could even promote the development of mobile device labs or IoT device labs to fasten the process. Though it may initially sound like an expensive strategy to implement, it could help testers to explore a wide range of deployment choices such as cloud, on-prem, private, or public networks, while gaining learning on support platforms, real-device experiences, script customizations, along with automation of the test support requirements in a cost-effective manner.
Since a framework is meant to improve the process, it would even aid lesser maintenance chances on tools with simple configurations and improved efficiency that aligns well with the business requirements.
More importantly, the mobile test frameworks' transformation could even help create better engagements offering enhanced domain expertise. From rapid development of test cases to painless test suite updates, the improving framework could make the entire process evolve for the better. Also, such critical assessment of the process, tool, and current strategy could help lead to better benefits with improvement on design and development methodologies.
Why CXOs Need to Intervene: Exploring The Benefits
Mobile app testing has its very own unique benefits to bring to the development communities and the organization. Moreover, when CXOs are directly involved in the development and testing operations, mobile testing could offer immense benefits that could further help enhance the scope of the projects.
“The most common software development testing model was agile, or agile-like, with 87% of companies taking this approach in 2019. Next up was DevOps at 36%, up from 28% in 2018,” claimed PractiTest. And therefore, CXOs need to actively participate in mobile testing operations, driving the best of Agile and DevOps into mobile testing. Some of the common benefits that such an approach could help you yield include:
- Mobile app testing helps to improve the quality of the mobile app
- Mobile testing helps to create easy to scale applications accessible across multiple platforms
- Mobile testing enables creating apps rich in functionality and usability, which further increase app consistency and quality
- Mobile testing helps create apps that offer similar and smooth functions even when thousands of users try to use the app at the same time.
- Mobile testing enables CXOs to be ensured of seamless app usability, encouraging market interactions.
- Effective mobile testing offers flawless and high-performance apps that help to attract maximum users and improve downloads.
- End-to-end testing could help overcome any interruptions related to compatibility that might lead to network interruptions.
- Mobile testing for accessibility allows testers to ensure that the app works well for all types of users.
- Speed, accuracy, code reusability, and all the high-performance factors could be achieved using mobile testing.
Nevertheless, reaping these benefits of mobile testing requires testers to stick with certain best practices that only CXOs could lead. And therefore, CXOs must show active participation in the testing process.
Mobile Testing Practices CXOs Must Adopt
- Making the right choice with the device
The primary responsibility of CXOs involved in the testing operations is about making the right selection of the device. This choice is most often made depending on the application usage, purpose, and the demographics that are most likely to interact with the devices. This data can help CXOs help testers understand the various screen size and operating systems that the target users most prefer.
2. Early testing & test scope objectives
The next thing that needs to be done while progressing on the testing process is to aim at the development process. CXOs could help testing teams take on a proper testing strategy meant to identify bugs or defects at the earliest stages of development. Moreover, the test scope objectives that involve early tracking of errors could help avoid issues at the production stage, saving on costs and time.
3. Real-time Testing
Though there is no denial of the fact that simulation devices and emulators have made the entire mobile testing process easy, it is equally necessary to take the test operations in real-time scenarios. This should involve the use of real devices that can help yield results from real scenarios and helps confirm the success of the application.
4. Functionality, Interface, and Usability
If you need your mobile application to perform flawlessly, it is vital to make your application test for its functionality. Functional testing is meant to test your application for its performance across different devices used by your target audience. On the other hand, Interface testing is meant to validate the application for its responsiveness and navigation. This involves checking on buttons, text inputs, device orientation, screen validation, navigation validation, etc.
All in all, working across the functional and interface testing allows testers to identify any gaps related to app usability because of skipping some specified requirements. Usability testing helps to get a first-hand understanding of the application replicating scenarios where the app is used for the first time.
Moreover, all these test operations allow early identification of errors that might restrict the app's functionality and hinder production. More importantly, testing an application on the functionality, interface, and usability benchmarks allows the development of user-friendly applications and an intuitive interface. From easy navigation flow to usability, CXOs could push DevOps and testers to create mobile apps of great success.
5. Performance & Security Testing
Mobile users need applications that offer minimum load time, and achieving such objectives requires testers to look for performance and load-related objectives. Ideally, it should involve testing applications for speed, reliability, memory leaks, image size requirements, and scalability concerns.
This sort of testing helps the QAOps teams ensure a pleasing experience throughout the application for users who need to access the functions and activities of the application. Also, CXOs need to aim for security testing to overcome any rampant cyber-attacks that might lead to data compromises or loss of sensitive information sent or received by the users over any network through the application. However, timely actions related to security testing could help users enjoy an application free from threats offering secure and safe transactions or navigation.
6. Automated Mobile Testing
When you need to save some cost and time for your organization without compromising on your application's performance, security, and functionality requirements, make sure you should not skip on automating the mobile testing operations. This will help you have the added speed and accuracy and improve the test conditions for added performance. However, this might need CXOs to help testing teams with the right choice of mobile testing tools to meet the automation goals.
7. Checking The Battery Efficiency
When it comes to people's favorite mobile applications, users want applications that bring the minimum load to the battery. Therefore, the application should be coded and tested to offer minimum load on the processor and free the mobile system from any unnecessary burden. Since battery consumption is an important aspect of the purchase strategy followed by the customers, working on the battery factor of the application could allow an improved market response.
8. Global Access Testing
The development process of an application should be done in a manner to ensure global adoption. However, meeting such goals need testing teams to understand different geographies. This would help developers and testers to understand different languages and currencies to validate the application for a global audience.
Though it may appear like a complex testing task, testing the application on different landscapes allows CXOs to ensure that the testing teams meet the objectives related to business success without compromising on efficiency and performance benchmarks.
A well-defined mobile test strategy involves selecting the right devices by the CXOs and the testing team to ensure the best mobile testing results are offered to the end-users. Moreover, it is vital to have the right balance of emulators and simulators to check the real-time performance of mobile apps. This would also aid mobile testing to be a more continuous process while driving the performance and load testing objectives offering seamless app performance.
More importantly, it is necessary to automate the mobile app testing procedures to achieve the best test results by implementing the most efficient mobile automation testing tools. In short, the right combination of technologies and the right mobile testing automation tools helps you to ensure your mobile apps are successful and create delightful user journeys.
The Crux
The last two decades have turned out to be the blast of mobile devices, and businesses from various domains have started to lean on mobile devices to conduct their business operations in the most efficient manner. However, the only thing that makes the difference is the application's flawless performance, offering end users a pleasing experience.
After all, only the apps that offer performance to the end-users are most accepted, and such goals could only be achieved through rapid end-to-end testing. Moreover, there are so many benefits that mobile application testing could help businesses to leverage their true potential. But it is equally necessary for CXOs to follow the best practices associated with the mobile apps ensuring the teams follow their business objectives.
Nevertheless, many CXOs across the globe still do not accept the criticality of the mobile testing services since they haven't faced the heat of the testing deficiency in threatening the bottom line. However, meeting the benchmarks of brand and reputation can help the loss of precious customers and ensure data privacy, which is a mere understated factor in the development industry.
All in all, CXOs need to understand success in achieving digital transformation by drilling the change from top to the bottom. Bringing this change, CXOs need to gel up with testing teams, developers, and board and CEO, to drive the desired agility and DevOps goals accelerating the digital growth through futuristic mobile apps. In a nutshell, leveraging next-gen mobile testing services is the only way that could help CXOs to ensure the best and high-performing mobile apps can be developed, offering you an edge over your competitors.