Mobile applications play an increasingly significant role in our daily lives. It’s crucial to ensure their functionality, usability, and accessibility across a wide range of devices and platforms. Traditional methods of manual testing have limitations, making it less practical in the fast-paced world of mobile app development within a DevOps operating model. In this blog, we will explore why automated testing of mobile applications is no longer a choice. It’s a necessary tool for meeting the demands of modern application development.
The complexities of mobile app testing
Mobile applications must perform seamlessly across various devices, operating systems, and network conditions. This complexity is compounded by many factors, such as different screen sizes, hardware configurations, and user interactions. Effective testing must account for the following:
- Usability: Ensuring the app is intuitive and user-friendly.
- Cross-platform compatibility: Verifying that the app works on iOS, Android, and potentially other platforms.
- Accessibility: Making sure the app is usable by individuals with disabilities.
- Multiple operating system versions: Ensuring compatibility with current and legacy OS versions.
- Performance: Verifying devices, operating systems, and software applications meet performance and reliability requirements under various network conditions.
Traditional manual testing: Strengths and weaknesses
Manual testing means human testers interact with the application as end users would. This kind of testing has its merits, and will likely never be completely eliminated. Humans are capable of detecting subtle issues that automated tests might overlook. However, it’s not without its significant challenges.
- It’s time-consuming: Manually testing an app across multiple devices and OS versions is labor-intensive and slow.
- There can be scalability issues: As the number of supported devices and OS versions grows, the effort required for manual testing increases exponentially.
- There are inconsistencies: Human error can lead to inconsistent results, particularly when tests are repeated frequently.
- Test coverage is limited: Comprehensive testing is often impractical due to time and resource constraints, leading to potential oversights.
To address these challenges, automated testing should be added to the overall quality testing strategy.
The rise of automated testing
Automated testing involves using specialized software tools to execute predefined test cases on the application. These tools simulate user interactions and verify the app’s behavior against expected outcomes. Automated testing offers significant advantages over manual testing, particularly in the context of mobile applications. These include:
- Efficiency and speed
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- Rapid execution: Automated tests can run much faster than human testers, completing the test execution in minutes, which may take hours or days manually.
- 24/7 testing: Tests can be scheduled to run at any time, including overnight, maximizing productivity and ensuring continuous testing.
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- Scalability
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- Parallel testing: Automated tools can run multiple tests simultaneously across different devices and OS versions, dramatically increasing coverage without proportional increases in time.
- Cloud testing: Leveraging cloud-based services allows access to a wide range of devices and OS versions without needing physical hardware, further enhancing scalability.
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- Consistency and reliability
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- Repeatability: Automated tests perform the same steps in the same way every time, ensuring consistent and reliable results.
- Reduced human error: By minimizing human involvement, automated testing reduces the risk of errors due to fatigue, oversight, or inconsistent procedures.
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- Comprehensive coverage
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- Extensive testing: Automated tests can cover a broader range of scenarios and edge cases, including those that are tedious or difficult to test manually.
- Regression testing: Automated tests are particularly effective for regression testing, ensuring that new changes do not introduce unexpected issues in previously working areas of the app.
Addressing key testing dimensions with automation
As companies look at leveraging automation to address challenges in manual testing, there are several places where they can gain immediate improvement. These initial automation focus areas represent testing types that have either been extremely difficult to assess or have been overly time-consuming, thus lengthening traditional testing cycles.
- Usability testing
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- Automated usability testing tools can simulate user interactions to evaluate the app’s user interface and overall user experience. While human judgment is indispensable for assessing nuanced usability, automation can efficiently identify glaring issues and consistently meet basic usability standards.
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- Cross-platform compatibility
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- Automated tools like Tricentis Tosca, Tricentis Testim, and others enable testing across various platforms with a single test script. These tools abstract the underlying platform differences, allowing developers to focus on test logic rather than platform-specific details.
- This cross-platform capability ensures that apps behave consistently across iOS, Android, and other platforms, providing a uniform user experience.
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- Accessibility testing
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- Automated testing tools can automatically check for common accessibility issues, such as inadequate color contrast, missing alt text, and improper use of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) roles. These automated checks ensure compliance with accessibility standards like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Americans with Disability Act (ADA).
- Automation in accessibility testing helps identify issues early in the development cycle, making addressing them easier and more cost-effective.
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- Testing across multiple operating system versions
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- Automation frameworks support testing on different OS versions, ensuring that apps remain functional on the latest and older versions. This is critical for maintaining a broad user base, as not all users update their OS immediately.
- Tools like Tricentis Device Cloud offer extensive device farms that include various OS versions, enabling thorough testing without requiring extensive physical device collections.
The future of mobile application testing
The shift towards automated testing is not just a trend. It’s a necessity driven by the pace of modern software development. DevOps emphasizes continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), requiring rapid feedback on code changes. Automated testing can be integrated seamlessly into a CI/CD pipeline, providing immediate insights and feedback into code quality and stability.
Advancements in AI and machine learning are further enhancing the capabilities of automated testing tools. AI-powered testing can intelligently generate test cases, adapt to application changes, and predict potential failure points, making the testing process smarter and more efficient. We can see an example of this in Tricentis Testim Copilot.
A Cautionary tale
While test automation and AI promise to accelerate the mobile testing process, it should not be seen as a stand-alone strategy. Quality doesn’t happen only during testing; it happens during design and development and throughout the software development lifecycle.
Companies that only focus on testing improvements run the risk of only speeding the rate at which they discover the poor quality they produce. Companies must focus on improving built-in quality (BiQ) by improving the processes and tools that help define, design, and deliver quality software for testing. Testing is a form of inspection or discovery, and it only exposes the relative quality that you have in your product. Companies that want to drive quality value to their end users must focus on the full development lifecycle while improving testing techniques.
State of mobile applications quality
Tricentis recently published the State of Mobile Quality Report 2024, based on research conducted by Censuswide. This report is worth reading for anyone looking to improve mobile quality and implement mobile testing automation. One interesting statistic in the report was the number of mobile applications available across the mobile platforms. Over seven million applications are available, and this number will only get larger.
More and more companies are moving significant revenue focus to their digital channels. This move puts even higher pressure on organizations to drive highly performant, usable, high-quality applications. Executives and development team members alike agree that testing is a vital component of their quality strategy.
Conclusion on the future of mobile applications
While manual testing has its place, particularly for exploratory testing and assessing subjective aspects of user experience, the advantages of automated testing for mobile applications are clear. Automated testing delivers efficiency, scalability, consistency, and comprehensive coverage that manual testing cannot match. By leveraging automated testing, developers can ensure their mobile applications are robust, user-friendly, and accessible across various devices and operating systems, ultimately leading to higher-quality apps and better user experiences.
As mobile technology continues to evolve, so too must our testing strategies. Embracing automated testing and AI is not just about keeping pace with technological advancements; it’s about staying ahead and delivering the best possible products to users. The future of mobile app testing is automated, and it’s a future that promises greater innovation, efficiency, and excellence in app development.
