Mobile Testing Best Practices Enhance Your APP’s Performance & Security

Mobile app testing services are an important phase in the software development process, and they ensure that the software is free from any glitches, bugs, and technical flaws. It is also important to enhance user experience to meet the expectations of businesses as well as customers.

In this blog, we will discuss mobile testing strategies, setting up a testing environment, best practices for leveraging mobile app testing, and much more. Let’s find out how the best practices leverage the mobile testing processes.

Understanding Mobile App Testing

Mobile app testing best practices is a process of evaluating the overall functionality of a mobile application before releasing it to the users. The purpose of mobile app testing is to determine whether the mobile app is compatible with several devices, browsers, and different operating systems to meet the expectations of both businesses and customers.

Types of Mobile App Testing

The mobile testing best practices consist of the following types of testing processes for a mobile application.

Functional Testing

It is one of the mobile app testing methods that ensures the overall functionality of the application is running properly, ensures the quality of the product meets customer satisfaction, and minimizes the risk associated with the application.

Usability Testing

This type of testing is purely based on how users are reacting to the developed mobile application. The testing requires real devices and real users who use the application and test the app should be easily navigable so that users can perform the tasks without any hassle.

Performance Testing

Performance Testing Services ensure the developed mobile application maintains stability and is responsive to real-world load scenarios. This is a vital test process that ensures the mobile app does not get stuffed under heavy web traffic and acts differently, which reduces its usability.

Security Testing

The security testing of a mobile application ensures the authentication of the app, which should be free from unauthorized access by intruders. This testing protects the app’s data and provides secure communication between the app and customers.

Compatibility Testing

One of the best mobile testing practices is to run the mobile application on different devices, operating systems, and browsers to make it user-friendly and increase usability among users.

Planning Your Test Strategy

Before going for any kind of testing, whether it is a mobile app or web app, a strategy has to be set in place to be successful in the final product. So, the following important steps will provide you with the required result.

Establishing Clear Goals and Objectives

To achieve clear goals for your mobile application testing best practices, you should know who your target audience is and what they demand in your app.

After you have cleared up the audience’s need, you can accordingly customize the application’s clear design, content, and other features that will enhance the testing possess.

Choosing The Right Tools And Frameworks 

After defining the clear objects, the next thing you can do is choose the right tool that matches the project’s needs. To decide on a tool and framework, one should consider some factors like budget, whether the tool is compatible with the existing applications environment, whether it is easy to navigate, and whether it supports your app’s existing features.

Deciding Between Automated And Manual Testing

Developers perform the best practices in mobile app testing by dividing the testing process into two types. Repetitive and continuous testing requires lots of time and involves errors. So, for these types of tests, you can choose automatic testing to save you time.

Otherwise, human access is required to complete complex tasks. For that, you can choose the manual testing process.

Setting Up A Testing Environment

After deciding on the testing strategy, it is time to learn how to test mobile applications. To run the test for the mobile application after planning the test, you should set up a testing environment to run the test successfully. To set up a testing platform, you can follow some steps to successfully implement the testing environment.

Simulators vs Real Device Testing

Let’s compare simulation and real device testing.

1. General difference- They both have separate processing speeds, graphics, and networking speeds.
2. API- Real-device testing uses API, whereas simulators do not use API.
3. Display- In both cases, the resolution is different. The simulator uses a large window scale for clear text and images. In real-world devices, the text and images appear in the smaller version.
4. System difference- Simulators help to suspend background apps and can run on Android 11 and later versions.

These are the key differences between Simulator and Real-device mobile testing, which help to set up a testing environment.

The Importance Of a Diverse Device Pool

The best practices in testing mobile applications create attention to diverse device pool testing for the following testing environment.

1. The diverse device testing on real devices helps enhance user experiences to record how the mobile application is behaving in the real world.
2. The diverse pool test helps to measure how the application is coping with diverse device situations such as low battery, several screen sizes, hardware support, and many other difficulties.
3. Apart from the simulator and emulator, the diverse testing on real devices helps monitor real-world disruptions such as calls, other notifications, etc.

Configuration Of Network Settings And Other Environmental Variables

Network configuration is an important factor to consider when creating a testing environment to accomplish best practices in mobile app testing. During the configuration process, the mobile testers check the network settings, controls, policies, and flows.

Environmental variables store the configuration data and application secrets, which can be retrieved whenever you run the test.

Mobile App Testing Best Practices

Now comes the crucial part of mobile app testing best practices, which needs the following considerations to yield the best results in mobile applications.

• In the first step for best practices for effective testing, a clear and concise test case must be written. For that, you must have a clear understanding of your project needs, break your test cases into smaller segments, and avoid technical terms instead of using natural language.
• The prioritization of test case scenarios helps determine the quality of the application. With some tasks assigned, the test cases will emphasize the business needs and critical defects.

Some other points to cover in the best practices in mobile app testing include:

• Test cases should be regularly updated to check for bugs or errors and cope with new technological advancements in mobile applications. It ensures that the test cases are recurrent and accurate.
• The integration into CI/CD best practices helps to build a connection between the developer team and operation management. It also increases the lifespan of mobile applications.
• Mobile usability testing best practices keep an eye on the latest technological trends, which helps update your mobile application into newer versions and additional features for better usability by the customers.

Automating Your Tests

The benefits of automated mobile testing include helping perform repetitive tasks accurately, which leads to increased functionality, accuracy, and test coverage. So, for the overall good performance of your mobile applications.

Some commonly used tools for testing mobile applications such as Selenium, Test Sigma, UI Automator, Robotium, Monkey Runner, Appium, etc.

To practice the best test automation strategy, you should first set your defined goal, then choose a tool that should be compatible with other devices’ browsers, decide which part needs to be automatic, and then run the test in a suitable testing environment.

Dealing With Common Challenges

While performing mobile application testing best practices, you may face some common testing challenges, such as:

• Sometimes, device fragmentation creates difficulties in the testing process. In order to handle those difficulties, you can run your test in both an emulator and a simulator for the application’s real-world testing behavior.

Otherwise, you can run your test cases on multiple devices and use AI tools to identify your target audience to handle the device fragmentation.

• One of the best practices in testing mobile applications is to run your tests in different networks or real-world load environments to avoid further complications in the application’s performance during heavy traffic.
• Another common challenge may occur in that the test cases may be affected by security concerns. So, to avoid this, you can use different security testing tools to identify weak areas and act to fix those problems.
• One should always manage test data in a secure platform to ensure the application’s internal operational data is protected for further use.

Apply These Best Practices To Enhance Your Mobile APP Testing!

As per a report by Mordor Intelligence, the market size for mobile testing services is going to increase from USD 6.56 BN USD to 16.71 BN USD between 2024 and 2029. So, looking at the trend, leveraging the best practices in mobile application testing services will surely provide success in the mobile testing industry. To get the best result in the successful practice, the above-mentioned strategy is used to develop a well-performing mobile application that will cope with modern trends!