Top Five Challenges To Consider When Building Your Mobile Testing Strategy

The number of mobile devices operating worldwide will likely reach 18.22 billion by 2025. As the number of mobile devices continues to rise, so do customer expectations for seamless mobile experiences. High-performing applications increase customer satisfaction. This underscores the importance of organizations integrating mobile testing into their comprehensive testing strategy, building out mobile and web experiences in parallel. However, creating an effective and efficient end-to-end mobile testing strategy is not an easy feat. There are five major challenges that development teams typically face as they build and execute their mobile testing strategy. But fortunately, there are solutions to each of these challenges. 

Managing Tests Across Devices

Device management is the first step in any team's mobile testing process and is a critical step to ensure you’re delivering the best end-user experience. Managing devices can feel cumbersome at the onset, as there are 30+ different types of mobile manufacturers and two primary operating systems each, with a long list of older supported versions. However, investing time and resources upfront to adequately manage devices will help deliver quality throughout the testing process and ultimately save your team time down the road. 

As you prepare to begin the testing and development process, there are two primary ways to test – on physical devices or using emulators and simulators. While physical devices are ideal, simulators are invaluable when you’re testing across multiple types of mobile devices with various operating systems. So, how do you decide which type of devices to run your tests on? First, think about your audience. Will they use your application on one platform primarily, such as iPhone or Android, or are you building something that needs to run on both equally well to meet your business goals? You’ll also need to consider the differences between old and new device models with varying hardware characteristics, software components, and features. Defining your audience portfolio upfront is crucial. 

Authoring Tests

The next step in your mobile testing, which can be challenging, is creating tests. It’s important to maximize time coding the actual application, minimizing the time spent creating or coding tests. The traditional test authoring process can be slow and flaky. Inevitably, if you are coding a test, you have to update the test code at the same time as the application. Otherwise, it will break, bringing you back to square one. This leaves you to troubleshoot the test again…and again instead of spending time building the application. Codeless authoring tools save time without sacrificing quality, allowing you quickly build out tests in the UI and spend more time building the application.

Developing Parallel Web and Mobile Strategies

Mobile testing is still an afterthought for many organizations. This leads to various tools and teams testing web and mobile individually, creating more work for all teams involved. However, organizations can save a lot of time and effort by developing web and mobile testing strategies in parallel. They can leverage what they’ve already built for web testing to maximize mobile testing and vice versa. 

E-commerce is excellent at maximizing comprehensive testing to expand across web and mobile. Because e-commerce companies need to operate across web and mobile applications, they reuse sophisticated mobile tests as building blocks to ensure consistency across business processes and user experiences. 

Replicating Real-Work Environments and Conditions

Making sure an application can operate with an unstable network connection is difficult but crucial to building high-quality mobile applications. For example, an end-user adds items to a cart on a mobile device, and they lose service for a short time. A quality application would save items in the cart, preventing the end user from having to start the process over again. Remember, 60% of users will exit an app and abandon the brand when applications are slow and clunky. Performance testing mobile apps is critical, especially given the number of similar apps. Teams that focus on testing load time under various CPU, memory, and battery levels ultimately build a more enjoyable user experience. This leads to increased adoption, reduced churn, and greater revenue.

The Final Step: Test Execution

Where you run the tests makes a significant impact on the process. You could run the test on a local device that is plugged into your laptop. This gives the best sense of functionality on an individual mobile device, but unfortunately, only that one device. Instead, run tests on cloud-based grids, which allow developers to easily test various platforms early in the development cycle and evaluate how the mobile app will perform, saving time without sacrificing quality.

The Greater Testing Ecosystem

It’s important to remember that your mobile testing strategy is part of your organization’s greater quality engineering practice. Taking the time to invest in quality throughout each step of your testing process will pay dividends when the product is in customers’ hands. 

In the end, it’s always about the bottom line. Handling your mobile testing strategy with care will heighten customer satisfaction and, in turn, boost revenue and the overall growth of that bottom line.