Why You Need a Mobile Application Testing Strategy
In This Post
App testing looks easy but you might want to think again – and I’ll help you think through a mobile application testing strategy.
Simple, but not Easy
You can very easily skip or ignore some very important risks just because you didn’t even know to think about them! Mobile application development moves very fast, is usually highly agile and covers much more than just the mobile app itself. Most mobile application testing projects spend too much time on functional testing and not enough time finding and reducing real technology and business risks.
Starting to test your mobile app without a Testing Strategy can result in a “well tested” mobile app that frustrates customers, scares off prospects and lights up the support phone and chat lines.
All because you didn’t know what you didn’t know!
And that’s probably not what you wanted or expected.
A simple mobile testing strategy will help you find the important risks, plan your testing work to focus on the important areas and reduce the time and money you spend launching your mobile application
What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt Your Project!
There are six important subject areas in that you need to consider in your strategy for testing your mobile application.
- Devices – What is your list of most important devices? What devices are you willing to exclude or not test? Do you have access to those important devices?
- Networks – What networks will your mobile application use? Are they cell networks or wifi networks? What happens when your mobile app switches networks?
- Servers – How much of your mobile application functionality depends on accurate information from a server application? Most mobile apps rely heavily on back-end servers to do the heavy lifting work while the mobile app itself mostly accepts inputs and display outputs. What happens in between your server and mobile app?
- Performance – What are your minimum performance times for functions in your mobile application? What are the upper limits of your server? How many simultaneous users do you expect? What performance tools are provided by your server hosting company?
- Security – How secure does your mobile application need to be to protect your user’s information privacy? Is 2FA important to your users? How secure does your server need to be?
- UX (User Experience) – Will your users find your mobile application enjoyable and easy to use or frustrating and confusing to use? What UX data will you collect to help you understand this? If a user does leave, how will you recover them?
If you know the answers to these questions, you’ll be able to clarify your goals and build a mobile testing strategy to achieve them for your unique mobile application.
Curious yet about TESTCo’s mobile app testing services? Here’s more information on our capabilities.
No Mobile Application Testing Strategy? Here Comes the Pain.
If you don’t answer those questions, you can expect to see (and feel) some of these pains:
- Your mobile works fine on the most recent iPhone but fails with previous versions of iOS and some Android devices. And, only a small portion of your audience has the most recent iPhone.
- Your mobile application works great on Wifi but fails with errors on a cellular network if a user is talking on the phone and using your app.
- Your mobile application fails and crashes when the server is slow returning complex query results.
- Your mobile application works fine until there are over 900 simultaneous users – and then it displays the wrong query results.
- Your mobile application is easily penetrated and accounts are hijacked.
- Your mobile application UI works great for the engineers who built it but ordinary users struggle to understand how to use it.
Build Your Own Simple Strategy – or Let Us Help You!
The best solution is to build a simple mobile application testing strategy unique to your project. It’s easy if you follow this guide I recently published. At TESTCo, we build and evaluate several test strategies for every software and mobile application testing project. If you don’t want to build your’s, we can build it for you!
Schedule a call with me using the green button on this page, or call me at 888-254-9709
