Is it possible to minimize the risk of poor customer experience with your application by relying on mobile app testing outsourcing? Can mobile app testing be conducted without slowing things down, delaying the release, or costing a fortune?
The answer is “yes” to both questions if you hire the right partner. Read on to understand why mobile application testing is important and difficult to master. Or skip over to some tips on how to select an outsourced testing company for your app.
We’ll be the first to tell you that it is not cost effective to try to completely eliminate all defects in most mobile applications. Check out this post discussing our views about how much testing is enough.
Start with a QA Strategy for Your Mobile Application Testing
The best way to protect yourself from mobile application defects, bugs and glitches is to select a smart QA strategy. You invested a lot in your business model and mobile app design. You probably even hired some experts to help you make smart choices. You invested even more in finding and selecting the very best mobile application developer that you could afford. You definitely hired experts here, right?
So, what is your testing and QA strategy? You have one of four choices:
- Test it yourself – this should save time and money because you know the app and the use cases.
- Have the devs test it for you – they built it so they should know best how to test it.
- Don’t test it – it’s really simple and what could go wrong anyway?
- Hire an expert for testing and QA – like you hired for design and coding.
Which Mobile Application Testing Strategy Is Best?
Test It Yourself
This approach does save money and time but if you’re not a professional Test Engineer, the chances of you being effective and actually finding the real defects is quite small – this strategy is usually a fallacy or myth and seldom succeeds.
Devs Test It
Devs test it for you – this approach seems to make sense until you realize that there are two problems with this strategy. 1 – the devs aren’t motivated to test – they’re motivated to write code. 2 – most devs don’t know how to test and use “assumptive” information in their testing which ignores more than 60% of testing activity and vulnerabilities.
Don’t Test It
This might work if your mobile app is unusually simple and small, and your potential target audience well known and very forgiving.
Hire Experts
Mobile app testing outsourcing can provide you with a higher level of testing and quality, lower costs and quicker turn-around than you can achieve with any other strategy.
Why a “Fail Fast” Strategy Will Kill Your Mobile App
“Fail Fast” is a good business strategy, but a poor software strategy. Fail Fast is an industry meme intended to drive rapid innovation and adoption. Mobile apps often appear to be a great way to use this strategy. But, Fail Fast is about business models and not the software used to support a business model. Software that Fails Fast get’s deleted in a hurry – and fails to give any feedback to the Fail Fast business strategy. When you mobile application fails due to poor quality or “glitches”, you lose a potential customer and their “vote” on the success of your business model.
“Succeed Fast” with your Mobile Application
Software is becoming cheaper to build every day. Mobile software appears to be especially easy to learn and use. Additionally, there are new services and software launched every day that claim to help you get your mobile app built and successfully launched.
Building a mobile application isn’t hard, but it requires attention to detail. It’s also a well-known process that is successfully completed thousands of times every day.sands of times every day.
The Ten Minutes That Decide the Fate of Your Company
Think about this. By the time your customer has gotten halfway through the process to get and use your mobile app, they have spent as much as 10 minutes and have high expectations about what they’re going to receive.
Just consider what you’re asking the customer to do.
- Notice that you have a new mobile app
- Visit the App Store or Google Play
- Search for your new mobile app
- Wait while it downloads
- Wait while it initializes
- Wait while it approves the new user account
- Wait while it gathers enough information to be useful
- Then, tell their friends how beautiful and useful you app is so that they will download and use it, too.
This is hard, hard, hard and you can’t afford to have anything, especially bugs, defects and glitches get in the way of your new customer using and recommending your mobile app.
A Single Bad Glitch Can Wipe Out Your Dream
Successfully launching a mobile app is really tough. Glitches are common, even in really good mobile apps. Professional testing is the only way to mitigate the risk. Testing that delivers value isn’t a walk through the park. In many ways, mobile applications are a lot harder to test than desktop software. Here’s why.
There are currently two major (and very different) platforms for mobile apps (iOS or Android) with close to six active operating systems or versions for each and a countless variety of physical devices using those various platforms or operating system versions. That’s 12 different variations to test if you ignore the physical devices. You see where this is going – you just can’t test everything.
A Single Outsourced Testing Partner can Save the Dream
Talk to TESTCo about mobile app testing outsourcing, even if you have just a small project. Every client receives:
- A Test Plan that addresses your goals
- Testing by Test Engineers, not testers
- A QA Manager
- Status reports twice a day.
Six Quick Mobile App Testing Strategies
and How to Know if You Need Them
and How to Know if You Need Them
The foundation of an effective mobile app testing strategy is based on the quality of the questions you’re willing to ask and answer. Here are some powerful QA Strategy questions that will help you understand whether you need those activities and the value that they can provide.
1 – Functional Testing. This activity validates your features and functionality. It is needed in almost every release but there is always more to test than you have time for. How do you decide what and how much to do?
- Do the features in your mobile app perform properly?
- Do the features prevent unauthorized or improper use?
- Which features were recently changed and need testing now Vs which features were not changed and only need confirmation?
- When do you need to test Everything?
2 – Performance Testing. This activity is needed when you have a concern about a large number of new users or have recently completed work to make your mobile app perform quicker.
- How many simultaneous users can your mobile app handle now?
- What determines “too slow”?
- How many simultaneous users do you expect?
- Where are the bottlenecks and how will you measure them?
- Would just adding more servers or capacity be good enough?
- How much more server or capacity will you need to have ready?
3 – Security Testing. This activity is needed when your mobile app contains private information that would cause harm if released.
- What information needs to be secured?
- What security procedures are used currently?
- Do those security procedures work properly in ALL cases?
- What security threats are you vulnerable to?
- Which security treats breach your defenses?
- Does your security functionality prevent breaches gracefully or just crash?
4 – Network & Interruption Testing. This activity is needed when your mobile app is used across a variety of networks – cellular, WIFI, Ethernet wired, etc – or your mobile app interfaces with an IoT device and you create or change the network connectivity or network data load in your mobile app.
- What are the required networks and optional networks?
- How big are the data payloads and how frequently are they transmitted/received on the network?
- How frequently does the IoT firmware update?
- How does the mobeil app behave when a connection is dropped and then reconnected? Succeed, Fail gracefully, or crash?
- How does the mobile app behave when connectivity is lost? Succeed, Fail gracefully, or crash?
5 – Cross Device Testing. This activity is needed if your users have a variety of mobile devices. Most think this is just iOS and Android but iPhones behave differently than iPads and Samsung mobile phones behave differently than Hauwei phones. Even iPhones with iOS9 behave slightly different than those with iOS10!
- What is the list of devices your customers use?
- What is the list of mobile operating systems your customers use?
- Where can you get real mobile devices for testing?
- Will a mobile device simulator work OK for your mobile app?
6 – Usability Testing. This activity is needed if you are uncertain about a work flow within your mobile app or are seeing frequent user problems reported to Support.
- What are the workflows your users expect and use?
- How do your users actually use your app? Walking or sitting? Casual or focused? Fast paced/quick or slow /deliberate?
- Where do workflows cause bottlenecks, confusion or frustration?
- Where can easy changes have a big impact and where are the hard changes that will take more time to fix?
These Six Mobile App Testing strategies are the starting point for TESTCo’s Mobile App Testing Services. Hopefully, this short menu will provide you with an easy way to determine if your mobile app needs any of the different types of testing. The strategy questions can also help you determine if you have enough information to perform that testing successfully. Please don’t try to run one of these Testing Strategies with incomplete information!
Give us a call and ask a bunch of questions. We’re happy to share what we know and do – just ask! And, if you find that you’d rather rely on the professional instead of doing it yourself, we’d be happy to pitch in and help.
