There are more than 5.5 Million apps available on Google Play and Apple App Store combined and by 2022, the number of app downloads will be around 250 Billion. The number of smartphone users in the world is more than 3 Billion and the users prefer using smartphones instead of desktop. This data shows that the mobile app market is very competitive and growing. In this age of digital transformation, the focus of enterprise mobility is to provide better user experience at great speed. The launch of 5G will further complicate the app development and testing process initially. But apart from this, there are three main challenges to overcome and pCloudy is leading the path to bring positive change. Let’s look at these challenges and their solutions.
Challenges Faced by Enterprise Mobility
There is a growing demand for quality at speed in the mobile app industry. The current market dynamics are such that it is necessary to provide the best quality product in less time to remain in the competition. When we talk about mobile app testing, quality can be maintained only when the enterprise can achieve scale. There is a myriad of devices in the market with different OS versions, browsers, Custom ROM, etc. and the app should be compatible with all the devices. How can ensure this and most importantly, how can we speed up the testing process on multiple devices? pCloudy can help you overcome this challenge with its best in the class features. Let’s have a look at them one by one.
Parallel Testing to Achieve Scalability
If we are talking about scalability then testing your app on 5,10 or even 20 devices are not enough for the enterprises to ensure a bug-free app. pCloudy enables to testers to run your test scripts concurrently on 50, 100 or maybe more devices. Enterprises have the option to perform parallel testing in our public cloud or in our plug & play on-premise infrastructure solution. With more than five thousand device browser combinations, enterprises can ensure that the application is working properly in all the devices.
Parallel testing on 50 devices
You can see in the picture above, we have set up a device infrastructure for 50 devices for demonstration. Similar device setup can be provided for our on-premise solution and public cloud users can just log into the pCloudy platform and book the devices to perform testing. These real devices can be accessed remotely on the cloud which makes it more convenient for the users as there are no location constraints.
Progressive Reports to Improve Quality
It won’t be efficient to go through each and every report to analyze the data for every device. Instead of that, you get intelligent results where you can do a quick analysis of the errors and then debug quickly. In the pic below you can see the list of results for different builds with their start time, progress, status, and Action.
In the status, you will be able to see how many tests pass, fail, and errors. This way you can concentrate on the tests which failed and you will save time as you don’t have to manually go through all the cases.
You can integrate any reporting framework with your existing Appium setup. The same way you have to configure with pCloudy by adding a one-line code while creating an asset.
In the pic above you can see the test case result in detail. You can see the tags, test case name, build, Automation, and the live status of errors.
Once you expand the test case you can see the logs, Jason format, screenshots, video for that particular session. This information can be used to expedite the test execution.
Integration with AI to Speed up Mobile App Testing
The next challenge is to speed up and simplify the test script creation process. Usually, the procedure is to connect the device to the system and use an automation framework like Appium to use object repositories. If you are using images then the XPath may change depending on the devices.
This AI based utility will help you to get the object repository for the entire page. So if there is an icon for contacts then this utility will automatically recognize the element.
In the code, you just need to declare the driver for Appium and for pCloudy as well. Then you need to initialize the drivers and start using the code generated using the AI utility. This is how the script creation is expedited using AI.
Conclusion
To sum up, pCloudy has come forward with solutions for the enterprise mobility to deliver quality at speed with scale. Whether it’s parallel testing, progressive reports or creating a script using AI-based utility, all these features fix the problems that were mentioned earlier. The proverb “change is the only constant” fits well as pCloudy comes up with updates on a regular basis to resolve the issues and make mobile app testing better.
Since there are many players in the mobile app market, the competition is endless. To beat the heat and to keep providing an enhanced mobile app experience to the users, the app needs to be constantly updated with the changes happening and for doing this, there are different types of testing techniques. Let us have an insight into the types of testing methods.
1. Compatibility Testing
Compatibility testing is a critical QA task. It assures that a given application works as intended with selected operating systems, selected devices with different screen sizes resolutions, and internal hardware (memory size, processor speed, and button/input differences). It defines the feasible compatibility combinations of devices and interfaces for a specific testing assignment, in concurrence with the customer’s requirement.
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Compatibility Factors:
There are different factors that play a very significant role in mobile compatibility testing strategy. Mobile operating systems and their supported versions, mobile devices developed by different manufacturers, different device screen sizes with different resolutions and internal hardware including different input types, processor speeds and memory size of devices.
Let’s develop a test strategy for compatibility testing. The first step is to identify the Operating systems and devices based on key factors described in the previous slide. Once you identified the devices based on different compatibility factors you need to set up your environment for testing. You can either set up your internal test lab or you can go for external cloud providers like pCloudy. Now, the next step is to execute your test cases on a defined set of environment. Report the defects to appear while testing and report these defects to your development team.
The main purpose of compatibility testing is to ensure whether different software is compatible with different configurations and whether the application is compatible with the client’s environment.
2. Installation Testing
Mobile phones come with different types of mobile apps like Native and Web and Hybrid. Installation testing is a type of testing that is done at the initial stage of mobile app life span or maybe it is the first impression on the users, in other words. Installation testing checks whether the mobile app installs, uninstalls and updates properly without any interruption.
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Installation Testing Factors:
There are some of the factors that play a significant role in installation testing of an application. Factors like which platforms and operating systems supported by the application and how they will be distributed whether it is directly available in the app store or are going to get the installable files on mail itself or is it available on an app distribution platform and can be accessed through public URL. The user behavior regarding installation changes from person to person. For eg: the developer may install the app (By using ADB install command) and a different user might directly install it from the app store or public URL.
Important points to be noted in Installation Testing:
Some of the common checkpoints which can be converted to standard test cases are:
Installing the app in phone memory.
Installing the app in phone memory is full.
Installing the app on an external SD card.
Installing the app on an external SD card is full.
Check the memory space after installing. It should not occupy more than promised.
Check if it is releasing the space after removing
Another part of the installation and uninstallation testing is the testing of patches/updates
These are the common situation when we need to test app after updates.
Check for updates:
Can I download an update?
Can I update the app when there are multiple updates available?
What happens if I don’t update?
When App is upgraded:
Check that the user is still logged in
Check that data is still the same
Backward compatibility:-Check that database changes will not affect the current data.
Test the update from an older version to the current version
When OS is upgraded:
Check the app compatibility.
App updated gracefully without a crash.
3. Interruption Testing
Interrupt testing is a process to replicate abrupt (Unexpected) interrupt to the application. It is done to understand how the app behaves under certain interruptions before resuming to its original state. This can be achieved in various ways and techniques depending on the application under test.
Following are some Common Interrupts:
1. A phone call when the application is running or is in background
2. Battery removal when the application is running or is in the background, battery high, battery low, incoming call or SMS
3. Plugged in or out of charging
4. Device shut down
5. OS upgrade
6. Network loss and restoration, etc.
Some specific scenarios for an application using a network:
1. Connect to the network but remove LAN connection from the router so the device can sense wifi state on the device but cannot connect to the internet
2. Connection via VPN and VPN disconnected
Scenario for Application using services:
1. Kill service by clicking on the recent button and swiping the application right to kill app and services
2. Kill app using third-party App killer
3. Kill specific services from Settings->Manage Applications
4. Scenarios for Application Linked to account Manager
Remove account from Settings->Account Manager
Incoming and Outgoing SMS and MMS:
An application is running in your mobile and you send an SMS/MMS from another mobile to your mobile. In this situation, SMS/MMS notification should display for a while and then close and the application should continue to run.
Incoming and Outgoing calls:
You are in a login page trying to log in and you have just pressed the submit button that will take you to the application home page. This is a transition period because loading is happening.If we receive a call during this time then the application should not end abruptly or crash.
Battery Removal:
If the application is running, remove the battery of your mobile and it will shut down. After rebooting the mobile, run the application again, it should run smoothly and without a crash.
Data Cable Insertion and Removal:
When the application is running, connect the USB Cable, the system should display “USB Connection Screen” and if the user returns to the application then the application should not crash or end abruptly
Interruption Testing Strategy
Let’s prepare a test strategy to test interruption testing:
The first step in this process is to decide the critical interrupts based on your application components and architecture. For example, if your application is using GPS include common interrupts related to GPS. Let’s Include two type of interrupts:
Application specific interrupts:
Prepare your test cases and try to fit theses interruption test cases with state of the application. For example, interrupt your Network while performing payment.
Interrupt testing process:
List of common Interrupts:
Phone calls, Text messages, App notifications, Battery Warning, Forced updates, Voicemail, Shaking the Phone, Different Gestures, Switching between apps, Locking and unlocking the screen, Changing the orientation, Music playing while using the app, Out of memory (general performance interruptions), Data app interruptions (What Sapp, Viber, Tango), Audio interrupts from multiple sources (iPod, Media player, Other audio apps), phone in standby mode, switch the network to plane mode.
Tools to test interruption Testing:
Use tools like Joule Unit (Android), On iOS use the Energy Usage Function of Instruments, Monkey for Android to stress test your app and see the handling of the interrupts, UI Auto Monkey for iOS
Scenario
A) Once the user connects the mobile earphone jack with Nokia Lumia and starts music Player.
B) Now when the user resumes the application the cart gets empty.
4. Localization Testing
This type of testing is a technique in which we check whether the mobile app adheres to the local cultural settings, customizing the apps according to target country and language and also according to the linguistic aspects. Localization is also known as “L10N” as there are 10 characters between L & N. For eg: Chinese language-search engine offered by Baidu beats Google in China. Baidu does better than Google because it looks and feels fully native to the Chinese speaking audience.
Also, regional language speakers can’t get many games in their own language, so they turn to race games, which are easy to understand. We must have noticed in these examples, language is the common issue. Apart from Translation there are different other elements in the localization, like Usage of proper Time zone, local formats of dates, addresses and phone numbers, Design and layout to fit translated text, Converting to local requirements (such as currencies and units of measure), Adapting graphics to target markets, Modifying content to suit the tastes and consumption habits of other markets, Addressing local regulations and legal requirements.
Why should we localize?
Localization is important in order to understand the cultural and linguistic aspects of a particular region. While testing, testers keep repeating the tests to check typographical, linguistic errors, cultural appropriateness of the UI, etc. Research says:
1. 56.2 percent of consumers say that the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price. (Common Sense Advisory, Can’t Read, Won’t Buy: Why Language Matters on Global Websites, 2006)
2. 74 percent of multinational enterprises believe it is either important or most important to achieve increased revenues from global operations. (California State University at Chico, 2007.
3. 95 percent of Chinese online consumers indicate a greater comfort level with websites in their language. (Forrester Research, Translation and Localization of Retail Web Sites, 2009)
4. A critical success factor for cross-border merger and acquisition deals is the ability to communicate information clearly and accurately in multiple languages. (Merrill Corporation, How to do Better Multinational M&A Deals, 2008)
Types of Localization Testing:
In the localization testing, validating whether a mobile app is capable of performing given a geographical location, in particular, is found out. It includes four major types of testing like linguistic, culture, cosmetic, and functional tests. 1. Linguistic testing– ensures that the UI text appears in the congregation with the language and is not mistranslated or misapplied. This requires language skill and knowledge of the product. Mistranslation, irrelevant usage of the language are few of the errors in this.
2. Cultural Testing– Few words may imply different meanings in different cultures. So, this has to be translated properly in relation to the target culture.
3. Cosmetic Testing– For easy understanding, let us use this scenario. For eg. In the apps used in Afghanistan, the text will be in Arabic and will start from right to left unlike other languages like English, French that are read from Left to right.
4. Functional Testing– In this testing, testers follow prescribed test scripts to run through all aspects of the product to make sure it functions as designed in a localized environment. Often functional testing includes verification that the localized product is compatible with various operating systems and third-party products. Functional testing generally requires a good knowledge of the target language and total familiarity with the product. Some of the major Functional testing problems may include– Incorrect or missing UI elements, graphics, and windows, Incorrect error messages, Localization bugs that may cause software crashes, Errors generated by installing the localized software on a localized OS.
5. Performance Testing
Performance testing is to test the performance of the mobile application in expected workload scenarios and to eliminate the performance hurdles. It checks whether the response of the app is quick, the ability of the app to tale load, and app stability in those load situations. Performance is very critical because if the app is malfunctioning, it is more possible that the user might uninstall the app and might shift to a competitor’s app which is better.
App start-up time is the most critical performance parameter from the user’s point of view. It shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds for the app’s first screen to pop up after the user taps on the app’s icon. Battery time is the second most important issue. Some apps consume a high amount of battery life. Excessive resource usage creates a burden on the processor and the phone heats up. In some cases, it is observed that the new app installed uses the same amount of battery as the OS. If more features are added in the app its memory consumption also increases. This is why memory consumption should be checked while testing the app.
Network Performance
The app needs to be tested on different mobile networks and network properties. If there is packet loss then the app should generate alerts or resend the request for the information. Jitters or delay in receiving information
Server/API Performance
Performance is directly proportional to the response time from the Server. In this, tests are run to check how efficient the app is to handle data transfers from the server and how quickly and in what format the data is transported by the app. The number of API calls generated by apps should be lesser and how and where the data is saved in the ‘server down’ case is all that is tested here.
Mobile app testing tools make it easier for the testers to identify and rectify any error that comes up. For different OS there are a different set of Mobile app tools. For Android, we can use Robotium and Monkey Runner and for IOS we can use Automator.
6. Usability Testing
Usability testing is a type of testing which is performed to check how user-friendly the mobile application is in terms of the navigation, ease to use the app, flexible app controls, etc. It is also known as user experience testing.
What matters in Usability Testing?
Workflow: To understand, below image represents the workflow of how the user reaches its goal while navigating through the app controls.
We must understand what the user needs to do in order to use the app’s functionality. If the workflow was overlong and included repetitive actions It may annoy the user while performing the task. Design and Layout: Good layout and design allow a user to easily complete tasks. An app need not offer so many features or content that the app is difficult to navigate. A friendly app has a design that allows less user text entry, helps differentiation between the selected items, finger-sized targets, should provide intuitive hints to texts, etc.
The response time of the application: It is one of the key factors. This means how long the user takes to complete a task. Often long delays while the app interacts with the server hinders the user experience standards.
The emotional state of users: Emotional state of user measures the user’s motivation to use the app. The apps should be smart enough to understand what the users want and how to engage them, this can be achieved by usability testing.
Usability Testing Strategy:
The first step is to identify users who match your expected audience. Watch and listen to them as they use your products. You can use video and audio recording equipment for archiving test sessions, in case later review is needed. However, our primary tool is taking notes with paper and pencil! This is still the fastest way we have found to get information quickly to developers and designers. You have your data. You now need to organize and analyze it. How the results are absorbed as a report in order to be useful for product changes.
Tools and techniques for usability testing
1. Mr. Tappy: It is a tool set up to capture how users interact with the apps naturally. The user data so generated could be used for better user experience.
2. Paper Prototyping: It is a technique that consists of creating hand drawings of user interfaces in order to enable them to be rapidly designed, simulated and tested. As simple as this technique may look like, it has been effectively used since the 1980s and is likely to continue to be used with a guaranteed degree of success for many more years to come.
3. Magitest: It allows you to perform mobile user testing of native apps and websites. Captures the participant’s voice and facial expressions during the session. Here the users complete the tasks you specify and allows to listen to them speak their thoughts aloud as they interact with your mobile app.
4. Reflector: This app allows us to see the iPad, iPod, iPhone screens on MAC or PC. The devices connect wirelessly to proceed with further functions.
7. Conformance Testing
Conformance/compliance testing is a type of testing which is performed to validate if the application is meeting the Market place and Enterprise policy guidelines. It is like an audit done to check whether certain standards are being met or not. Conformance Testing is focused on two main areas- App store guidelines and Enterprise policy compliance. Each Market place has their own guidelines. We need to validate if the application is following the guidelines of each of these app stores.
1. App store Guidelines pertaining to User Interface, Media Content, Privacy, Spyware and Phishing, nudity, religion, culture, violence, etc.
2. Enterprise Policy Compliance pertaining to a different set of industrial standards. For eg: For the pharmaceutical industry, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) passed rule comes into the picture, For the pharmaceutical industry, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) passed rule comes into the picture, In healthcare, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) includes an administrative simplification section, which mandates protecting the information assets of patients. So, it is a dire need for the testing organizations to follow the necessary guidelines and compliances to limit the risk that non-compliance might follow.
Reap the benefits of different types of testing
In this day and age, mobile app quality matters the most as the market is very competitive. We need to focus on user experience as well as the performance of the app. If the app contains bugs the app ratings will go down and so will the number of app downloads. If we can make our app bug free than the chances of app gaining popularity will increase. This can be achieved by performing different types of testing on the mobile application. In the next blog in this series, we will talk about mobile app testing strategies.
‘Metrics’. This term has become one of the widely used terms today in enterprise mobility especially for measuring mobile app performance.
Let us first understand why are the metrics are so important to analyze the performance of an app.
Generally, app developers consider mobile app performance testing as an afterthought. Mobility teams have to meet stringent deadlines and for them, testing the performance of an app has the least priority. To them, passing the functional tests meet all critical criteria for launching an app. Well, let us find out why is performance such an important criterion for mobile app testing.
Reasons why measuring Mobile App performance is such an important criterion:
1. Speed wins: As per the Compuware report, users expect their apps to load in about two seconds. This can even be proven right by the SEO reports from Google, which considers the site speed as an important parameter for Page ranking.
It is important for mobility teams to understand that your users want their apps to respond in about two seconds or less. Anything beyond two seconds, and you might lose your business.
Once the app starts taking anywhere close to five or 10 seconds, users start shifting to your competitors.
2. Mobile App Error Rates are probably much higher than it seems: You must have struggled with issues like images not loading, network errors, content feeds leaving blank holes in the app, timeouts, crashes, freezing, upload failure etc. Most of these issues are not errors of apps but caused by unreliable networks.
The error rates are highly variable and depend on network conditions. In the United States, we’ll typically see 3% error rates, whereas in India, China, and on challenging networks in Europe and Asia, we see error rates up to a frustrating 12%. Not measuring and then getting a handle on mobile app errors will quickly result in frustrated customers, uninstalls and 1-star reviews in the app stores. And no one wants that.
3. 5 star app rating: Reviews and ratings have become important aspects of judgment for any user before downloading your app. And the app should be perfect in all the ways to ensure a 5 star rating.
If you focus on functional tests and miss out on the mobile app performance not knowing, if too much battery is drained on a particular device, or is consuming too much data, then your Playstore might be full of negative reviews even before you market it well.
In this post, you’ll know how app monitoring performance works so that you can get the best out of your Smartphone software.
What is application performance management? 10 APM features that we can tick right off our fingers are:
Troubleshooting of disruption of frequent speed and uptime
Monitoring of the speed at which transactions are performed by end-users and systems
Use of a single integrated suite of software tools
Load-testing
Synthetic monitoring
Real-use monitoring
Root-cause analysis
Web-performance monitoring, to gauge app speed and uptime
An end-to-end overview of bottlenecks
Review of service interruptions
APM is integrated through the lifecycle of an application including the pre-deployment and post-deployment stages. It is therefore important for developers, testers, and business teams. A slow load can be prevalent due to a host of issues related to APIs, servers, or browsers. APM techniques are what help pinpoint the actual problem.
Basic availability monitoring involves testing IP protocols and network services, but a user needs to establish some optimal performance thresholds and real-time alerts to monitor and manage both speed and reliability.
Tips for monitoring app performance
Performance monitoring must take into account certain things in order to optimize user experience. These include measuring from the user’s point of view, i.e. performance, stability, and resource utilization in real time the way the user perceives them.
The context is crucial too. It’s important to determine how many users were affected by a slowdown, and what action on a specific operating device prompted the disruption. To truly experience a ‘mobile moment,’ you should follow these tips for monitoring your app performance:
a) Measure Frame rendering time
Only measuring network time doesn’t cut it out for users, who are interested in when the network resumes as well as when it responds.
Measuring response time by the device or operating system allows the product manager to focus on one platform at a time, respond to performance issues, and deploy resources accordingly.
b) Measure battery usage
It’s crucial to measure the battery consumption of your mobile app, along with data plan impact and memory usage. If the app is responsible for draining your battery, you should bring it in line with best practices.
Frequent updates can also be minimized so that user satisfaction can be increased.
c) Measure cell data consumption
Recent studies by Dimensional Research have shown that 20% of respondents stopped using apps that were heavy on data usage. This indicates that you should measure the consumption by app version, the total number of users, KBs of data consumed per minute, the amount of data being transferred per hit, and the percentage of data being consumed per hit.
d) Measure errors
HTTP errors from certain URLs need to be captured. This will help track the number of users who received an error, the actions that resulted in it, number of users with errors on app launch, the percentage of actions that led to at least one error, and the app version.
pCloudy helps you with performance profiling of your mobile apps. You can view the CPU usage, Memory usage, Data usage and Battery consumption while performing a series of actions on the app. The Real time mobile app performance monitoring feature helps you to keep track of the app’s performance while conducting manual tests. You can even check the performance consistency of the app by running automation test suites in parallel on multiple devices and by also simulating different network environments.
App Performance while conducting Manual Tests
The performance of an app can be viewed real-time while conducting functional tests. You can simply select the application installed on the device from the Tools section to view a graph of Memory and CPU usage, with the packets/bytes consumed in the Data Usage.
All information captured during a testing session is gathered by the platform and stored in a secure location to be used later. When a tester completes his testing session using a device, the performance related information can be found in the Cloud Drive.
Battery Consumption
The Battery Consumption graph indicates Battery consumption by Device, Battery consumption by Application and Battery consumption in %.
CPU Consumption
The CPU consumption of an App is plotted as CPU consumption in percentage against Time Duration in seconds.
Memory Consumption
The CPU consumption of an App is plotted as Memory consumption in ‘Mb’ against Time Duration in seconds.
You can listen to this webinar on Performance testing to find out how a cloud based solution can help your app perform well in all situations.
There are millions of mobile apps available in the market today. The statistics shows that since 2016, on an average around 6000 apps on Google play store and 1400 on the Apple store have been released every day. In order to be hassle free and to be on top of the competitors, an app needs to be stable and be properly tested.
Testing on mobile devices could be very challenging as it has to constantly be in touch with the new updates, new features and a myriad of DevOps tools that get introduced every time to ensure better performance and reliability of the mobile app.
Hence, there are many factors that have to be considered while framing the testing strategy in order to avoid all kinds of uncertainties in the app performance, just needs a right planning.
Below are five strategies every mobile testing team should keep in mind in order to reap the most benefits from their QA efforts.
Emulators are the best option only at the early stage of testing, and they have a vital place in the overall QA process. But testing on emulators is not successful for all types of testing. All the tests should not run on emulators as those will not be reliable for an app to run immaculately in the real world scenario. Testing on the real devices is certainly more accurate as it can test many device functionalities like camera operations, battery life, GPS, Bluetooth, networks and more. Each device is designed differently and emulators do not solve issues specific to a particular type of device.
Procuring multiple devices and testing the app on each Operating System can be quite a daunting task and it may seem next to impossible to test the app on every OS combination. The best way would be to test apps on a cloud based platform with a hub of real devices. This way your testing results would be more precise and the procurement cost could be controlled. pCloudy has a wide variety of mobile devices available on cloud that can be considered as the preferred option.
2. Testing Automation
Automation testing is the key and the most vital when it comes to mobile apps. It can ease the execution of tests to run simultaneously across real devices which speeds up the entire testing process allowing the apps to float in the market quite earlier and faster. In the cases where the tests require a lot of set up and aren’t the routine tests, manual testing should be preferred over automation. Mobile Automation testing necessitates the use of right automation tools. The choicest one is Appium which is open source and supports both iOS and Android and also allows to write the tests that can run on both the platforms.
3. Functionality testing
The core functionality is the main draw for any app and it has to be rock solid. People seek out apps to perform specific functions. Incomplete or inadequate functionality will result in abandonment, so make sure that the main functions are fully implemented and tested before you move on. User experience really matters and is also a key factor in an app’s success. For example, if the elements of the app are placed incorrectly on the mobile screen, the user will not use the app and uninstall it straightaway. So, the mobile app needs to be tested on each functionality in order to give the best results.
4. Performance and Load Testing
Usual tests are performed at earlier stages to identify the bugs even before they are pushed for production but the performance and load tests are performed later in the SDLC process to assess the maximum operating capacity and behavior of a mobile app in real life load scenarios. Tools like JMeter and Android’s Monkey tool are often used for performance and load testing. Also, the app performance on real devices is done in order to check the issues like network interruptions, memory leaks. Whatever the choice of tool may be, the goal is to ensure the smooth functioning of the app before and after the final release.
The Internet speed can also have a major impact on the experience of using an app. A user connected to a slow cellular network might have a hard time with apps that have rich media content. Make sure your app testing includes slow connections — and fast ones — to make sure the experience is OK at any speed.
5. Choice of Mobile app testing tools
It is very important to choose the right tool for mobile app testing. There are many favored mobile app testing tools to do the right testing.
Out of the meagre tools available in the market, Appium tops the list of the most preferred open source mobile testing tool in the market. Other than this, the tools like Robotium and Espresso which are used widely to test the Android apps by empowering the testers to write UI tests for Android Apps, easily. Google’s EarlGrey performs the similar function as Robotium for iOS framework.
Conclusion
To conclude, we must acknowledge that the decisions related to successful mobile app testing is the key role of the testing team. Testing landscapes keep changing and the testing strategies have to be aligned with the vulnerabilities of the market. It can be deduced from the above discussion that both emulators and the real devices are needed as per the testing situation. Performance and load testing are the saviors and must be performed sincerely in the production to understand the reaction of the mobile apps at different load conditions. There should be a right combination of the testing tools as per the type of operating system where the app has to be installed. To make the Mobile app testing a success, the right decision-matrix regarding the above mentioned points would prove to be the strongest pillar of the QA team of an organization. To know more about the mobile app testing success, visit www.pcloudy.com.
Mobile apps can often crash for many reasons. Nothing is as excruciating as memory leaks. It starts with your app crashing often, or becoming slow or maybe making your entire phone slow down, taking longer time to load activities. Memory leaks are notoriously hard to detect, and thus can easily surprise you. Have we ever thought why most of the users uninstall the application after some use?
Which is why it is critical for Developers to understand the memory consumption by any mobile application. How do you detect memory leaks during Mobile Application Testing? And if so, how can you prevent them from hogging mobile resource consumption?
Memory is one of the key resources of the mobile device.And memory leaks in Android is an important thing to be kept in mind. Java is a garbage collecting language, which removes the need for developers to dig deep to manage allocated memory. This reduces the chances of any segmentation fault crashing an app or any unfreed memory allocation from eating up space of the heap area, thus creating a safer code.
However, a garbage collector is never an insurance against memory leaks. There are other ways by which memory can be leaked within Java. This means that your android mobile application is still pretty prone to wasting unnecessary memory allocation and crashing with out-of-memory (OOM) errors.
Figure 1: Image Credit- Toptal
Why are Memory Leaks Bad?
Cause: Memory leaks occur when some variable of the application still has references to some objects that are unnecessary, no longer in use or used to be with the app anymore, is bloating the allocated memory heap and the Garbage Collector is not being able to release that memory.
Effect: Android devices mostly run on phones with limited memory, so as a result of too many leaks, the app runs out of available memory. This triggers more frequent Garbage Collector events which paralyze the device (Stop-the-world GC events) by almost stopping the rendering of UI and processing of events. This leads to an Out of Memory Exception and translates to the user as the app being unresponsive.
Testing for Memory Leaks
Memory Leaks are caused by the failure to not be able to de-allocate memory that is no longer in use, which is why they cannot be identified during black box testing. The best phase to find the memory leaks is when developers are developing the application, at a code level.
It’s best to check for memory leaks during unit testing. However, testers can follow these tips:
Release Unused Memory: Memory leaks can be present because of the bad design of the application and thus might consume lot of memory when the application is in use
Test on Multiple devices:The memory consumption by the application should be monitored while doing the system & functional testing. One shouldn’t rely on a single device testing as there are plethora of devices in the market.
Detecting Memory Leaks
There are quite a few techniques and tools devised by developers to pin point memory leaks. Android’s very own Android Studio has a powerful tool to monitor not only memory usage but also for network, GPU and CPU usage as well, called the Android Monitor.
Memory Monitor in this helps track memory usage, find de-allocated objects, identify memory leaks and helps get an overall sense of how your app allocates and frees memory. It’s done in three steps:
1. During and use and debugging of app, track the memory monitor. If the memory usage graph rises for your app and doesn’t fall even if put in background, it’s a memory leak.
2. Using the Allocation tracker, you can check the percentage of memory allocated to different types of variables in your app. This gives you a sense of how much memory is consumed by which object.
3. Create a Java Heap Option to create a heap dump that keeps a snapshot of the memory at any given point of time, thus providing the data consumption data.
Despite Android’s monitor to detect memory leaks, there are a few platforms from developers that help extract memory consumption data without so many steps for faster testing cycles.
pCloudy’s very own platform for example, generates the statistics for Memory consumption while doing the normal functional Mobile Application Testing on real mobile devices.It also generates other vital data such as CPU consumption, battery consumption & data consumption for testers and developers who reiterate several test cycles across multiple physical devices.
