Mobile apps have become an integral part of our everyday life. It goes without saying that successful mobile apps are those that are appealing and useful for their end-users. In particular, successful mobile apps meet a tangible need of end-users i.e. they solve a real-world problem. At the same time, they are acceptable to end-users in terms of user-friendliness, aesthetics, and ease of use. Hence, user experience ends up being an integral part of the usefulness and acceptability of the app.
In order to ensure that an app provides the right user experience, it has to be tested thoroughly. Mobile app testing is also indispensable when it comes to evaluating non-functional aspects like performance and scalability. However, mobile app testing is a challenging process, as it is associated with many different aspects and requires mastering different tools and techniques.
All successful software applications offer an acceptable and friendly User Interface (UI). Mobile apps are no exception to this rule. Hence, UI testing is probably the most common activity of a test plan for a mobile app. UI testing audits the appropriateness and acceptability of aspects like the color scheme of the device, the UI theme used, the style of the icons used, the color of the icons, the use of appropriate UI indicators and controls (e.g., progress bars), the aesthetics and utility of menu items, the overall responsiveness of every UI element, as well as the ease of navigation and use of the various commands of the mobile app.
A significant part of UI testing concerns the evaluation of how the app behaves in cases of different orientations and resolutions of the screen. Testing under different screen resolutions is important in order to ensure that the mobile app behaves appropriately across a variety of devices and network conditions. Typically, all common screen resolutions) should be tested. In case of multi-column or other complex table-like layouts, testing needs also to check that columns and tables align correctly, especially in cases of lower resolutions where scrolling is also required.
Mobile app testing involves many other aspects beyond UI and usability testing. In many cases, these aspects concern the non-functional aspects of the apps such as:
As evident from the description of the above testing aspects, successful mobile apps need to install and run properly across a variety of different devices. Thus, testing behavior across different devices is an essential part of mobile app testing. Device testing is a very demanding and resourceful task given the very large number of mobile devices vendors and types, including smartphones, tablets, personal digital assistants, book readers and more. To restrict the number of devices to be tested, specific devices can be prioritized based on the target audience of an app. The target audience could be defined based on mobile/web analytics, which provides insights about the number of mobile users who visit t a site or download an app, as well as about the devices and operating systems that they use.
In terms of mobile platforms and operating systems, apps need to support and be tested at least for the two most prominent mobile platforms, namely iOS and Android. There are several testing frameworks that enable the tester to develop the required test cases for the application. A few of the popular testing frameworks are listed below.
Mobile testing frameworks boost testing automation, by enabling development teams to build and automatically execute test cases over them. As already outlined, mobile testing frameworks cover the most popular mobile platforms. For example, some popular testing frameworks for the Android platform are:
As evident from the description of the above-listed tools, some of them (i.e. Appium, Calabash) can be used for testing iOS applications. However, there are also exclusive iOS testing frameworks such as:
No mobile app can be successful without thorough and systematic testing. However, mobile app testing is in several cases much more challenging than testing of conventional software apps, given the need to deal with multiple testing aspects and a wide range of supported devices. Therefore, successful testing lies not only in taking advantage of the right automation frameworks and tools but also in creating an effective testing plan that covers the vast majority of possible cases and ensures that all the important user requirements are successfully met.
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