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The world is mobile-centric, and the data is telling: 65% of users say that a poor mobile experience impacts their opinion of a brand, 70% of users will abandon an app with a load time of over three seconds, and 71% of uninstalls are caused by the application crashing.
Brands aim to set themselves apart with their applications and meet end users' expectations that everything looks great, works perfectly, and runs quickly. To create a five-star app in today's digital-first world, you must master mobile testing basics to build quality products and provide quality user experiences, taking a strategic approach to continuous testing.
A modern testing approach to drive greater efficiency, more productivity, and a higher quality application often includes agile and continuous testing aspects within the development lifecycle. The two go hand-in-hand—an Agile test strategy supports DevOps and continuous testing, both essential for improving product quality.
In Agile development, testing needs to happen early and often in the process. Instead of waiting for development to be completed before testing begins, testing occurs continuously as features are added. By doing so, developers can significantly reduce costly manual efforts, accelerate releases and improve quality, providing greater flexibility and laying a strong foundation for application success.
Developers must also understand three critical and mandatory requirements that make up modern testing to ensure all aspects are accounted for. This includes meeting accessibility compliance within applications and their dependent technology like videos and social media integrations, creating a secure and compliant application, and ensuring it can work across smartphones, tablets, and foldable.
When considering the DevOps testing lifecycle, legacy approaches traditionally only test at the very end. Advancements in the industry have encouraged daily testing and even testing for every build. Yet, achieving continuous testing at every step provides a vastly strategic approach to overcoming testing challenges and creating better outcomes.
With a continuous testing strategy, developers can realize test coverage across various platforms and environments like Apple, Google, and Samsung, ensuring the full spectrum of apps is considered and tested. This greatly improves the end-user experience. The most strategic continuous testing approaches also plan for test certification with a focus on app stability to ensure that any test that is included in the CI/CD testing cycles is reliable and consistent in its result, can run varied testing types, and cover the entire test pyramid from the unit through integration and exploratory, or scenario-based testing, and can capitalize on countless tools, frameworks, and test data to support development.
As continuous testing becomes more adopted, considering the balance of the people, processes, and technology is critical to the success of a test plan—in that order of importance! Organizations must encourage developers to train, reskill and upskill to stay up-to-date on the latest developments and frameworks available while creating a strong internal process of pipeline build. Having these processes and steps in place within a continuous testing strategy, alongside leading tools and technology, radically elevates the testing lifecycle.
AI has found a home in nearly every industry and department within an organization—including mobile testing. AI-based testing automates testing tools to produce better results. The sector has experienced advancements in everything from using AI to identify web elements in mobile applications to see increased usage of the technology to enhance existing tools and frameworks.
Introducing AI to mobile testing primarily excels when it is used to model applications by learning the application screens, and end-user flows and autonomously allows the engineer to create new test scenarios. The technology can support developers in streamlining processes, maintaining test data, executing tests, and analyzing test results, leaving higher-order tasks for humans to navigate. This relieves much of the manual, time-intensive requirements.
Though many developers are exploring all aspects of automated testing capabilities, there are four areas that are most easily automated:
1. Unit Testing: Identifies mistakes at the code level, either accidentally modified or simple errors.
2. Integration Testing: Checks if the existing system will work properly once a new component is introduced.
3. Smoke Testing: Verifies that the software works well enough to move into the testing phase.
4. Regression Testing: Ensures functionality after the code changes.
As developers look to introduce AI and test automation, it will be critical to find the most common, repetitive, and high-volume testing scenarios to balance human and machine-driven testing capabilities—alleviating developers from the mundane and thankless testing tasks that must be completed.
As new mobile technologies like 5G and foldables continue to enter the space, mobile and mobile web application testing is becoming increasingly complex—with mobile test automation a moving target. The third annual 2022 State of Test Automation Report surveyed 400 leading digital enterprises. The findings uncovered that over 60% of respondents believe mobile and mobile web apps are very important to their testing strategy.
Increasingly, more testing is done on digital platforms, and teams show a greater increase in test automation investment. In 2021, the report found that teams grew their mobile and web app test suites, while also adopting other technologies to serve different personas. With more behavioral-driven development adoption, frameworks like Flutter have skyrocketed in popularity as developers handle more testing responsibilities. Additionally, as the mobile testing space grows, so does the emphasis on shift left testing. Specifically, shift left testing has proven to improve performance, accessibility, and API test automation across platforms, eliminating manual testing activities that happen too late in the development process.
Advancements in mobile app technology—and the expectations for what a great app interaction looks like—continue to change and become more complex, introducing new challenges for tomorrow's developers. From chatbots to location-based services and AI camera technology, the evolving mobile landscape uncovers more testing gaps.
To drive the best outcomes with mobile testing, developers must test earlier and often in the process, anticipate influxes, and keep a constant pulse on the latest advancements in the space.
At the end of the day, if testing is not prioritized, don't expect customers to be waiting around.
Eran Kinsbruner, Chief Evangelist Test Automation Practices, Perforce Software
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