We can not deny the fact that mobile applications have become an integral part of our our lives. You can perform all the activities ranging from playing games to buying groceries with just one tap on your mobile phone with the help of mobile applications. But if the mobile application that you are using is not up to the mark for your use or is slow or or is plagued by user experience having bugs that make you irritated, then you’ll just uninstall it in a fraction of second and find the better replacement for that app and will never reinstall it.

So, any mobile application must be properly tested before being deployed and made available for users. Hence comes the importance of mobile application testing. But it ain’t a one time activity. Regular updates and improvements in this agile world requires frequent testing as numerous times in a day. Then the major challenge lying behind the beautiful mobile applications came into existence. Managing time between development, testing, and deployment.

One thing is dependent on other. You can’t deploy a product if it isn’t tested. So, frequent released need frequent testing without compromising the quality. So, you need to formulate a proper mobile application testing strategy by which you can test your mobile applications thoroughly without compromising on the quality.

What All is to be Tested in a Mobile Application?

When an app is released to the market various factors are accounted related to the performance of the test.

Some of which majorly focuses on:

• what is the start-up time related to the application,

• how much memory is the app consuming,

• what percent of battery is being used by the app,

• does it work with all the OSes present in the market,

• is the app compatible with all screen sizes present in the market,

and the list goes on.

Now as you can figure out there are hundreds of tests that an app has to pass before releasing in the market so the next thing that comes to the mind is how do we cope up with these many numbers of tests in addition to the increased market needs.

The current statistics shows that every day 1300 apps are being added to the google play store (source: [Appbrain]) so you can see how tough the competition is.

This increases the need of faster testing methods done very efficiently not to lag behind in the competition. Proper testing strategy needs to be followed to save time for other troubleshooting methodologies.

What Should Be Done To Save Time While Testing?

Automate Testing of Mobile Applications

One of the mobile application testing strategies that helps you save time is using Automation testing for testing your mobile applications.

Test automation tools for mobile app like Appium, Robotium, MonkeyRunner Ranorex, Appium Studio, UI automator, etc.can help you do this task. You can explore the advantages of automation testing in our blog on automation testing.

Automation testing when applied to load testing, performance testing, Unit testing, Device testing scripts can help you perform these tests several number of times in a row. This allows you to test the application for every minor update and the efficiency can be increased.

Use Emulators

Add to this, use of Emulators also provides you with the solution. You can test your mobile application in numerous number of virtual environments that emulate the actual test environment. This saves you a lot of time since you can test all the environments on a single platform by changing various mobile configurations. Emulators like Mobile Phone Emulator, MobiReady, etc can be utilized for this purpose. Besides saving time, emulators also increase your testing efficiency and add flexibility to your testing strategy.

Make a List of Mobile Devices Beforehand

Analyze the market and your target audience to wisely choose the devices that are widely used by your audience. This depends on the popularity of devices among your target audience.

Say you are developing a gaming application on Golf then you surely need to analyze the market for interests as number of people who like golf, what devices they use. If the audience use 99.8% of apple devices and 0.2% of other handheld mobile devices for gaming then your major area of concern should be apple devices. This saves you from extra efforts to be put in testing and of course will save you a lot of time.

You need to select the relevant devices. To help you with that selection we have already done some research and you can read it in the following blogs.

So, using some of these tips you can save a lot of time and perform aggressive tester faster and in the right direction. So, go ahead, plan your strategy, and see your mobile application succeed.