All You Wanted to Know About Mobile Test Automation

At a time when the question of mobile app development is chief on our minds, we need to ask ourselves how much the testing process impacts the overall quality of the product. There is no doubt that testing is critical to app quality, but how much of an advantage is Automating the test framework? That is the question that this article aims to answer. Test automation has become an integral part of mobile app development process today. This is because mobile app development is agile and the development associated with it should be in tune with that as well. But is the testing process agile? It can’t be so. That is why a lot many tools for testing automation are available, and they fit agile mobile development quite well.

The Test Automation Advantage

The crucial advantage with test automation is that you get to do the testing in parallel. You can run the tests in the night and do the next phase of regression in the morning. This way, the development process gets over sooner and you have the product ready for use faster. When it comes to mobile apps, test automation allows you to get over with the entire testing process instantly and quickly. Any Testing process is evaluated on three parameters viz. effectiveness, efficiency and coverage. And on all three, automation gives you the critical edge wherein you can complete tests over and over again that you cannot even perform manually.

Factors That Influence Mobile App Automation Testing

Integrated App Development

Integrated mobile app development and testing would mean that you would have to repeat the development and testing cycles to ensure application quality. And you need to test your software for every release and you need to test it on all variants and versions of operating systems, browsers and hardware.

Record-Playback

Taking this approach would greatly reduce the errors in your application as you need not write anything in code here. In the record-playback approach, you can record your tests and play them over as many times as you want on different device configurations. But limited functionality is something you’ll have to cope with.

Test Re-usability: The Open Standards Question

When you have automated your entire test process, you are basically eliminating the possibility of vendor lock-in. With automation, you can increase the length of your tests and their coverage spanning memory, data tables and file contents to execute complex test cases in every run. In turn, you get more time to market your mobile apps.

What Should be Your Priority When Testing Mobile Apps?

1. UI Layouts As mobile apps are targeted at different devices and screen resolutions, this is an area that needs the highest priority.

 

2. Security Can you gain unauthorized access to the app? Testing for access and information is  crucial

 

3. User experience Does the app stand up to the expectations of the users in its category? As we debate the efficacy and advantage of automation testing, we also need to remember that your app in the end, is as good as its development. So develop the app with the best developers and test it in a trusted automation framework!