Being an android app development company, we know nothing pisses off the client more than a faulty final product. A small bug can ruin their elation and they would ask countless questions. “You didn’t even bother to test my product?”,” You’re so unprofessional, didn’t even check for bugs?”
That’s why mobile app testing is a crucial phase. You can’t be complacent. Good teams make sure the app has been tried and tested from different angles.
Assuming that you’re here, you want to learn about the strategies for mobile apps performance testing. Slow apps, even if they are functioning alright, are useless. Nobody today has the patience to bear low-performing apps.
So, how can you test your mobile app development for testing? In this article, we’re going to talk about that.
Strategy for Performance Testing Mobile Apps
An effective mobile app testing strategy consists of the following steps:
1. Align Test Objectives
When running tests, you have different objectives. Sometimes you’d like to learn about the bugs while sometimes your sole objective would be to test its speed.
Normally, testers are keen to test complex features like the cart feature for e-commerce stores, the registration and contact form, and so on.
At this stage, the testing team learns about the architecture of the product including its business and data levels. In the beginning, make sure you know why you’re testing and what you want to achieve with it.
2. Identify Testing KPIs
Without setting benchmarks, you won’t be able to decide what’s perfect, what’s average, and what’s below standards. Just like there’s a benchmark for “pass” and “fail” in education, there has to be a similar kind of benchmark for testing your app.
You can consider the following as the key KPIs for testing:
Error rate; Maximum response time; Average response time; The peak number of requests; Average throughput
3. Simulate a Real-Life Testing Environment
Since your ultimate objective is to test the app for the user experience it will provide to the users in real-time, testers use system emulators. Such tools help in emulating the basic parameters of an operating system so the tester can get a sense of the look and feel of the interface.
You can choose the best emulator for this purpose based on your research or experience. Make sure you assess the performance of features that require camera permission, GPS, and other device-specific functions so the end product meets your expectations.
4. Prioritize scenarios
Effective testing is all about devising different scenarios your app might go through. Some of them are likely to occur frequently while some would occur once in a blue moon.
Mostly, testers check the app for frequently occurring scenarios. And the rare ones are not even considered or thought of as worth checking for.
Before starting the testing process, make sure you have jotted down all of such scenarios. Start from high-priority ones then move to the ones that are going to be rare. Yet, they can piss off the users.
5. Test on Different Software & Hardware
It depends on the type of app you have developed. Is it a native app or a cross-platform one? Testing will be done accordingly. If your app is a cross-platform one, you will have to test it on multiple platforms.
Also, you must check it on different resource specifications, for example, OS speeds and RAM. Make sure it’s performing alright based on its usage with other apps and functioning in the background.
6. Start Testing from the Oldest Device
Mobile devices and OS versions keep updating. What’s new today will become old after a few days. So when you are testing your app, start with the oldest version.
Not all of them are going to use it on the latest version. So if the app doesn’t perform well on an old platform it would turn off the user.
It’s normal that the code on a newer device might not work effectively on an older device. It’s a great practice to start from an older version of the device or OS and move up from there.
Once the issues are caught with the oldest version, it becomes easier to make rectifications in the other versions.
7. Prepare for Interruptions
Mobile users face more interruptions than their PC counterparts. This is due to the fact mobile devices are used in a different way than PCs. When you turn on the computer and switch between different windows, different applications keep running in the background.
On mobile phones or tablets, you might be using an app when you receive a phone call.
So interruptions are a common part of the UX and you can’t leave this aspect out of testing. Take these interruptions into account while testing and make it a smooth experience for the user to as much extent as possible.