So, you’ve decided that it’s time to get your mobile app testability in order. A wise decision! After all, testing is the name of the game, and you save your team endless headaches by ensuring that your mobile app is up to snuff before releasing it out into the wild.
In this brief guide, we’ll take a quick look at a eight steps you can follow to prepare your app for testability. These are in no particular order—each point is just as important as the next. That said, let’s dig in!
Eight steps toward mobile app testability
It’s not difficult to prepare your mobile app for testability:
1. Get organized
It may seem obvious, but ensuring that you’re organized and that you’ve got a well-considered plan may be the single most important step when preparing your app for testability. By keeping any and all confusion and chaos to an absolute minimum, you can better focus on the task at hand without constant distractions from other corners. By maintaining order throughout the testing process, you can keep efficiency, scalability, and quality as high as possible.
2. Identify and eliminate redundancies
Let’s take a moment to consider the example of the humble QR code. If you’re going to be testing every day, it is highly inefficient to constantly point a device at QR codes throughout your testing process. If you can find a way to bypass scanning a QR code and instead read from an image, you stand to benefit from increased efficiency. Ask yourself, if you were to add up all of that time spent manually intervening in the process, how much time would you have spent? Generally speaking, planning ahead to eliminate and identify any and all redundancies is a great strategy for getting the most out of your testing.
3. Work around biometrics
Biometrics, such as fingerprinting and face recognition, can similarly be a challenge for testing. It may be wise to go ahead and simply plan to bypass these processes in the staging environment to speed up the process and avoid complications surrounding personal fingerprints and facial recondition capabilities.
4. Keep your staging environment stable
During testing, try to keep your staging environment as stable as possible. By ensuring that your staging environment is consistent, you’ll avoid a potential headache around what amounts to moving goal posts.
5. Decide on emulators or real devices
When testing with devices, choosing between emulators or real devices is a huge decision. Generally speaking, real devices are the way to go. This is because they eliminate any potential guesswork and behave under any circumstance as a real machine would, whereas emulators always present some level of guesswork. Unfortunately, cost can be a major limitation here: Few teams have the time and resources necessary to set up a real device lab. In turn, if possible, you and your team stand to benefit from access to a real device lab.
6. Automate as much as possible
While most testing processes are functionally automatable, there exists edge cases that can make automated solutions harder. These include cloud-based environments or testing scenarios where testing with personal devices may be necessary. For example, if you have a one-time password (OTP) requirement, you may need to use fake OTPs so that the automation does not need to jump through hoops. These scenarios can lead to particular challenges that may need to be sorted out ahead of time.
7. Make automation easy
Make sure that you have the proper descriptors (such as resource names, element IDs, element description, or any kind of unique identifiers regarding the action the user is performing) to enable automation. In your button, you want to make sure that you have easy to identify names and other factors that make automation easier and less confusing.
8. Find no-code solutions
It’s no secret that the future is no-code, and that the No-Code Revolution is in full swing. No-code solutions are everywhere now, and can save your team both time and money by allowing non-specialists to perform testing, rather than specialists who are so often needed for higher level projects.
Where to next?
By following the eight steps above toward mobile app testability, you’ll be working from a great foundation. But keep in mind that every day seems to bring with it a new batch of solutions and problems in the testing world. Fortunately, testing itself is growing easier by the day, and your team stands to benefit. We at Sofy know this very well—after all, it’s what we do! If you’re looking for cutting edge automated no-code mobile app testing solutions, we encourage you to try out Sofy today.
