Today’s Mobile Apps: Flawless User Experience is Key
In the rapidly evolving landscape of mobile app development, ensuring a seamless user experience has become a non-negotiable imperative. Today’s customers increasingly rely on mobile applications for various aspects of their lives. Meanwhile the pressure to deliver flawlessness has never been higher. Yet, the path to perfection is anything but effortless – especially when it comes to testing and fixing bugs. The complexity of modern apps, spanning diverse devices and operating systems, renders the testing phase a labyrinthine challenge. In this demanding landscape, app developers need to prioritize productivity in mobile app testing strategies to stay competitive.
App Testing: Once a Bottleneck – Potentially a Source of Efficiency
The testing phase of the mobile app development cycle has historically been an accepted bottleneck. Even though manual testing takes days or even weeks, organizations haven’t been looking for a solution. But modern approaches are here to help. You and your team can reduce testing time, reduce the initial testing learning curve and bring your testing strategy up to speed.
Productivity in Mobile App Testing
It helps to start with a basic definition of what productivity means in the world of mobile app testing. The resources organizations have to work with within the testing realm are generally time, budget, and human expertise. This article will cover three tips that aim to reduce the need for all three with several different approaches. Chiefly, with the reduction in testing time and overall busywork. With this reduction, QA engineers are able to spend time fixing bugs and rolling out new features. Let’s explore some common components of testing and how they could be made more productive.
Productivity Tip One: Consider Cloud Device Labs
Hosting your own device lab is a major source of time, budget and expertise all at once. This resource drain comes in the form of initial purchase costs, time spent setting up devices, and expertise needed to maintain them. It doesn’t take much to extrapolate the enormous amount of time and money spent on each device. This is especially true in today’s highly fragmented device landscape (we’re looking at you, Android).
Many organizations are tempted by running simulators and emulators instead. While relatively cost effective, it’s important to remember that this option fails to consider real world scenarios. These include usage with cameras, battery life issues, GPS functionality and CPU limitations.
To leverage the coverage of testing on real world devices with the cost savings desired by using simulators, consider outsourcing your testing on cloud device labs. These real device labs are housed in different locations and are typically available anytime. By letting another company do the heavy lifting when it comes to purchase and maintenance, you can better utilize your existing headcount and budget on more important fixes and feature rollouts.
Productivity Tip Two: Use Automation (If You’re Not Already)
Transitioning from manual testing to automation offers another significant leap in productivity for mobile app testers. While manual testing has its merits, the ever-growing complexity of mobile applications and the need for rapid releases call for a more efficient approach. Automation testing empowers testers to streamline repetitive tasks, execute tests across multiple devices and platforms simultaneously, and accelerate the feedback loop. If you’ve ever thought of app testing in terms of ROI, you can easily begin to imagine the time and budget savings from this transition. By scripting test scenarios and automating their execution, testers can focus on more creative and exploratory aspects of testing. This more modern approach not only enhances efficiency but also ensures a higher level of accuracy and consistency in test results, ultimately saving time and promoting productivity.
And if you’re concerned about time already spent on creating manual tests – don’t worry, they can easily be converted into automations.
Productivity Tip Three: Consider Visual Editors Instead of Coding
Codeless editors, often called no-code, visual editors, drag-and-drop, or GUIs, are the next obvious advancement in a wave of technological abstraction. Just as we no longer need to type in code to use a program on our computers, testers are no longer required to use code directly to create, edit, or maintain mobile app tests. With drag-and-drop visual editors, app testers can simply
How does this help with productivity, you ask? The greatest improvement is the lack of time and expertise needed to get started testing. Without a QA specialist needed, or even the large learning curve of creating or editing traditionally coded tests, development teams are able to have non-specialists tap in and deploy test processes quickly. By letting a no-code editor do the heavy lifting of code management under the hood, test creation and execution steps can become accessible to nearly all skill levels. In practice, using visual editors saves you both time and money.
If you want to test out all three of these tips in action for free, consider Sofy. At Sofy we combine all of these features alongside an innovative AI component. Learn how Sofy has sped up mobile app testing by 95% for their customers today by connecting with a Sofy rep or getting a demo for yourself.
