Hardly anything is more annoying for app users than when an application does not work as intended. Anyone who has ever pressed around on the screen of their smartphone or tablet for what feels like an eternity without anything happening knows that there are no second chances. The applications usually end up in the app graveyard immediately.
Quality assurance (QA) is the effort by a company to make sure that a mobile app provides the best experience to the users. QA is crucial as various studying has pointed out that as much as 48% of the unsatisfied users delete apps after crashes. To ensure that apps do not immediately fall out of favor with users, a good strategy for test automation is required in addition to manual quality testing. To avoid exactly this and for users to become fans in the long term, a sufficient degree of quality assurance in the development process is unavoidable. A good and balanced strategy requires two types of testing: manual testing on the one hand and automated tests on the other.
The manual review of the apps is mainly about identifying problems that require human creativity, such as visual errors or checking usage scenarios that have not yet been taken into account during development. In contrast, automated tests for quality assurance are suitable for predefined and repeatedly feasible processes.
Due to the high speed of application development, the rapidly changing technology and the constantly growing number of devices, in particular, the demand for efficient automation of testing processes for mobile apps and responsive websites is increasing. This allows companies to maintain a high speed of development.
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The Basic Framework Must Be Stable
Nowadays, it is best practice to use open source components such as Selenium to set up a professional and flexible and at the same time future-proof solution. With such a solution, there are no license costs, but larger investments must be made in the development of your own framework. These create the framework for automation and delivers important functions. In practice, we often see that the effort required to set up and maintain your own framework is clearly underestimated. A good framework usually contains years of experience and corresponding development capacities.
Define Only Relevant Test Cases
For this purpose, those responsible for front-end tests should think about the usage scenarios of the application: How is the app ultimately used by the users? What absolutely needs to be checked? How we will measure the success? Once the answers have been found to these questions, the essential test cases should be defined in such a way that they reflect user behavior as comprehensively as possible. In order to ensure that the written cases can be automated without any problems, they should be as short, fast and stable as possible and can be carried out in every conceivable order without any problems.
Maintain Test Scripts Correctly
Normally, changes in the code of an app also adjustments in the corresponding automation script. In practice, we often see that too little attention is paid to long-term maintainability and high efforts arise or test scripts become too unstable.
It is crucial that companies draw on appropriate expertise in the development of automation and that continuous maintenance is ensured. For each failed test, it must be checked whether there is a bug, the test must be adjusted or e.g. a timeout has caused a false positive and the test simply has to be started again. Without investing appropriate time resources in daily maintenance, the quality of automation otherwise decreases significantly over time and more problems than benefits arise.
Use User Hardware and Software
In order to map as many use cases as possible with regard to hardware and software use of users in testing, all common device types and software versions should be used. Since the procurement and maintenance of physical devices and systems are usually extremely expensive and tedious, QA managers should consider using a cloud solution that has the appropriate infrastructure.
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Final Thoughts
In any case, one thing is clear: effective and efficient test automation not only makes the quality assurance of an app easier, it also ensures better customer feedback when entering the market. Companies get the best possible results through the combination of manual testing and automated procedures.
It is important to design the process and all variables involved in such a way that they are as easy to maintain as possible and can be adjusted without problems once changes have been made to the app’s program code. If QA managers take this into account and the quality of the application continuously ensure that they are loyal to their users in the long term.
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