Introduction
Mobile phones are an essential part of our daily lives. It has evolved from a communication tool to a machine that can do anything. What is assisting this progress in reality? Yes, the apps for mobile devices. These programs enable us to utilize our phones for different tasks, including banking, restaurant ordering, and cab booking.
Mobile Application Testing is one of these steps to be taken. All applications must undergo testing once. It is done before release to ensure the application's quality. Testing is conducted based on three components which are:
- Functionality
- usability
- security
It increases the application's effectiveness and contributes to its user reliability.
The importance of testing mobile applications
The selection of mobile applications by consumers is significant for testing. The additional features in the mobile application will please the users, and bug patches will ensure that they don't have to uninstall them from their devices. Testing is therefore crucial for apps to survive.
Types of mobile application testing
There are two main types of testing:
- Manual testing
- Automated testing
Manual testing
It's known from the name alone that human intervention is necessary and that the user experience is the key priority. This procedure involves manually testing the application's functionality and looking for issues. This method will take time because it manually fixes bugs. It will also be more user-focused. After all, it will make sure the application meets user-friendliness standards.
- Actual hardware as a testing platform
One of the most widely used manual testing methods is using actual hardware. Applications are on devices, such as mobile phones. It will make it easier for the QAs to evaluate the performance and behavior of the application. There are virtual platforms where users may load applications and choose from an array of Android and iOS devices to test them on.
- Testing on Emulators or Simulators
Determining the variety of devices on which the QAs must test their program takes a long time. Download the appropriate emulator for each device. The main disadvantage of this strategy is that tests conducted using it won't produce realistic findings because emulators have fewer features than actual devices. The majority of iOS devices use simulators. In contrast to emulators, this will offer more precise data. Both are implemented throughout the early phases of development but are unreliable later on since the results could not be correct. However, the top issues for all QAs right now are accepted and created applications on all current Android and iOS devices.
The significance of manual testing
- There are interface and usability issues that people can discover that automated test scripts can't.
- Only manual testing that operates inside defined bounds is capable of exploratory testing.
- Less money
- For a complete review of all angles.
Automated Evaluation
Testing will be done with automated tools, which will speed up the process and require less human involvement. However, these are appropriate for large-scale projects that require repetitive work and higher costs. The Android automation tools are Robotium, Appium, Selendroid, Ranorex, etc.