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November 20, 2024
Table of Content
Quality assurance in mobile app development in today's fast-paced environment will herald the success or failure of an app. Mobile App Quality Assurance (QA) ensures an app meets the user's expectations, provides a seamless experience, adheres to various security and performance benchmarks, and works across diverse devices and environments.
In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through the main stages of the mobile app QA process; including all the best practices, case studies, and industry insights.
Quality assurance is important for mobile applications as it maintains user satisfaction, ensures smooth operation, and upholds the reputation of the brand.
Below are some key reasons why QA is important
Good performance and reliability are the ultimate benchmarks for delivering high-quality mobile applications. Users expect the apps to load promptly, function flawlessly, and offer reliable performance in every setting.
The QA highlights those bottlenecks in the performance that lead to lags or crashes of the app, thereby causing poor user experience. Without proper QA, it would not be possible for apps to handle the real-world scenario - either low battery, network connectivity, or high traffic.
Case Study
A fitness-tracking app conducted performance testing with comprehensive testing that simulated low network conditions and verified that the app could continue to track activities and sync data effectively.
Even under weak signal areas, the app kept on functioning without letting users lose their workout progress.
A bug in payment gateways or transaction processes may result directly in monetary loss; however, some mobile apps that handle payment, like an e-commerce site or a mobile banking app, may present a high risk for such issues.
A small bug could prevent users from completing transactions, resulting in potential lost sales or dissatisfied customers. QA is designed to test critical workflows to prevent the mentioned risks.
Case Study
Black Friday-related issues with a popular shopping app: on the day, its payment gateway bugs caused some transactions to fail, but QA caught the issue very early in the testing stage when the team could rectify it before the event. This proactive approach prevented large revenue losses during the high-traffic period.
Consumer retention is one of the key success factors for apps. Consumers will not continue using apps when they often crash or are unsatisfactory in terms of usability and have varying experiences.
A rigorous QA process ensures that the core features of the app work flawlessly, leading to a seamless, pleasant user experience. By unveiling the usability flaws, QA helps achieve higher retention rates and better app ratings.
Mobile applications contain sensitive personal data, such as financial information or health records, and sometimes login credentials. So there is an immense priority on security. A security breach can result in data being stolen, legal consequences, and loss of trust.
Testing security vulnerabilities is the QA teams' duty. Penetration testing and following laws like GDPR or HIPAA are other sectors of QA. Quality Assurance can ensure that user data gets the right protection and meets the given security standards.
Case Study
A health app was extensively tested for security to ensure that all patient data is encrypted, access-controlled, and adheres to HIPAA. The QA team penetrated the app by using penetration testing to seek out vulnerabilities and fortify the app against potential attacks to ensure sensitive data are not affected.
Below are the sub-phases in which the process of the mobile application QA process consists. Each phase ensures that functionality, performance, and security standards are reached. Find the different phases and their key best practices along with insights below,
Objective: To define the business objectives of an app, user needs, technical requirements, and key features.
The closer the engagement with stakeholders such as product managers, business analysts, and developers within the requirements analysis phase, the better the definition of features and functionalities in an app, which eventually creates a comprehensive strategy for testing towards the app's goals.
Example
In designing a social media application, stakeholders clearly outline the following: users can post, comment, like, and share. All of these features become the primary focus of the test strategy; besides scalability and security.
Understanding the target audience is an important part of the QA process. The expectations of different user groups could be varied, and this should be considered during the test case design. Therefore, it includes creating user personas who would represent key users of the app and then testing the app on their needs and behaviors.
Example
A game app may involve Casual players and avid gamers. Both types have different expectations from aspects like difficulty levels provided, multiplayer choices, and in-app shopping. All of these need to be covered through test cases.
Break down the functional and non-functional requirements of the app into measurable specific criteria that can be tested for validation purposes. This way, most of the features are guaranteed to be validated by tests and the minimum standards of quality while testing.
Example
A fitness app might have a requirement like "The app should track workout progress and sync with the cloud within 5 seconds." Such a requirement can then be used to design performance test cases regarding how the app would respond.
Best Practices
Develop a clear, elaborate plan that defines the scope, resources, and tools used for testing.
The scope of testing should be defined early to prioritize the most critical features. This includes identifying core functionality, high-risk areas, and the features most important to the user experience.
Example
For an e-commerce app, the testing scope would likely encompass all the various high-priority, feature-based testing - like the functionality of a shopping cart, the checkout process, and the integration with the payment gateway. Features like account settings or product reviews could be tested later in the process.
Select the test types for your application. Test types include functional testing, usability testing, performance testing, security testing, and compatibility testing. The right kind of test type will ensure that every aspect of your application is tested.
Security testing should be one of the major ones when developing a mobile banking application, such as testing encryption methods. Performance testing ensures that the traffic volume with heavy usage doesn't slow down your application during peak times.
Divide the work into specific tasks and allocate the right team member for the job depending on their skill set. The success of a good quality app depends on QA engineers, performance testers, security experts, and UX designers.
Example
For a travel app, one would need a security expert to ensure that payment data is encrypted and a performance tester to test whether the app would still be stable while fetching real-time flight information.
On the basis of the app's technology stack, choose suitable testing tools and platforms. For instance, for automated testing use Appium, cross-platform testing using BrowserStack, and bug tracking using Jira.
Example
Suppose the food delivery app wants to test how the backend deals with the sudden creation of traffic spikes from users ordering together. Here, it can make use of JMeter to simulate the desired conditions.
A big retailer continuously utilized integration and automated testing to run tests every day. This ensured new features did not break existing functionality. They had a sophisticated test plan that was updated per sprint to allow maximum coverage.
The next step is to create detailed and structured test cases for every possible use case, edge case, and scenario.
Develop comprehensive test scenarios that encompass all the features of the app. All possible user actions and edge cases should be considered to make sure that the app behaves as expected.
Example
For a ride-sharing app, the test scenarios would include booking a ride, adding payment details, rating a driver, and canceling a ride.
Then, describe preconditions, which should be satisfied before the execution of any test case. Moreover, each test case should be able to define the expected outcome.
Example
The precondition in this case might be that the user had the location service enabled in a weather application, and therefore, the expected outcome would be that the application can display the current weather for the user's location.
Test extreme or unexpected inputs, large file uploads, invalid data entry, and rapid tapping of UI elements.
Example
Test the behavior of a social media app when a user tries to upload an image that is larger than the file size limit or tries to enter a non-numeric value in the payment details section.
Now, confirm that all app features work as they should, according to specifications.
Test each unit or module of the app separately. Unit tests are typically automated and verify small blocks of code, such as functions or methods, for correctness.
Example
Test the login API to make sure it accepts a valid user; otherwise, reject a set of invalid credentials.
Check that multiple modules or components of the app behave together as expected. This includes not only tests for APIs and third-party integrations but also advanced workflows.
Example
For a mobile food delivery app, integration testing would ensure that the payment gateway has been successfully integrated with the backend to process transactions.
Simulate the user's entire journey through the app from start to end, ensuring all elements work as expected and there is no break in the user flow.
Example
A user login and placed an order with the help of a food delivery app in order to be tested as a flow
During the functional testing of an e-commerce application, QA found a bug in the 'product filtering' feature because users were not able to filter products by multiple categories. It was fixed before its release.
The next step is to stress test the application under varied loads and adverse conditions so that it can handle any large number of users and work properly.
Performance testing of an app is required so that it would perform optimally at various conditions such as high traffic, limited resources and variable network speeds. It would diagnose performance bottlenecks and give it the stress tolerance to not crash or slow down.
Simulation of High Volume of Traffic: Load testing checks how the app performs under expected or above-average user traffic. It simulates a high number of users accessing the app at the same time to ensure it can support peaks in users without considerable degradation in performance.
Example
A ticketing app for big events such as concerts or a sports game has to undergo load-testing at times of peak use, which may be when the tickets are open for sale. This helps validate whether an app can even stand against thousands of simultaneous users trying to buy tickets without its breaking down.
Push the App Beyond Normal Limits to Identify Breaking Points: Stress testing helps to identify the extreme limits of the app by deliberately overloading traffic or data into it. This in turn ensures the gentle behavior of the app, rather than just its crash, when pushed beyond normal limits.
Example
In an e-commerce application, stress testing might attempt to recreate a massive spike in traffic seen during sales such as Black Friday. This will help evaluate the behavior of the system when transaction volumes are significantly greater than usual. Perhaps slow processing or failures in transaction processing could be issues that stress testing could alleviate.
Don't Allow the App to Dissipate Excessive Battery Mobile users are very sensitive to battery drain. Performance testing has also considered how efficiently the app would use its resources on the device, including battery consumption.
Tool
The use of Battery Historian helps in analyzing battery consumption through an analysis on Android devices. Performance testing ensures that the app is not wasting the battery when used for extensive periods or with background running processes.
Example
Testing a navigation app might ensure that the GPS tracking and map updating do not drain the battery too much, especially when in prolonged usage.
Now, you need to detect vulnerabilities within the app so as to validate whether the data is secure and complies with the standards and regulations on security.
Mobile applications, especially those that contain sensitive information like personal data, financial transactions, and health records, will be put to strict security testing to ensure that users' data is protected and that trust can be maintained.
Focused Areas
Testing Secure Transmission of Sensitive Data: This is one of the basic requirements by security testing; this includes ensuring that personal details, passwords, and payment information are transmitted securely over the network. Most of the data should be encrypted using industry-standard encryption protocols.
Example
Security testing within a mobile banking application would ensure that the payment and login information are encrypted when they are passed to the backend server. This makes the access to sensitive financial data safe.
Login Mechanism Testing: The authentication mechanisms, such as 2FA, will make sure that only the rightful users have access to their accounts. It gets verified during the course of security testing that the mechanism provided works as intended and, more importantly, logins neither are easily surrendered nor cracked.
Example
To verify a password reset in a social media application might test functionality in such an application. The condition with incorrect sending and verification of the OTP might even cause locked accounts of users.
Demonstrate Real-Life Attacks to Identify Vulnerabilities: Penetration testing, or pen testing, demonstrates real-life attacks to identify vulnerabilities in the application. This can be compromising authentication control, unauthorized access to data, or exploiting system weaknesses.
Example
For instance, on a healthcare application, penetration testing would simulate likely attempts against the patient records in an attempt to check if unauthorized users are allowed access to sensitive information.
Ensure that no functionality has changed or been modified as a result of the latest updates or changes.
Regression testing is performed to ensure that the new functionality added or the bug fixed does not introduce new bugs or break existing functionality. It is an important step in any development cycle, particularly in Agile or continuous integration environments, where changes are happening constantly.
Since regression testing is a redundant process, this process is highly automated using Selenium or Appium, etc. Automatic testing allows one to verify the core functionality of the app is not compromised in the course of every new iteration or update.
Example
Suppose a photo-sharing app has added a new feature in its system. In beta testing, it would validate that the functionalities like uploading pictures, commenting, and getting alerted, remain uninterrupted as before .
Get feedback on the use, functionality, and performance of an app from users before releasing in the market.
The app is released to actual real-world end-users outside the development team to gather insight into how it performs. It helps find any issues that have crept into the app prior to general release, such as bugs, usability, or performance.
Apps are published on platforms like TestFlight (for iOS) or Google Play Console (for Android) to a small set of beta testers. Responses from these beta testers are reviewed and utilized in making last-minute adjustments before full deployment.
Example
A mobile game can launch a beta version of the app for a set of users. Beta testers would provide inputs on the balancing of gameplay, bugs, crashes, and UI issues so that the development team can fine-tune the experience before launching it.
Monitor the performance, stability, and behavior of the users after the launch of the app so that bugs or issues appearing post-deployment can be easily detected.
Even after launching, monitoring is crucial to ensure the app remains successful and useful for its users. Monitoring launched could detect the problems that would occur during execution but didn't occur during the testing phase, such as crashes, poor performance, or heavy use by the user.
Tools such as Firebase Crashlytics, New Relic, and Flurry could be used to track any crashes and monitor the app's performance and the post-launch behavior of the user.
Example
After releasing an update to a messaging app, the development team uses Firebase Crashlytics to track any crashes or errors users encounter. If a specific error occurs frequently, the team can prioritize fixing it in the next patch.
By continuously monitoring the app’s performance and addressing issues promptly, teams can maintain high levels of user satisfaction and improve the app over time.
Proper QA process is a means by which your mobile application will exceed the expectations of your users. Any step requirements analysis, in-depth testing of the app, right through to the post-deployment stages an opportunity for quality improvement. Investing in QA makes sure that your app doesn't just work- it's a product users can trust and love.
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