An Insight into the Rise in Mobile Testing Demand

Recently, a number of reports highlighted that a gradual increase is noted in the number of organizations who have comprehensive processes in place for testing mobile apps. Most mobile app developers, nowadays, realize the significance of delivering a flawless mobile application for getting higher ROI. An organization can accomplish several objectives by implementing a formal mobile app testing strategy. The strategy will help the organizations in keeping the end users engaged, and boost both productivity and sales through personal interaction. However, there are several factors that make mobile app testing essential for each organization.

Why testing is important for your software application

Software testing is the process of assessing different parameters of an application that will determine the functionality, efficiency and productivity of the application. But, how much important is it? Do we need it? Let’s find out...

Testing determines the fate of an application!! Industry respects testers as Mirror!; Because, the tester reflects the exact status of an application so that the developer can take immediate actions for the improvement of the application. Moreover, tester behaves like a connection link between the end user and the developer. Tester tests an application from the end user’s point of view and gives feedbacks to the developer for improvement, bug fixing etc. On the contrary, developer is unable to trace the errors in the user experience because, he is aware of the background processes. As a result, a developer never find it difficult to access his application. To avoid this unfavourable situation, testers are there in the industry. To add this, when a tester tests an application thoroughly it results in a better output and better output means better future! Isn’t?

Is the software testing market growing?

Why Software testing? As a software developer you should always careful for quality and reliable output. To achieve the same you have to design and develop and enterprise standard software application for the industry. From the top, it looks as if a good software developer is the key for a reliable software application or product; but the fact is quite different. From the ground we can see the reality and it says the importance of software tester is much higher than that of a developer. When a developer develops an application, though he can make it robust with his skill and experience but he will fail in providing that supreme quality of user experience for the end user. This is quite obvious since he can never feel the difficulty and pain of the end user due to prior knowledge of all background processes involved in the development process. He can easily roam around the application without any difficulty and this gives him virtual feelings of being inside a perfect application. But when the application is projected to the practical end users they may find it difficult during the browsing process; because they are totally unaware of the background processes. To avoid this issue testers play an important role in the industry as a connecting link between the software developer and the end user.

Software Testing and its objective

Testing is treated as the most trusted concept of software development life cycle. Often developers underestimate testers. But they are totally unaware and uneducated about the importance of testers in the industry. Though the effort of a developer is usually more than that of a tester; but at the end of the day, the quality of the application or product will depend upon the smart effort of the tester. We can’t ignore the importance of smart work against hard work. Hence testers are given more priority by major IT companies of the industry because, they understand their importance in the quality output and hence in getting a CMMI level status in the industry. There are many important points to describe the importance of testers in the industry; but in our topic we will shortlist three concrete objectives of software testing.

Independent Testing - Its benefits and risks

Independent Testing is carried out by testing specialists who are not involved with the development of the system. This is done to make sure that the software that is delivered is able to meet both functional as well as non-functional requirements. This process helps to avoid any type of author bias and is proven to be effective for finding any kind of drawbacks or failures. There can be several levels of independence, such as the tests can be performed by a person who wrote it; by another person belonging to the same team; by a person who belongs to another group or an independent test team and by a person who belongs to a completely different company or by an external body.

Agile Performance Testing Life Cycle

In a software development life-cycle, performance testing is a vital activity. Application performance in terms of initial planning along with overall application performance and production analysis drives the development of better software releases as well as iterations. In all iterations of software development process, application programmers, testers and stakeholders must make performance a major consideration in every iteration. Here you can get a closer understanding of how performance testing can be integrated into your Agile process.

The Key Activities Involved in Agile Processes

The best practices relating to performance testing involve various primary issues. Throughout the past two decades, business application devices have experienced significant evolution from monolithic mainframe systems to composite as well as distributed systems. Development life-cycle process is presently measured in weeks or even days as opposed to years. These changes to the development methodology or technology increase the pressure on test engineers to finish or plan performance testing. Besides the evaluation of new systems or issues of legacy application, implementation continue to have impact on test engineers.

Issues Associated with Traditional Agile Testing

At the environment testing core, there is the art of analyzing how the application responds after imitating the real user activity or behavior. With brand new testing systems, test engineers are forced to make a deliberate guess about the users' behavior based on requirements as well as use-cases. With brand new systems, the test engineer is forced to make a calculated guess about the behavior of users based on use-cases and requirements.

The essential performance related issue reliably uses data from a constricted non-production environment to predict precisely the implementation ability of the system in a rather robust environment. Test engineers generally do their best in order to attempt or extrapolate for identification of system presentation, but often gain constricted success forecasting environment.

An Agile Environment Approach

With growing business needs as well as technology advancement, enterprises continue to work on producing highly developed software in less time. To realize this goal, a number of organizations have started adopting Agile methodological analysis. This approach helps in accelerating time to market, improving the quality of software, enhancing productivity and alignment between several business purposes and the technology innovations.

Agile methodology has tremendous momentum as it has been on the rise over the past few years. Software development breaks through the barriers of conventional waterfall model to Agile development to render better value much faster in order to improve the return on investment (ROI). An Agile environment puts several teams to work and develop the specialized, iterative as well as incremental product. This methodology promotes appropriate reviews, close teamwork, self-organization and more iterations. This approach also facilitates rapid delivery of high quality software and thus enables an industrial practice that aligns software development with company goals along with customer needs.

Agile Performance Testing

Performance evaluation which generally takes place in a waterfall model at the end of the life-cycle moves to the beginning in an Agile process that includes the designing as well as analysis. An application performance is directly proportional to its design. Hence, at the early stage of the life-cycle development it should be addressed. Throughout the Agile process, performance testing is considered from the release planning stage onwards.

In this developing business scenario, with the existing system, advent and demand of new products, the switch to the agile development technique is taking place from standard convention techniques. With the application of new or latest technology, more and more improved software are being developed. The performance of the products mostly depends on the specification and design of the product that can change at any point of time. Hence, this latest version of software should always be updated and monitored well for better functionality and adequate level of user satisfaction.

You can hire software testing companies from India who can help you accomplish testing within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide QA software testing services. If you would like to know more about the expertise of our certified software testers, please reach out to us at Mindfire Solutions.

Data-driven test automation is the best mobile application testing strategy

Using software for execution of tests as well as determining whether the predicted outcome and actual outcome are same or not on basis of those tests is known as test automation. Automation phases in software appears during the testing as well as implementation phase. Automated testing helps organizations accomplish the goal of adequately tested software as fast and thoroughly as possible. The coverage is also increased and the need for testing manually is reduced. Through this type of evaluation, minor defects which remain unexposed by manual testing are discovered. In fact, there are plenty of other advantages associated with this kind of evaluation, making it absolutely indispensable in the world of software. This is especially so for testing of mobile applications since it is a much more complicated process with the number of varying platforms along with operating systems of tablets, smartphones, etc.

Automated tests need proper execution environment; in this case it is an automation or testing framework which is an overall system for the automation of tests. The framework or support or work platform for the evaluations constitutes a set of concepts, practices as well as assumptions. The framework is application independent and can be easily expanded, maintained and perpetuated. Testing frameworks are of different types- modular, keyword driven, hybrid and data driven.

For data driven testing, data files supply the test's output and input values. Separate files store the expected output and input results. Although, the file is generally in tabular formats, it can be a CVS file, Excel file, DAO object, ODBC source, ADO object, etc. In such a framework variables are used for output verification values along with input values. All coded information related to navigating through evaluation status logs and application, reading of data files, etc are there in evaluation scripts. The test case remains encapsulated in information files and scripts remain a means for data delivery or a “driver”. Just the test information is contained in the data files of this type of evaluation.

Data-driven testing framework has a number of advantages like-

• The scripts can be created even during the ongoing development of applications.
• You can greatly reduce unnecessary duplication as well as redundancy of automated test scripts creation because records and files are used for verification of data along with input and also because of the modular type design.
• When there arises changes in the functionality, all you need to do is revise the script of the specific “Business Function”.
• Details as well as information like expected results, outputs or inputs are stored in form of text records which can be managed very conveniently.
• Errors can be handled better which results in more robust testing scripts. This is mainly because during the calling of scripts the functions return with “FALSE” or “TRUE” values, the entire thing is not aborted. Just creating a nice “recovery” program results in the execution of test scripts without needing any attendance.

Data-driven frameworks have certain disadvantages as well. For the automation tool, you need to be an expert on the scripting language; for each test case, many data-files are needed. In fact, evaluation plan information has to be re-entered by test engineer in varying data-files and on top of that the test plan has to be properly managed as well. However, the advantages of data-driven test automation outnumbers the disadvantages. With this type of testing, new test cases can be easily added just by adding new entry into information source. Also different sets of information help cover many aspects of the features of applications, thus increasing the test coverage. One script can test application functionality which makes this automation framework the best mobile application testing strategy.

You can hire software testing companies who can help you create and execute the perfect mobile app testing strategy.

We provide mobile app development as well as software testing services. If you would like to speak to expert mobile app developers from our team about the ways in which we go about doing app testing, please feel free to contact us. We will be glad to get back to you.