How to test mobile apps effectively?
Nowadays, application development, regardless of the platform, is a very complex task, requiring the work of an entire team of people with exceptional talents and abilities. One of the key positions in the entire application development process is a software tester, whose job is to find errors in the application using dedicated tools. Application testing is a very complex process; therefore, it is divided into several stages.
Stages of application testing
Automatic testing
Basically, testing a mobile app, whether testing an android app or testing an iOS app, is based on applying the same steps. The first of these is usually unit testing, based on verifying the correctness of the operation of individual pieces of code, e.g., objects or procedures, by running a series of prepared tests and checking the correctness of their result, e.g., calculations. In such a test, the logical correctness of the operation of a given function is verified, but without checking the operation of the entire application and communication between its various elements. Therefore, in the next step, there is automatic testing of the user interface (UI), that is, so to speak, contrary to the name, it is a test not of the interface itself, but a test of the correctness of the operation of our application as a whole, and it is a test from the user’s perspective. This type of test allows us to test the application on different device models (tablets, phones with different screen resolutions or operating system versions), and verify the stability and performance of the application. This is followed by integration tests, i.e., verification of the application’s communication with the server on which the application architecture is implemented and the correctness of the data transferred between them. Both the web application tester and the mobile application tester have similar tasks. They differ only in the testing platform used, as the vast majority of mobile applications are executed on the server side, and only their user interface is available on the mobile device. Web applications from the software development side are de facto the same as mobile applications, with the caveat that their interface must be displayed by a web browser on any hardware platform, not just on a mobile device.
Manual testing
The next step is manual testing, i.e., “manually” clicking and testing the performance of the application’s interface and its resistance to input that was not anticipated by the software developer writing the application. This stage requires a lot of ingenuity and patience to test every unusual behavior of the sample user; therefore, this testing cannot be done automatically, but by a live tester. In addition, penetration tests are also carried out, checking the security of a given application and its vulnerability to various types of attacks. As a rule, such verification (audit) is carried out by external specialists.
How to test applications effectively?
Effective testing of an application and catching all errors, due to its complexity and multi-stage nature, requires a lot of knowledge and skills from testers. In our asperIT project, we provide technical facilities in the form of the availability of testing platforms of different types (tablets, phones with different screen resolutions or operating system versions), which significantly increases the quality of our work.
