Smartphones have become powerful, sophisticated, and advanced over the years. From just being a device to communicate, now smartphones are leveraged to do any personal or professional work efficiently. From browsing social media to handling emails, smartphones have become a multipurpose gadget for users all over the world. More than $350 billion of revenue was generated from just mobile apps in 2018. And these astronomical numbers are only expected to surpass over $900 billion by 2023.
Amid the exponential growth of mobile users, several challenges have emerged with mobile app testing service providers. Cutthroat competition has compelled businesses to launch applications at a faster pace. Apart from shorter time-to-market, QA professionals need to consider multiple aspects of an application including multiple OS versions, cross-platform capabilities, network, data usage, and in-built native features.
With such a large ecosystem of mobile applications, it is also essential to use mobile test automation for enhanced efficiency, test effectiveness, and speed-to-market. However, it is not just technology and tools that can help you to implement mobile test automation efficiently. There are several other crucial factors that you need to consider to offer flawless mobile test automation services.
Cost
It is crucial to think about the cost factor with a thorough approach. You should consider factors including automation tools, timeline, IT infrastructure, training, and available bandwidth of resources. Analyze all these factors comprehensively to calculate ROI and identify the feasibility of a mobile app.
Automation testing methods will also help in reducing the cost and efforts. You can resume already built test cases again and again without manual efforts. The time saved through this process will help in reducing the overall cost of the mobile app. Test automation can also enable QA teams to perform parallel app testing to find out and fix bugs at an early stage of software development.
Scope of the Test
It is also crucial to analyze the coverage and scope of test automation for mobile apps. By applying the right approach to execute complex test automation, you can easily enhance the quality of mobile applications while reducing time-to-market significantly.
It is also advisable to not limit the test coverage to just the functionality of mobile apps. You can also cover different areas including database table and memory usage among others. Apart from that, QA engineers should focus more on creating new automation test cases instead of automation manual ones only.
Aside, you should not be relying solely on test automation. In fact, you can have better test results by leveraging a blend of both manual and automation testing.
Proof of Concept
With a legit proof of concept (POC), test engineers can easily mitigate existing risks that are linked to the flawless implementation of a test automation strategy. It can also help in finding whether a single tool is required to meet test automation requirements or you need a set of multiple tools to deliver cross-platform and multi-device automation solutions.
Selecting The Right Tools and Technologies
You need to select an appropriate set of automation tools to ensure the successful implementation of mobile test automation. Look for features like easy integration, multi-device support, cross-platform compatibility, and user-friendliness to finalize an automation tool. You also need to ensure that the selected automation software is capable of testing interruption and battery state change parameters among others.
To save upfront costs of expensive licenses, you can consider open-source automation tools. However, consider open source solutions only when you have specialized resources to handle these tools efficiently. Consider all these points judiciously before zeroing in on tools and technologies for your mobile test automation project.
Leverage Cloud-based Automation Tools
Cloud-based automation tools can help you significantly reduce the overall cost of the project. Costs of essential components including hardware, operating expenditure, per-user license, and depreciation costs can be avoided with cloud-based automation solutions. Cloud solutions can also help you easily scale and reuse resources at any point in time. Hence, they are also a credible option for performance and load testing requirements.
It is also a boon for enterprises having a lot of remote workers. It enables QA engineers to perform test automation from any location across the world while having all the access to test results and reports from centralized locations or dashboards.
Wrapping Up
Test automation is an efficient and effective solution for mobile testing services. However, its implementation is not similar to a regular test automation project. It is because mobile app testing has multiple complexities including test coverage, toolsets, devices, and environments. Hence, to achieve the desired results, you need to follow all the best practices religiously. It will also help you to achieve robust quality at minimal costs at a shorter time-to-market. Hence, it is highly recommended to follow the above-mentioned points carefully before implementing mobile test automation in the real world.