Mobile App QA: Strategies, Tips & Checklist for success

Mobile apps help build brand recognition and awareness. Today, the goal of every business is to develop a product that satisfies customers’ needs. However, it’s always important to create a solution that does not pose a problem for users. This is why mobile app development companies prioritize Quality Assurance (QA) to develop and launch a product free of bugs and within the guideline of a planned process. In this article, we’ll explore some Mobile app QA strategies, tips, and checklist to help you save money and time in the long term.

What is Quality Assurance

Put Simply, Quality Assurance (QA) is a measure put in place to ensure usability and optimal performance of a mobile app before going public. To build a successful mobile app, due care must be taken to iterate through several app layers for bugs and fix them. This process continues until the team is certain that there are no bugs that can affect performance or lead to data loss. Nevertheless, quality assurance isn’t an activity to be carried out at the end of the app development. It’s a continuous process that is initiated at every step of the mobile app development process.

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How does it work?

Quality Assurance testing answers a few questions, which include but not limited to: Why are we testing? What are we testing? How do we test? Once answers have been provided to the above questions, the next step is to begin a series of activities to test the quality and performance of the mobile app. The team can decide to do manual or automated testing or even outsource to a team of experts. After every test run, bugs discovered are sent to the development team for rectification.

After every test run, bugs discovered are sent to the development team for rectification.

Mobile App QA covers the following testing areas:

• Usability testing
• Performance Testing
• Security Testing
• Functionality Testing
• Compatibility testing
• Accessibility Testing
• Installation testing
• UI Testing
• Recovery Testing

Mobile QA Strategies

Mobile testing is different from traditional QA for enterprise software. Whether you’re building a native or hybrid app, it’s critical to define key components and review features to manage risks throughout the QA testing. The best QA strategy considers compatibility with various devices, responsiveness, connectivity, and many more. Define test requirements Test requirements are as important as the QA itself. To avoid shooting in the dark or executing without a defined process, an app development team needs to have a template of the action to be taken by the user and the expected outcome. Whether it fails or succeeds, the outcome should be recorded for the testing team. Try Emulators or Real devices. Emulators are commonly used for both automated and manual mobile QA testing. They provide a set of rich features that makes them achieve a real device environment. With emulators, you can see how your app will look on a real device. Also, some of these emulators provide debugging tools to help make your iterations stress-free. Nevertheless, there are disadvantages to using emulators. Emulators cannot check for certain features like battery, connectivity, calls, SMS, touchscreen, and temperature sensors. To save time and money, emulators can be used to check for functionality and compatibility quickly. However, the best strategy is to test on real devices. They give better accurate reports on everyday things that emulators cannot test. Do Beta Testing No mobile app is perfect. There’s always something to adjust to to make it better. Even with quality assurance testing, some features that are working perfectly might break when they get to the market. This is why it’s best for mobile app development teams to launch a beta testing program to check how the app performs in a micro-market. With beta testing, you can ascertain whether your app works as planned or needs improvement before rolling it out to your target audience. Performance Testing Of all Mobile QA testing activities, Performance testing is most important. There will be increased revenue with accurate performance testing, a high retention rate, better user experience, and high ratings. You’ll be able to track and manage mobile device and server performance. Apart from these requirements, it’s also important to check for device behavior: What’s the startup time? How much memory is it consuming? Does it hang during usage? Do push notifications work? Does it run in the background? These are questions that need answers to ensure optimal mobile app performance. However, performance testing is quite complex. Some advanced performance testing includes:

• Load testing: Also known as endurance testing, to see how many simultaneous activities an app can take.
• Stress testing: It’s used to know how an app behaves when it has reached its maximum load capacity.
• Capacity Testing: It’s used to know the number of features an app can take before it exceeds its limit.
• Spike testing: This test is carried out to know how an app behaves when it reaches its maximum load in a short period of time.

Performance testing is usually efficient when carried out by a team of QA specialists.

With emulators, you can see how your app will look on a real device. Also, some of these emulators provide debugging tools to help make your iterations stress-free.

Checklist for Mobile Testing To save time and unnecessary iterations, a development team needs to have a well-defined process of how, when, and where mobile testing should be carried out. Following a checklist can impact functionality, compatibility if they aren’t used effectively. Standard mobile testing includes:

• Cross-platform testing
• Features functionality
• Platform Testing
• Responsiveness testing
• Network Compatibilities
• Storage
• Data Fetch
• User Flows

There’s no perfect way to go about testing your mobile app for quality assurance. It depends on your team's capacity, experience, and type of project.

To save time and unnecessary iterations, a development team needs to have a well-defined process of how, when, and where mobile testing should be carried out.

Summary Whether you are launching an old application or creating a new one, it’s best to have performed a mobile QA to ensure that you deliver the best application that is usable and functional. At Omnis Digital, we. Create high functional and beautiful mobile app to help build your brand recognition and awareness. We prioritize effective mobile QA in our digital solutions for every business. If you need a mobile application development partner with a thorough quality assurance process, we’ve got you covered.