Ashli’s Note: This is a guest post about third-party mobile app testing by Ilie Ghiciuc. Third-party testing can be very helpful if you’re swamped or value a second opinion. Consider third-party testing for your next project. Enjoy!

Few people realize testing is the most costly and painful part of app development.

Mobile app Quality Assurance includes functional testing, integration testing, app performance, and user experience.

Organizing and understanding the testing process

A mobile app is an elaborate product and so is the testing process.
While working on multi-platform apps at Thinslices, we’ve set up thorough systems to test products. They help us keep track of the whole effort and extract huge benefits.

Here are the stages:

1. Setting goals

Having perfect, high-performing, completely bug-free software is hard. This has proven to be impossible once the software scale increases.

Even if humans could write perfect software, there’s always the possibility of a misunderstanding (let’s call it a communication bug) between the developer, manager, tester, and customer.

So, set expectations and goals with regard to the effort, time, process and defect incidence during the QA process.

2. Defining processes and use-cases

Armed with the functional specs, some test scenarios can be elaborated. If you don’t have time to work on elaborate testing scenarios or automation, you should at least have a basic outline of what to test.

3. Setting up the test environment

To test the performance and functionality of the app, the testing circumstances should be as realistic as possible.

The user experience tester and your real customers will have to be as similar as possible.

Manual vs Automated QA

Should I use both manual and automatic testing?

Our answer is always yes. In our view, exploratory testing is a big part of QA. Its output should be translated to automated tests, so issues discovered manually are tested automatically going forward.
While testing, never overlook issues!

One of the biggest challenges with mobile app quality assurance is different lead times for updates. For example, deploying a new version of a web app is instantaneous. But an Android app can take a few hours and iOS apps can take up to two weeks. So multi-platform updates need a lot of skill and attention in orchestrating.

Device fragmentation

Making different versions of an app for different devices is complex and time-consuming.
It requires many versions of User Interface to make apps work on different screen sizes and different versions of an OS.

Choice of mobile testing tools

Manual testing (what some QA pros call ‘monkey testing’) is good for improving user experience. But for predictable, repeatable testing results, testing automation should be set up. This helps reduce the chance of finding bugs within features that work. Once tested, developers can confidently add new features.

Testing automation is difficult to start, especially for mobile apps. But once you have it, you can let the machines worry about the bugs.

Unlike the 15 years old web industry, mobile automation testing is a mess. Apps work in closed ecosystems, where vendors control the OS. Mature tooling is not available, especially for multi-platform projects.

The best option we’ve found is Cucumber, a fantastic open-source Behaviour-Driven Development tool.

Cucumber is the only free tool we found to test web, iOS, Android, and Windows 8/Windows Phone apps.

Availability of Resources

We have pretty strong opinions on internal vs external mobile development teams. We feel QA should be an integrated part of the product team. Not a separate department or company.

Using a third-party for QA before going to market can be helpful. It brings fresh perspective on users’ interaction, in-depth expertise, and tooling not available in-house.

Build the right mobile product by doing the right things!

Even big players have trouble launching the perfect product from the beginning. Especially when users’ expectations are high and trends change so. One of the main problems stems from Apple’s approval process, that adds at least two weeks to finalizing an app.

Testing a complex mobile product challenges you in so many ways. So keep this in mind after reading this post:

• Create a testing plan to track the entire project.
• Decide what kind of testing your product needs, to save time and money.
• Set goals and expectations before starting something.
• Test scenarios are the ideal time for product owners and developers to discuss requirements.
• Testing circumstances should be as close to real as possible.
• Focusing on manual testing will help improve user experience.
• Outsourcing the QA can give you a fresh perspective on users’ interaction with your app.

So how do you get your mobile app tested?

Ilie Ghiciuc is the CTO at Thinslices. He has 11+ years of experience in IT&C and has delivered over 100 projects in varying industries, with different technologies.

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