Best Practices in Mobile App Quality Assurance to Ensure Your App Win The Competition

If you don't take your Mobile App Quality Assurance seriously, users will also not take your mobile app seriously.

Why we are saying this?

According to MoEngage study 2020, 56% of the users uninstall apps within the first seven days of installing them because they find:

-App performance is weak

-App doesn't satisfy the users' expectation

-App updates are forced

-Irrelevant features

And due to these high uninstallation rates, companies faced on average app lost about $57,000 a month in 2020.

The extent of financial loss incurred by users’ decision to uninstall the app gives a wake-up call to app owners, marketers, and aspiring entrepreneurs who are not focusing on the key metric of the app's failure.

In short, if your app does not perform on all the technical aspects, users won't think twice before uninstalling it and move to the next available app on the Google or Apple App Store.

Developing a mobile app for your business sounds like an exciting project, but making it fully successful in today's cut-throat competitive market is the biggest challenge.

Everyone stresses the importance of quality assurance in Android or iOS app development, but do you know the hidden keys that ensure your mobile app quality?

Some mobile app companies pay a huge of money to developers just to make sure there should not any single letter error in the entire coding process.

Imagine you have given a project to an app development agency or a developer. They promised you to deliver a great performing application. And during the mobile app testing, they showed your app is performing fine, and you agreed.

But after launching your app on the App Stores you see the app is struggling to retain users despite a good number of downloads. And you know the reasons why users are abandoning your app after installation, as we told you above.

Therefore, mobile app quality assurance is critical to ensure whether your app will be able to meet user's expectations in all aspects.

Quality assurance is a complex part of software engineering which involves several professionals with different expertise. Mere testing your mobile app is not a guarantee of your app's success. Mobile app QA is the key to provide a high-quality product to users; hence, you shouldn't ignore it.

Today eSearch Logix will tell you the best practices in mobile app quality assurance that will ensure your app performs beyond users' expectations and win the competition in the market.

Following the best mobile app QA practices will not only ensure your app works seamlessly on a variety of devices but also help you reach plenty of users via positive referrals, ratings, and reviews.

This blog is for companies, enterprises, and startups who want to make sure they deliver a top-performing mobile application to their customers.

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance (QA) is the process a company follows to ensure they get the best possible product and provide a great experience to the end-users. As an app owner, they want to make sure that everything works as intended and performs exactly to meet users' expectations.

Difference between Mobile App Quality Assurance and Testing

Many software companies often consider these two terms similar in meaning which is why they sometimes fail to develop a top-performing mobile application.

There is much difference between the two: Quality assurance is about the techniques or strategies to ensure the final product is up to the expectations of its users, while the test is a technical process to discover or find out errors in coding, and later fix the issues.

So in simple words, testing helps you to find out the errors, bugs, or other hidden issues inside your mobile app, whereas, quality assurance ensures your mobile app performs ideally and makes its users happy and satisfied in all aspects.

Best Practices in Mobile App Quality Assurance:

1. Have a Dedicated Mobile App QA Team in the Initial Phase

In several cases, the QA team enters the game only after when some functionality is developed and needs to be tested. As a result, developers report a lot of bugs that could have been prevented in the earlier planning.

That is why it is a better idea to hire a dedicated mobile app QA team in the initial phase. This team involves various professionals with diverse expertise, and in this way, everyone has a chance to improve the mobile app development process from their perspective:

• A project manager can plan sprints and budget
• A developer can offer more efficient technical solutions
• A mobile app designer can bring innovative ideas about the latest Mobile App UI/UX trends
• A QA analyst or engineer introduces a more complex view of the development process based on his experience and knowledge of testing various mobile apps. He can predict and prevent certain issues with app usage, integration, and compatibility of multiple services, etc.

Final approval from a quality analyst gives the entire team the confidence that they are developing a bug-free app. To ensure the QA team is going on the right track, you should know the following key responsibilities of a QA team:

• QA team is responsible for training the users (if needed) for the product they intend to use.
• QA team checks the product under defined environments and hence they are responsible for recommending the test environments. They will suggest the system version, device selection, and security issues.
• QA team needs to keep a constant review of the product's quality by conducting manual and automated testing.
• QA team chooses the automation software and app testing tools to carry out the smooth testing.

Making changes in design or technical implementation at the planning stage isn't painful. But it may cost a lot when problems are discovered in the ready product.

Your mobile app QA team can better understand the scope of the project and estimate to eliminate the possible associated risks.

2. Prepare a Test Plan for Mobile Application

Think when you decided to develop a mobile app for your business, you must have put huge effort into planning your mobile app development. Sometimes, it may seem like planning is a complete waste of time.

But if you are a mature businessman, you know entering the market without planning may hamper your desired results. That is why you should have a QA team that can quickly prepare a test plan for your mobile application in advance so that the final product is perfect.

Just like you research how to plan mobile app development, there is a specific strategy to create a test plan for a mobile application that focuses on:

1. Unit Testing
   1.1 Entry Criteria
        1.1.1 The development stage has been completed
        1.1.2 Requirements have been defined and approved
        1.1.3 Test design and tests plan have been created
        1.1.4 The testing environment is set up
        1.1.5 All essential resources are available 

        1.2 Exit Criteria

             1.2.1 Test cases are implemented

             1.2.2 The rate of test cases passed is satisfactory, i.e. 95%

            1.2.3 Failed test cases are not related to critical functionality

            1.2.4. Important defects have been fixed

2. Logging Tests and Reporting

In this part, every detected issue should be accurately reported using certain mobile app testing tools and software

3. System Testing

        3.1Performance Testing

        3.2 Interrupt Testing

        3.3 Usability Testing

        3.4 Installation and Launch testing

        3.5 Functional Testing

        3.6 Security testing

        3.7 Regression testing 

4. Pass/Fail Conditions
5. Test Report

If your mobile app testing plan focuses on the above factors, your QA team will be able to deliver a smooth development process. Proper planning enables the QA engineers to find out that some testing device is missing in the beginning which means a test had failed.

So the QA engineer can check the tests are finished and maintain control over the entire development journey.

3. Follow Test-Driven App Development

Test-driven app development is a kind of software development methodology that is based on the main principles of extreme programming. If you want to achieve the highest quality product, you should follow test-driven app development as a separate approach to produce high-quality coding in the shortest period.

In this process, adding or changing functionality starts with a test that covers the desired change. After that, code is written to pass the initial test. It is believed a good practice when a developer writes tests for his own code.

When he follows this approach, he quickly understands the requirements for new functionality and develops it to pass the test. This simply signifies mobile application testing begins before actual programming.

4. Follow Separate Mobile App Testing Strategy

People use mobile apps on different devices such as smartphones, tablets, iPad, Mac, and more. Therefore, your mobile application needs to be tested separately on real devices.

Testing on real devices ensures test results are realistic and gives a reliable estimation about the look and the feel of an app and its general usability. Having the exact device (manufacturer and model) can make your 100% sure that the app is compatible and runs smoothly.

At eSearch Logix, we use more than 500 mobile devices including the latest smartphones, tablets, iPad to make sure our clients' mobile applications are performing flawlessly all across the platforms.

The best strategy is to prepare a list of devices that you anticipate the majority of the users will be using. Choosing the device wisely will reduce the mobile app testing cost and ensures the quality of your app.

To do this, you should:

• Define the requirements
• What is the goal of your app
• Who is the target audience
• Where are the market possibilities
• Collect all running mobile device statistics
• Research implementation characteristics
• Select the most-used devices in your region or your market based on the target audience
• Create the list of the devices for testing

There are some conditions when the company can't afford to have all the required devices as the number of smartphones is in billions. In this case, your company should follow the next mobile app QA strategy to easily verify all requirements.

5. Device Grouping Strategy

There are over 2.5 billion active Android smartphone users and 1 billion Apple users. With such a large ocean of mobile devices running across the globe, it's would be a crazy idea to conduct tests for all phones. You have to decide which device to choose for your app's quality assurance and which one to leave?

But device grouping strategy can make it possible. The goal of the device grouping strategy is to conduct deep research in the mobile phone market and prepare a broader list in the following ways:

• Analyze your target audience

Study where is your target audience, the devices which are highly popular in their region or which devices are in huge demand in their location. What is their budget when it comes to mobile phones? Once you discover the devices which they are using in a certain area, prepare a separate list for it.

• Do market study of the top mobile phone brands

Today, smartphone manufacturer company brings new versions of their current devices to lower the production or maintenance cost of their previous ones. By studying the market in which brand's smartphones are more popular, you can create plans for selected companies that generally remain popular among people.

• Invest in the devices

Once you have a more specific list of devices on the basis of the screen resolution, manufacturer, and operating system, you can step into investing in conducting real app tests for these devices.

6. Execute a Comprehensive Suite of Tests

Testing is the most critical part of mobile app quality assurance. Depending on the nature of your mobile application, you should put your app through a comprehensive suite of tests to ensure its high-quality performance.

You need to make sure your app passes the tests on the below checklist and then conduct the tests:1. General Mobile App Testing Checklist

• Network (2G/3G/4G/5G/CDMA/GSM/Wi-Fi)
• Stability
• App crash potential
• Acess and support format
• GPS
• Device type and screen elements
• Compatibility with social and other popular apps
• Data integration
• Energy parameters
• Scalability and acceleration capability
• UI/UX validation
• Time gap analysis 

2. Mobile OS Testing Checklist

• Apple/iOS
• USB compliance
• USB debugging and alternative to rebooting
• Apple UI Guideline compliance
• User transition from one to another application
• Setting, multitasking, and storage
• Backward compatibility of mobile apps 

3. Android

• USB debugging
• Back function and minimization without rebooting
• Ability to operate seamlessly with multiple software
• No confrontation between background and foreground apps 

4. Windows OS

• USB debugging
• Ability to support apps running in the background
• Task Manager compatibility
• Scalability and seamless operation with multiple apps

5. Once you prepare your checklist following the above, deliver the below tests:

• User experience testing
• Functional testing and user journey tests
• UI consistency, visual issues, and UI behavior
• Responsive design behavior for different mobile screen sizes and resolutions
• User interaction visualization and custom feedback
• User experience of mobile application for every functionality

To ensure the QA for user experience, start with a simple interface testing, validate all elements of the application on every screen, and overall navigation flow consistency.6. Performance and connectivity

Performance testing is one of the most important tests in mobile QA. Users easily uninstall the app if it loads slowly or unable to perform certain actions. Therefore, while conducting a mobile app performance test, it is necessary to check the following factors:

• App memory and processor usage
• Network bandwidth usage
• App behavior on insufficient resources
• App behavior in multi-tasking scenarios
• App behavior with different connection types, i.e., Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, broadband
• App performance in weak signal conditions
• Temporary web services unavailability
• Offline mode and synchronization

7. Security Testing

• Data transfer and synchronization testing
• Mobile messaging testing
• Remote storage
• Web services used 

8. Interoperability and integration with other software or services

• Data transactions/bandwidth optimization
• Content retrieval on mobile devices optimization
• Seamless embedding web service features into a mobile device

9. OS, Device, and Hardware Compatibility

• OS testing
• Mobile app compatibility with onboard hardware
• Device compatibility check
• Operation under defined cases
• New capabilities verification
• Hardware/software synchronization

7. Cross-Platform Testing

You know that there are two main operating systems for mobile devices Android and iOS. It means you need to ensure your mobile app performs exactly same on every OS and fits with all different features.

Android app development company in India mostly uses cross-platform SDKs to build an application that works on several OS and devices. Hence you should use such SDKs and tools that could help you test your app performance on all platforms.

8. Automate Your Mobile App Quality Assurance

Mobile app quality assurance automation can significantly improve the development process. Automated testing can help you avoid monotonous manual work, especially when it comes to regression tests. With quality assurance automation tools, you get the ability to test several features or functionality at the same time on different devices.

These tests can run frequently and well suited for testing in an agile environment which requires the capability to quickly adjust to changing app development objectives. Carefully planning quality assurance automation will enable you to efficiently make the most out of test automation.

When deciding which tests should be automated, their value and required efforts need to be compared. High-value/low-effort tests should be automated first.

App tests suitable for automation:

• Repetitive tests which run for multiple builds
• Tests that tend to cause human error
• Tests that require multiple data sets
• Frequently used functionality and compatibility tests
• Tests which needs significant effort and time when testing manually.

When you are confirmed with the tests which you want them to automate, you should carefully choose the best testing automation tools.

Here are the Most Popular Mobile App QA Automation Tools:

• Appium
• Eggplant
• Ranorex Studio
• TestComplete Mobile
• Robotium
• Selendroid
• SOASTA TouchTest
• Calabash
• Monkey Talk
• XCUI Test

Conclusion

Mobile app quality assurance is not a single stage in the development process. These QA practices can be followed starting from the planning stage to the app launch.

Of course, you don't have to necessarily implement all these mobile app QA practices. A strong and experienced QA team can help you in deciding the right approach and tools that ensure your app gets succeeded in today's heavy competition.

And eSearch Logix is a leading mobile app development company that provides advanced Mobile App QA & Testing services. We have a dedicated team equipped with professional QA engineers, analysts, programmers, and technologists who master the latest QA practices to build a mobile app with superior quality.

If you want to check the quality of your app, just

Book a free consultation