Mobility has taken the software market by storm.
Users now have a vast array of choices for mobile operating systems, hardware and applications that can help with the simplest of needs such as messaging, maps, social media, and e-commerce to the very complex to manage banking, trading, healthcare, etc.
Businesses are leaving no stone un-turned to capitalize on their enterprise mobility investments. With such a growing need for mobile functionality, mobile application testing as well as security and reliability have become an essential part of the platform’s success.
This urgency creates a frequently-faced, time-consuming and expensive challenge – to enable all devices and keep the device support list constantly refreshed with the latest technology upgrades. As users demand a faster and more personalized experience, any discrepancy may negatively affect adoption and engagement. Organizations can utilize cloud services for their mobile application testing to address these challenges.
Here is how.
Accelerating mobile application testing
Cloud-based testing offers an inexpensive and flexible hardware and network infrastructure for regulating tests. Financially, it provides the benefit of pay-per-use and saves unnecessary capital expenditures. It also offers the potential to run highly scaled apps in a standardized or customized test environment.
Below are the factors that assist in faster rollout of mobile apps by catering to the extensive testing needs of these apps in an optimal manner:
Access to real devices without maintaining a device lab. Many organizations still rely on setting up in-house device labs and acquiring a range of devices for their employees. This is manageable if there are just a few devices in the lab. However, device labs need to be continuously updated, either by replacing outdated devices with newer ones or by initiating major updates on mobile platforms, which are both time consuming and expensive.
Also, such maintenance could affect the utilization of QA resources for core QA tasks. Using a cloud platform offers test teams access to a wide range of real devices instead of procuring and maintaining them in-house. The QA team is also ensured they have the latest devices throughout each testing cycle.
- Easy to monitor and analyze. With an in-house device lab, monitoring and troubleshooting is a very tedious activity and often there is a requirement for running tasks manually, including testing cases, screening logs and finding the root cause of the problem. Most cloud services providers offer built-in monitoring tools that record each test step that’s executed and then retain it for analysis. In this way, the QA Test Automation team can simply look at the detailed error log, screenshots of actions taken in the test steps and the recorded video to identify the root cause of the problem.
- Simulation with real-world environment. It’s challenging for organizations to ensure their app works well in various conditions, such as varying network speeds, geographic locations or any prerequisites in the app installation process. Cloud environments allow organizations to configure the test environment with the location, network connection, etc., to test against these potential real-life scenarios.
- Flexibility to run tests from an external testing framework. There’s no need to modify or re-build an existing automation framework to use cloud services for testing mobile applications. Organizations can easily integrate tests from any automation framework to run over devices in the cloud with very few configuration steps, as most cloud providers support widely used open source test frameworks.
- Convenient access and user-friendly. While testing mobile apps, organizations also need to ensure that the testers have a convenient way to access the test devices that are available when needed. But they may have a difficult time managing the hardware, software and connectivity needs of their global performance testers. Cloud-based test automation allows testers to access the environment over the internet so they can work from any location at any time, as well as have an easy user interface. This helps eliminate installation and maintenance issues.
Benefits of cloud for mobile app testing
Testing plays an important and crucial role in ensuring and delivering quality mobile applications. Procuring, maintaining and testing on real devices can be expensive. A cloud-based platform can be a solution to support your robust and cost-effective testing, with accessibility anytime and anywhere.
Cloud testing configurations provides ample testing tools, popular OS versions and real-devices to ensure that a comprehensively tested mobile app is launched.
The Emtec mobile testing team has been successfully utilizing cloud-based device farms to drive impeccable mobile application releases for our clients. If you would like to optimize your mobile application testing process and reduce costs, contact us.