How to Test Your Mobile Apps From Anywhere

Testing teams have had to reevaluate their testing methods over the past few years. Organizations are moving toward remote working methodologies with uncertainty looming over resuming in-person work.

However, with a remote work environment comes the challenge of testing and maintaining physical devices. Organizations now distribute development teams globally, adding to the challenge, as these teams need access to the same testing devices to ensure uniform and shareable test results.

A cloud-based testing platform with a global device cloud can help you meet these testing needs.

Why is Cloud Testing needed?

There are many reasons why cloud testing is in popular demand. A report from Statista highlights that by 2025, the Cloud applications market size will reach 168.6 billion USD. With so many organizations lining up for cloud testing, what makes it so desirable? Here are a few reasons why:

1. Heavy applications usually take a long time to test. With cloud testing, organizations see a massive reduction in this time. Its flexibility, scalability, and the reduced resources consumed help significantly improve ROI.
2. With cloud testing, customers pay only for the resources they use, making it cost-effective. Additionally, remote teams from all over the world can use cloud testing.
3. Cloud testing comes with high scaling capabilities. Organizations can either scale up or down based on their requirements and be sure that their cloud-testing platform will scale with them. Cloud testing makes things much simpler where traditional methods may crash or leave a dent in your pockets. 
4. Due to its availability, cloud testing ensures that physical restrictions do not interfere with your testing procedures. Typically, cloud-based testing platforms come with tools that help facilitate collaboration, enabling teams to collaborate in real-time and work on testing. 
5. Since cloud testing processes are faster than traditional ones, organizations see an increase in their time-to-market. 
6. Cloud testing comes with a more straightforward disaster recovery procedure.

Points to Remember Before Cloud Testing

1. Security issues around data privacy are a significant concern in the Cloud. Since security is hard to maintain in a shared environment, precautions are a must. 
2. Multi-cloud models are another area where complications can arise. Since these models can contain private, public, and hybrid clouds, organizations can experience synchronization and security issues. 
3. Discrepancies in the network, storage, and server configurations can affect cloud operations. Since it is a challenge to replicate user ecosystems, these discrepancies are difficult to avoid.
4. Shared resources can lead to bandwidth issues. Handling heavy traffic with limited infrastructure is a real challenge.

See also - A Mobile Application Testing Guide for Optimizing Apps

Cloud Testing Types

Testers can use traditional and new-age methods to run tests in the Cloud. Here are a few types of cloud tests and why testers use them:

Testing the Whole Cloud

Testing the whole Cloud involves viewing the Cloud as an entity and observing its features. Testers write tests according to these aspects. 

Testing Elements Within the Cloud

Testing elements within the Cloud involves assessing the Cloud's internal features and carrying out tests accordingly.

Testing Across Clouds

Testing across clouds involves testing on public, hybrid, and public clouds, depending on specifications.

SaaS Testing the Cloud

Software as a Service testing the Cloud involves running functional and non-functional tests based on requirements.

Testers also perform cloud testing in 3 types of environments. They are:

1. A public or private environment where apps deployed in the Cloud need validation regarding their quality. 
2. A hybrid environment where deployed apps need validation regarding their quality.
3. And finally, a cloud-based test environment where deployed apps need validation regarding their quality.

Functional Testing

Functional testing ensures that the software functions and features work according to the requirements set by the client. It also ensures that the software interacts well with the hardware. Functional testing includes system testing, acceptance testing, and integration testing. Some basic functional tests include:

System Verification Testing

System verification testing helps testers identify if a function's modules perform how they are supposed to - which is the main aim of this test. 

Acceptance Testing

Acceptance testing involves allowing the users to use the cloud-based app to ensure it meets the specified requirements.

Interoperability Testing

Interoperability testing ensures that Cloud-based applications work on multiple platforms without issues and move seamlessly around cloud infrastructures.

Non-Functional Testing

Developers use non-functional testing to check their app's performance, usability, and reliability. This type of cloud testing may include:

Performance Testing

Testers focus on verifying response times and network latency in performance testing to ensure the app performs well despite multiple requests. They also check the app's ability to decommission resources depending on the user load. 

Security Testing

Security testing ensures the protection of all sensitive information available on the Cloud.

Multi-tenancy Testing

Multi-tenancy testing checks if the app gives access and security to data to multiple users using a single instance.

Availability Testing

Ability testing involves checking for operability, compatibility, multi-tenancy, and disaster recovery.

Effective Ways of Testing Cloud Applications

Online-Based Application Tests on a Cloud

These tests determine and validate the quality of the connection between a legacy system and the application. Tests do this through functional tests to check their Cloud-based services' functionality and performance. 

Cloud-Based Application Tests on a Cloud

Cloud-based application tests help evaluate the quality of cloud-based applications concerning various types of Cloud.

Cloud Oriented or SaaS Testing

This test aims to assess the quality of individual service functions offered in Cloud or Saas programs. These tests validate unit, security, functionality, integration, and system functions. Performance testing, regression testing, and scalability evaluation are the best ways of running Cloud orientation or Saas testing.

How to prepare for cloud-based testing

1. Set clear objectives

Define why you need cloud-based testing software and what you expect from it before you can use it. Many organizations use these technologies because they're accessible and popular. Understanding your business needs is the only way to benefit from a cloud-based testing platform. When you have clear objectives while testing your app, cloud testing will help you get the most out of it. 

2. Create your testing strategy

Develop a testing strategy before you move your project to the Cloud. This strategy must have a step-by-step plan on how you intend to achieve your testing goals - What processes will you have in place? What tools will you use? What type of tests do you want to run?

Have a proper idea of what tests you want to run, the risks involved, and the time they'll take. Developing a strategy will help you to get a better idea of your budget and avoid unnecessary costs.

Also read: Strategies To Help Improve Mobile Application Testing

3. Plan your infrastructure

Consider the infrastructure requirements to build a test environment while planning your testing strategy. Make sure that cloud-based services provide the necessary testing tools, software, hardware, and bandwidth. It's also essential to determine if you'll need to make changes to your testing environment and the time you'll take to test the environment in this configuration. 

4. Select a reliable provider

When looking for cloud-based testing tools, look at each provider's guarantee of security, quality, and reliability. Choosing a provider with considerable experience ensures quick set-up and tear-down of test environments is best.

The selected provider should have various services, including testing tools, licenses, complete provisioning, and physical infrastructure. Also, examine a provider's compliance certificates to ensure the provider will protect your sensitive data according to local laws.

How HeadSpin Helps

The HeadSpin Platform gives you the ability to perform real device testing. You can connect to real devices across the globe and evaluate actual user experience without compromising security and performance. Here's how the platform can help:

1. HeadSpin enables customers to deliver flawless connected experiences across all connected devices, applications, and networks. The HeadSpin Appliance is built on top of the global device cloud and supports on-premise deployments or deployments on the Cloud. 

2. Through HeadSpin, you can collect data from real devices. The data platform analyses this using machine learning models, enriching the insights we receive from raw data; this includes issue detection. 

3. HeadSpin uses the Waterfall UI as its primary session UI. After recording your sessions, you can see all the collected data streams as part of the capture session here, including the primary data streams, for example, the screen recording, network traffic (HTTP and binary), and the device logs. Here you will also find issue cards.

4. The system populates issue cards in rank order using the Impact Time metric. Issue cards help customers trying to dig into a Root Cause Analysis through a systematic alignment of all the data streams. The issues start from high-priority user-facing problems and go down into the root causes.

5. HeadSpin offers two types of deployments - Hybrid On-Premise, and Fully On-Premise

Hybrid On-Premise: HeadSpin offers a hybrid on-premise deployment with a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Through the VPC, we generate a separate instance in AWS for customers, allowing them to have their silo and ensure security. We also host their unified controller and store their data while customers use the HeadSpin appliance. 

Customers can also collocate hardware like having a HeadSpin Appliance in their offices and one at a HeadSpin data center.

Fully On-Premise: With the fully on-premise deployment, the customer gets to host all their hardware and data. They can host their unified controller in a bare metal server that HeadSpin provides or a virtualized server that the customer provides based on HeadSpin specifications; this lets our customers be fully air-gapped. 

6. The Create Your Own Lab (CYOL) product from HeadSpin allows companies to remotely test and debug key workflows for their apps. With HeadSpin's reverse bridge technology, CYOL can deliver local access to remote devices for manual and automated testing. You can track device usage and identify who had access to it last, and with the Cloud, you have access to a variety of iOS and Android devices to meet all your testing needs.

Conclusion

Mobile cloud testing will continue to grow, and the need for a robust platform to help with this will also increase. Going about real device cloud testing is a challenge. HeadSpin offers a comprehensive solution that you can use to meet all your testing needs. Reach out!

FAQs

Q1. What are some challenges in mobile app testing that testers face?

A1.

1. Executing test cases that have different OS.
2. Testing app functionalities on various devices.
3. Screen size fragmentation.
4. Testing apps on various mobile networks.
5. Testing various application types like a native, hybrid, or web app.
6. Choosing the right mobile testing tool for the QA team.

Q2. What types of mobile testing can you include in the Android testing strategy?

A2. A standard Android strategy can include these testing types: unit testing, system testing, integration testing, and operation testing, subject to the features available of the tested mobile application. Depending on the application's features, you can perform other types of tests if required.

Q3. What are the types of bugs that testers encounter during mobile testing?

A3.

1. Platform-related bugs: Issues that are related to the OS
2. App-related bugs: Bugs related to business logic.
3. App architecture-related bugs: Bugs related to the components of the application architecture.