A study shows that there are over 3500 apps that are released on the google play store every day. Imagine the number of app developers that put in a number of hours to bring apps to our phones on a daily basis. And we are just talking about the Android apps, imagine if we combined the number of apps released for iOS and other operating systems as well. With a lot of apps being rolled out every day in the market, there is hardly any room for releasing apps with errors. Ensuring that the apps you release are of high quality and immune to any crashes gives it a good chance for consumers to download and use. But, consider the cutthroat competition in the market. How does one develop apps that are unique and of high quality at the same time? The key to that is to ensure a continuous testing process, or a continuous feedback loop is created to develop, test, and release apps swiftly. Time plays an important role in ensuring that you stay ahead of the competition at all times. And to ensure faster releases, implementing the Continuous Testing strategy becomes non-negotiable.
What is Continuous Testing?
Now, what is Continuous Testing? Traditionally, apps used to be developed, tested and released in a sequential manner. Making the process slow and time-consuming, the other reason is that the entire process was done manually, which made matters worse. However, with the advancement of strategies to speed up the process, such as Agile and DevOps. Enterprises and App development companies were able to speed up the process and release quality apps faster. And improvements in the automation space, artificial intelligence, low code platforms, etc. Enterprises are now able to expedite the processes in the software development life cycle (SDLC ). They are also able to reduce a lot of time and effort spent on manual testing to release quality apps. But what does Continuous Testing Cloud have to do with any of this?
Continuous Testing is one of the prime strategies that has helped many companies scale up their app testing efforts and speed up the SDLC. The key to building quality apps at a rapid pace is to ensure that there is a continuous feedback loop that is built around different teams. And that is exactly what the Continuous Testing methodology does, it allows teams to start work on a particular project simultaneously without having to wait on other teams to complete their tasks. It allows the teams to continually run tests both manually and through automation to validate the functionality under development in the delivery process. It allows both testers and developers to work alongside each other throughout the entire development and deployment process, ensuring that the updates or functionalities are released fast without any delays. Now that we understand what continuous testing is, let’s look at how we can accelerate our testing efforts by leveraging a continuous testing cloud.
How to Accelerate Your App Testing Efforts?
There are several components that make up a Continuous Cloud. Which we will look into in detail, however, before we get there, let us understand what it is and what it does. In the context of technologies cloud solutions are tools that resolve issues remotely. Take for instance that you and your colleagues developed an app recently and want to test it on a particular set of devices. However, these particular devices are set up at a facility that is in a different location. Fortunately it isn’t too far away from your location and you go there to test your app.
But how will the situation pan out if the team is distributed across different geographies and time zones? How will one access a lab that is setup at a particular location? And that’s where Cloud Solutions come in, being able to access a testing infrastructure that is set up on the cloud allows access to anyone across the globe to perform test runs on the devices required. Now what are some things to keep in mind while testing on Continuous Testing Device or Browser Clouds? How can we accelerate our testing efforts by leveraging these technologies? Here are a few pointers that shed light on the subject.
1. Implement Continuous Testing Methodologies
The primary and most important component of a Continuous Testing Cloud is to see that DevOps enabled. This means that the testing environment fulfills the requirements of Continuous testing, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Ensuring that a testing infrastructure has the right tools to speed up the release cycles is a must when looking into a Continuous Testing Cloud.
2. Use Real Devices to Test
While testing on simulators and emulators is a cost-effective solution, the effectiveness of testing on real devices outweighs the accuracy of results that one achieves. Also having a wide variety of devices at your disposal would eliminate any device or OS fragmentation issues. Testing on a wide range of devices would also help in reaching a larger segment of the target audience that uses different devices. Testing on real devices hosted on a Continuous Testing Cloud would provide accurate reports than their simulator counterparts. The reports can then be used to resolve any irregularities or anomalies for the success of the app in the market.
3. Utilize various Automation Techniques
Automation is key to accelerate your app testing efforts. Testing across various devices at an instant or performing various tests parallel on different devices will enable testers to help accomplish key objectives at a much faster pace than testing manually. The use of Artificial intelligence in test analytics, or the use of scriptless test automation efforts would speed up the testing process even faster as there is hardly any human intervention. Another added advantage to using various automation techniques such as parallel testing or autonomous bot testing would result in greater accuracy of reports as there is a lower chance for human error. Here is a helpful webinar on Leveraging AI and DevOps in Mobile App Testing. Watch the webinar to delve deep into how you can AI and DevOps in moving beyond traditional Mobile App Testing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2_KnwrBv84
4. Add tools and integrations
As important as it is for having the right plugins to enhance the experience of a website, so are the integrations and tools that enhance the functionality of the testing platform. Adding additional integration tools to your testing platform will smoothen the testing experience for those that have already been using third-party integrations to get their tasks going. Besides, it is vital for any continuous testing platform to link popular continuous integration tools such as Jenkins, Bamboo, Travis, etc to solidify the implementation of Continuous Testing. Having other tools that help with collaboration go a long way as they help teams across geographies to collaborate easily over shared testing projects.
5. Monitor Diverse Performance Artefacts
Monitoring the key performance metrics during app testing will help developers and testers to improve the app experience by optimizing the application performance. Keeping tabs on the memory usage, the CPU usage, the battery and network performance will surely provide a meaningful interpretation of the performance of an app. Keeping a close watch on these performance metrics will enable the developers and testers to narrow down the issue and provide early improvements reducing the chances of app crashes in the future.
6. Widen Test Cases
Restricting your test cases to a particular device, OEM, OS, or geographical region might not be the best bet to test global apps, ensuring that you test on different devices, with different OS, network bandwidth and screen sizes will provide comprehensive data for analysis. The wider the range of test cases, the easier it is to solve any incompatibility issues and reach a wider target audience. Also, using automation tools to run multiple tests across the different devices will provide a larger amount of data to assess the app data and make improvements if and when needed.
Conclusion
Testing your apps on the right platform is a key element that determines the rate at which apps and app updates are released. Ensuring that you analyze the Continuous Testing Cloud for various pointers such as ease of use, accessibility, tool compatibility, integrations, and automation are a few of the things to look out for. While these are some of the basic things to look for, we need to be able to utilize these features to the best of our ability in order to accelerate our testing efforts and release quality apps and updates faster and frequently. While these few pointers play a significant role in accelerating your testing strategy, there are many other factors that impact the speed of testing. To understand other technologies you can leverage to accelerate your testing efforts, download our whitepaper on Rapid Automation Techniques by following the link below. Happy Testing!
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