Mobile App QA Best Practices You Need to Know

In mobile app development, mobile app QA plays a crucial role. According to Quettra, the average mobile app loses over 95% of its customers in the first ninety days. With this high decrease in user base, it is crucial to create a game plan. It should go beyond identifying and fixing bugs. It should ensure the app provides a seamless, intuitive, and satisfying user experience across various devices and operating systems. 

To answer this problem, a rigorous mobile app QA process will help deliver a strong, reliable, high-performing app. This blog explores the essential best practices for mobile app QA that will help developers like you achieve their goals.

Define Clear Mobile App QA Objectives

The foundation of an effective Mobile App QA process is setting clear and measurable objectives. QA objectives should align with the overall project goals and user requirements. Start by identifying the critical functionalities and performance benchmarks that your app needs to meet. This could include load times, response times, and user interface elements. 

Clear objectives help formulate a focused testing strategy that thoroughly examines all crucial aspects. For instance, if your app targets a global audience, include localization testing as one of your objectives. Localization testing is essential to ensure that your software functions correctly and feels natural to a specific region or locale. 

Automated Testing for Efficiency

An efficient mobile app thrives more often in a fast-paced developer environment. One process that plays a crucial role in its efficiency is automated testing. Automation allows monotonous and time-consuming tasks to be performed quickly and accurately. Common tools that are valuable for this testing are Selenium, Cypress, Appium, and TestComplete. These automation QA applications enable testers to run scripts across multiple devices and operating systems, ensuring consistent results and allowing more time for complex testing scenarios. Automated testing is particularly effective for regression, performance, and load testing, where the same tests must be run repeatedly.

Manual Testing for User Experience

While automated testing enhances efficiency, manual testing is indispensable for evaluating user experience. Automated tests can miss nuances that affect usability and overall user satisfaction. There will be aspects in the development process that automation struggles to explore, especially when user experience and usability are involved.

In manual testing, problems with navigation, design, and overall user flow problems are found by having human testers interact with the application the same way as end users would. This type of testing is crucial when evaluating the app’s usability and intuitiveness. By identifying problems that automated testing might miss, testers might offer insights into how actual users would view the application.

Cross-Platform Compatibility Testing

Many mobile apps face challenges regarding their compatibility with different platforms. In February 2024, 52,000 mobile apps were released in the Google Play Store. Considering this massive competition, ensuring your mobile app is compatible with different platforms should not be taken for granted. Cross-platform compatibility testing ensures your app provides a consistent experience across various devices, screen sizes, and operating systems. Emulators and real devices are both essential in this process. 

Emulators are useful for quickly testing a wide range of devices, while real devices provide insights into user interactions. Tools used in this type of testing are BrowserStack and Sauce Labs. These tools facilitate cross-platform testing, allowing you to test on many devices and operating systems without maintaining an extensive physical device lab.

Security Testing for Data Protection

With increasing cyber threats, security testing has become a non-negotiable aspect of mobile app QA. More than 2.2 million cyberattacks in 2022 happened through mobile devices. Users trust apps with their sensitive information more often, and any breach can lead to severe consequences. These range from loss of user trust to legal repercussions. To counter the growing need to prevent these incidents, security testing provides a solution. This type of testing seeks to identify vulnerabilities and ensure data protection against unauthorized access. 

Data encryption, safe authentication techniques, and defense against frequent threats like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and unsecured storage are important areas to concentrate on. Tools such as Burp Suite and OWASP ZAP can help conduct comprehensive security testing.

Performance Testing for Speed and Stability

Users will surely get angry when your mobile app is unstable and slow. Implementing performance testing is a must-do to ensure that your mobile app can handle high-load conditions.  It evaluates the app’s response times, resource usage, and overall performance under various conditions. 

Performance bottlenecks can be found, and programs like JMeter, LoadRunner, and Blazemeter effectively simulate large user loads. To ensure the app can manage unforeseen increases in usage, performance testing should also involve stress testing to see how the app performs in harsh circumstances. Extreme conditions like high user traffic, low memory, or limited network bandwidth are done for this process. By doing so, you can ensure the app doesn’t crash or exhibit major slowdowns during real-world scenarios with unexpectedly high usage or resource limitations.

Regular Updates and Continuous Testing

The mobile app landscape is ever evolving, with frequent updates and new operating system versions. Regular updates and continuous testing are essential to keep your app relevant and functional. Implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines can facilitate this process. CI/CD pipelines enable automatic testing and deployment of updates, ensuring that any new code changes do not introduce new issues. Tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and Travis CI can help set up and manage CI/CD pipelines, promoting a culture of continuous improvement and rapid iteration.

User Feedback Integration

User feedback is a useful source of information for developing your app. It might reveal missed problems during testing and offer perspective about users’ requirements and preferences. Within your app, incorporate a feedback feature. This could be through reviews, feedback forms, and in-app polls. Examine this input regularly and incorporate the results into your quality assurance procedure. Quickly resolving user issues enhances the app and fosters user loyalty and trust.

Documentation and Reporting

Thorough documentation and systematic reporting are necessary for a mobile app QA process to be successful. Test cases, results, and comprehensive test plans should all be included in the documentation. This will help monitor the progress of testing activities and keep everyone on the same page. Reporting a bug should be explicit and include logs, screenshots, and instructions for reproducing the problem. Jira, TestRail, and Bugzilla are a few tools that can help organize reporting and documentation, promote effective communication, and resolve problems.

Collaboration and Communication

Teamwork is crucial for the effectiveness of the mobile app QA process. This is only possible when team members collaborate effectively to attain the desired goals. To make this process easier, it is advisable to use collaboration tools to communicate with each other. Doing so also lets your team keep track of the progress and base your next steps upon it. 

Moreover, frequent talks and meetings will guarantee that everyone agrees with the project’s objectives. These discussions will almost certainly help resolve problems quickly. Popular tools that are commonly used to achieve these objectives are Slack, Trello, and Asana. Generally, these tools help with project management and communication, fostering a transparent and cooperative work atmosphere. 

Conclusion

A meticulous mobile app QA process ensures that your app meets user expectations and stands out in a competitive market. Prioritizing mobile app QA is crucial since bottlenecks must be addressed during the process. Embrace best practices like automated and manual testing, security and performance testing, user feedback, and collaboration. After all, high-quality mobile apps are not created out of thin air. They are tested for their readiness and marketability. You can’t have a user-friendly app when things become out of place when it is deployed.

Beta Breakers goes beyond the norm of mobile app QA. We maintain a mobile device library running on different operating systems, browsers, and carrier plans and thoroughly test mobile apps across various devices that users might employ. By partnering with us, you can make your mobile app more reliable and deliver a consistent and seamless user experience for each mobile device user. While settling for less can be your option, with us, expect your mobile app to be well above average. Partner with us by contacting us today.