Top 5 Challenges of Mobile Test Automation

With the average smartphone owner handling at least 10 apps per day and almost 3 million apps available for download on the Google Play Store, companies require to release high-quality, seamlessly performing products to remain competitive in the market.

This is why mobile testing is crucial. Doing it the traditional way implies manually conducting countless tests on a variety of mobile platforms. More recently, automated testing has come into play, taking the opportunity to develop better apps with less effort.

Despite the obvious advantages of mobile test automation, many organizations still run everything manually, as approaching and dealing with automated testing include many challenges.

Why You Should Consider Mobile Test Automation

Automated testing, allowed by the use of special tools, scripts, and software, serves for executing test cases on several levels of the application regularly and at a pace that is not decided by human resource limits. It is good for test cases that are repeatedly performed, time-consuming, or hard to perform manually – such as load, functional, integration, regression testing, and some more.

Mobile test automation is fit not only when it comes to the development of native apps. Mobile testing itself is important for everyone who wants to ensure that a web application or site operates well on mobile devices. Either way, it can be performed to ensure robust software quality with minimum effort and maximum accuracy.

Let’s dig deeper into the advantages of mobile test automation for businesses:

Accelerated results: Automation presents the ability to carry out tests repeatedly and run them on various devices simultaneously, giving faster results with lesser effort and time. It also allows quick feedback cycles so product developers can fix recognized issues immediately.

Higher overall test coverage: A larger number of tests performed leads to higher test coverage, which, in its turn, suggests more bugs detected. What’s more, testing becomes more thorough as the chance of human error is eliminated.

Reusability of automated tests: The reuse of test resources, such as automated tests, documentation, or test cases can decrease the effort spent on writing new tests, help ignore rework, and improve the quality of test cases.

Automation complements manual testing: Manual testing not only works for exploring issues from the user perspective, but it is also important for setting up automated test cases.

Faster time-to-market: Reduction of test cycle makes it feasible to decrease the development time, release the product faster, and, hence, gain a competitive advantage, staying ahead of the competition.

Challenges of Mobile Test Automation

1. Recognizing a starting strategy

Beginning on the journey of test automation needs careful planning as it defines the financial feasibility of this initiative.

One can perform automation to establish up a regression test suite or deal with the business-critical parts, user workflows, and situations, complex app scenarios, etc.

Note that the mobile test automation pyramid varies from the traditional one, as mobile testing needs a totally different collection of activities and an inventory of hundreds of mobile devices.

2. Getting the time for generating automated test scripts despite tight release plans

The complexity of the mobile environment and the automation process itself needs significant time investment for writing stable test code able to operate continuously in parallel over platforms. Which is really hard given tight project deadlines.

What’s more, every few weeks, new devices with new OSs and new features are released appending to test maintenance.

3. Picking the right mobile test automation tool

It is important to get a tool relevant to the requirements and specifics of the organization. Choosing the wrong tool may point to important technical difficulties in making it work in a specific environment that will consequently sabotage any test automation efforts for some time.

The necessary quality characteristics involve both functional and non-functional aspects, such as what programming skills are needed to write test scripts, how usable is the tool documentation, what is the frequency of failures through realistic use, the level of interoperability with other software, etc.

4. Dealing with test automation flakiness that includes quality blind spots

A flaky test both passes and fails from time to time without any code modifications.

Flaky tests can be really costly since they often need engineers to retrigger complete builds on CI, and also annoying undermining trust in automated tests.

There are some common causes of flakiness, including irregular assertion timing (meaning the state of the app is not consistent among test runs and expect/assert statements fail randomly), dependence on test order, and the use of end-to-end tests which are flaky by nature.

5. Maintaining automated tests

Software maintenance is an inevitable part of the software lifecycle – a test suite including test documentation, test data, and expected results should be handled in the same way.

Automated tests need updating for every newly added or improved functionality, while some tests can also become irrelevant as the system changes. All of this adds to the maintenance costs.

With the correct method to automation, it is possible to significantly decrease test maintenance by concentrating on automating the right things, avoiding complex test situations, decreasing flaky tests, etc.

Conclusion

To address test automation challenges, teams require to come up with a valid approach, pick the right tool, accept the need of test maintenance, and plan for continuous monitoring and tuning the test automation suite to execute it as healthy as possible.

On the other hand, one can evade many pitfalls (and headaches) by trusting test automation to the service provider.

At TestUnity, we believe that the solution to mobile app quality lies in the correct blend of manual and automated testing. That’s why we test, automate, consult, and present a test lab of 350+ real devices.

Our Test Automation Unit includes a skilled pool of professionals with cross-industry experience. We help businesses both with recognizing strategies that would cover all the testing requirements, overcoming migration challenges, and automating a broad range of tests.

Run as many tests as often as required with the TestUnity test automation services. Learn more about what we have to give or let’s begin our collaboration right away.

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.