12 Mobile Application Testing Mistakes that Already Cost You More than You’re Willing to Admit

by TestFortExpert on 07/22/2016

Mobile application testing Mobile application development is a growing industry and competition hardens with each year. When quality matters the most, testing comes into play as the most efficient tool to ensure high quality of your products. Numerous developers make simple mistakes during testing. These mistakes drastically increase costs of the development. Often times, they also prolong the development making it even less cost efficient.

Mistakes differ from case to case. We will try to talk about them all.

Failing to adapt to UI/UX guidelines. Any iOS testing company will put a huge emphasis into checking UI and UX quality. This is one of the most common reasons, alongside bugs and crashes, for rejection during Apple Store Review. Be sure to follow UI and UX guidelines closely. These are created so that your end-users could enjoy using your application more.
Too much focus on the UI. You must follow the guidelines. However, overlooking various hidden API problems and network interactions can be devastating for the success of the application. Your UI may shine like a diamond in the sky, but if it runs like an old bicycle, you are going to have bad times.
Too much manual work. Catching bugs and errors is hard. Often, it takes months to make a bug free application. In order to save some time for other areas of testing, dedicate more efforts to create automatic checking tools. They are hard to code, but they reward with saving dozens of workhours during testing.
Poor installation testing. This is a topic we cannot stress enough on. An installation process is a business card that you exchange with an end-user. The first impression is very important. It doesn’t matter how good your application is, if no one can try it out. Focus on installation and update processes. Make sure they work perfectly.
In-office checks only. When your application is ready to hit the market, devote some time to checking how it behaves outside of your office. You have perfect conditions, your network doesn’t fail, and so doesn’t your app. However, in the wild things may change. What happens if the network is unstable? Did you check it?
Overtesting. Even an experienced mobile application testing company may drop the ball here. You do not have unlimited resources. Testing must be efficient both time and resources wise. You can’t check every aspect of the application. In many cases, this will take so much time that your release day will be centuries late. Focus on testing features vital for the success of the application.
Testing how your dynamic tutorial works is not that important for a simple table based application. On the other hand, making sure that content is visible and simple to read is crucial.
Not enough devices involved in testing. Many amateurs make this mistake. They believe that if an application works on one device, it will magically work on any other device with the same OS. Well, it usually doesn’t. A developer must address this issue and use as many various devices as possible.
Mobile application testing services usually have multiple “clean” devices at their disposal at any given period of time. They use them just to test how an application works in various environments and how it interacts with different hardware.
Poor security testing. This is a very important part of your testing activities. Many developers prefer to outsource this part of testing or use special external tools. Search for the most common security threats on OWASP and check out companies like VERACODE that develops special testing tools.

Mistakes like listed above are very common and can affect your bottom line.

Apple Store Review Committee can reject your poorly tested application. You will need time to fix mistakes and re-apply for the review. It takes workhours and makes development more expensive. The only way to avoid such expenses is to focus more on pre-release testing.

Conceptual Testing Mistakes

We focused on technicalities in the first part of the article. Let’s talk about more general mistakes that developers make very often.

Test it like a web.
During web development we have to take into consideration many various factors, but user’s software and hardware versatility is not one of them. If you test your website on Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera, you pretty much covered about 70% of the market and more than 90% of the world. When it comes to testing mobile applications, you have to use more software and hardware to test. Don’t test it like a web, test it like a boss.
Not enough attention to crash logs.
Many developers think that after extensive testing their applications are free of bugs. Unfortunately, this is a delusion. Make sure that testing is accompanied with comprehensive crash logs that will help your staff members in identifying reasons for various bugs and crashes found after the release.
Poor communication.
If your testers fail to report all the bugs and crashes they find, your testing will be inefficient. Making sure that your employees are on the same page is important for testing activities.
Testing without knowledge.
A mobile application testing company must know what it tests. This is a statement that makes perfect sense, isn’t it? Regrettably, many app testers do not study the application. They hastily jump into testing, cover only several features, check UI and UX, and report. This is bad and leaves a lot of functionality uncovered.

Such conceptual mistakes are even more dangerous because testers take initially wrong approach and follow a skewed roadmap. The mistakes we covered in the first part of the article are consequential. It is useless to avoid them, if you take a conceptually wrong way to test your application.

Denouement?

Mobile application development creates products. The objective of testing is different. It ensures high quality of the product. Focus more on quality of testing and make sure that testers don’t make amateur mistakes.

We Work With

Having one outside team deal with every aspect of quality assurance on your software project saves you time and money on creating an in-house QA department. We have dedicated testing engineers with years of experience, and here is what they can help you with.

Software is everywhere around us, and it’s essential for your testing team to be familiar with all the various types and platforms software can come with. In 21+ years, our QA team has tested every type of software there is, and here are some of their specialties.

There are dozens of different types of testing, but it takes a team of experts to know which ones are relevant to your software project and how to include them in the testing strategy the right way. These are just some of the testing types our QA engineers excel in.

The success of a software project depends, among other things, on whether it’s the right fit for the industry it’s in. And that is true not just for the development stage, but also for QA. Different industry have different software requirements, and our team knows all about them.

Full-Cycle Services

By Platform

By Type

Industries