Did you know that there were almost 230 billion mobile app downloads in the year 2021 worldwide? That’s right. Gone are the days when users treated desktop applications as treasure chests. In the era where smartphone variants come out at the speed of light, most users access applications on their mobile devices. Thanks to ever-shortening attention spans, they expect a flawless interface and a great response. If they don’t get that, you should remember that competitors are just lurking around the corner!
Sunlight Media in Los Angeles can help you develop a mobile application and conduct performance testing on multiple devices.
QA teams can eliminate these glitches through performance testing for mobile apps. In other words, for the success of any mobile application, top performance is non-negotiable. After all, the present-day digital-savvy user doesn’t have any tolerance for sluggish applications filled with crashes and errors! However, performance testing can be time-consuming and expensive. Even though it addresses many issues, it’s important to conduct performance testing correctly.
The development of mobile apps is an evolutionary process. It’s time we modernized mobile application performance testing by identifying different bottlenecks at the network layer, database layer, and application layer. This blog discusses the 6 tips to revolutionize performance testing.
- Make performance test mobile app an early priority
Traditionally, performance testing comes after development. However, if you are talking about revolutionizing the process, you need to execute some tasks even before drafting your first letter of the code. These include monitoring, instrumentation, and addressing other environmental factors.
Front-end load tests don’t have to be the final steps of the software development life cycle anymore. The modern approach requires passing performance engineering metrics such as throughput, release, quality, workflow, defect density, etc.
- Simulate the load with various network conditions, geographical locations, and compatible devices
Different mobile users have varying levels of network quality and signal strength. While simulating the load with various network conditions via a performance test software, you also need to test the signal strength of mobile networks.
It’s important to simulate the load with compatible devices.Â
Cover all possible permutations and combinations of iOS, Windows, Android, and BlackBerry platforms. Since every device can translate application content, it’s vital to check device compatibility. However, you don’t need to own many physical devices, thanks to emulators capturing realistic UX.
- Developers have a more significant role than you might think
Let’s face it; developers are no longer disconnected from QA. It’s vital to realize that if defects emerge in production, fixing them costs a lot higher than if you manage to detect them early on. Modern performance testing involves setting some rules for developers, such as implementing unit tests, telemetry timers, and instrumentation to trigger and detect performance problems in the development phase.
Moreover, developers should consider the nature of the used test automation and ensure easy triggering of the code from them. Testing APIs, creating test back doors, and implementing calling methods are some steps to accomplish this. Sometimes, testers fail to automate some processes due to inaccessible, compiled, or sealed software bits. So, to avoid the software going untested or unnecessary manual testing, it’s crucial to involve developers during the creation of test automation.
- Think ahead of load testing
The biggest misconception in the testing world lies in the interchangeability of load and performance testing. In reality, numerous actions and practices make up performance testing.Â
But since companies usually slam the testing of a system’s performance with load, create load automation, and execute loads, the two terms are often confused. Load automation and load testing have a set of actions part of performance testing.
- Record performance test scripts with real-world devices
There are specifically identified scenarios associated with mobile performance test scripts on real devices used by actual users. Recording these scripts is highly recommended. As a result, it captures specific network traffic associated with a particular device which you can easily simulate with the load for accurate capturing of performance metrics.
- Measure and observe, Validate and Repeat
There were no performance measurement mechanisms before the software reached the production stage or the test environment. When developers write the code, the QA team should be ready with performance measurements. Besides that, it’s also important to complement these with APM systems as they offer plenty of new functions for the management and monitoring performance thresholds.
Moreover, since solutions are subject to change, performance test results are no longer relevant immediately after including new code or sprint releases. Therefore, ideally, you should be scheduling, running, measuring, validating, and repeating instead of treating performance testing as merely a single load test before launch.
Summing It Up
Time constraints can often give rise to a temptation to rush through performance testing of mobile applications. Well, it’s a no go considering the negative impacts of a bug-filled interface. When you revolutionize performance testing, you can quickly validate hardware usage application performance with huge workloads or under critical conditions and determine the app’s capacity. It also helps in checking metrics like network errors, response time, average crash time, etc.
Mobile application performance testing determines the app’s credibility, which is directly proportional to the ROI of a company. Thanks to the availability of performance testing tools free of cost, the process has become more accessible. The steps mentioned above will make your tests highly automatable and light. This will make them easy to schedule and configure by the QA team. So, are you ready to embrace more popularity, recommendations, and downloads for your app? Follow the above six steps to revolutionize performance testing for mobile apps and witness the striking bloom in your business.
