Why Mobile Test Automation Has Become Important?

Intense competition and need for reaching higher revenues has triggered the growth of Application development. Additionally, there are challenges related to changing user preferences, and ultimately you have only a few mobile apps that hold the attention of the users. Teams developing mobile apps go through a laborious process of designing and developing the app. While they put across their best efforts at ensuring quality, there is every likelihood of bugs creeping into the source code. These bugs can result in;  

• Impacting the user experience and forcing customers to drop the app

• Causing error in the smooth operations of functionalities

• Causing data breach or the loss of sensitive personal or business information

• Causing financial cost to the company due to litigation from customers

• Falling foul of regulatory authorities

• Losing the brand value

 The answer to deal with all the above lies in carrying out mobile application testing. The process of mobile application testing can be done after developing the app (as in the traditional waterfall model) or simultaneously with the development of the app (as in Agile or DevOps). However, the growing digital challenges of increased competition, faster time to market, changing user preferences, and an increased threat of data breach has meant the manual mode of mobile application testing is no longer viable. Let us find out why using a manual mobile application testing strategy can be counterproductive.  

• Increased cost: As manual mobile application testing is a laborious process, the business has to employ a team of testers. The cost of hiring or employing manual testers can be substantial.
• Inconsistent testing: Using a manual mobile application testing strategy would mean a human tester checking a greater number of codes and input data for possible outcomes. This can lead to errors whereby certain bugs can be missed or overlooked. Moreover, since the process of mobile application testing can differ from person to person, the results can differ as well.

• Failing to manage complexity: During the use of a manual mobile application testing strategy, the focus of the tester decreases with time. Also, as the complexity of codes or the number of inputs increases, the human tester can no longer manage the same. Thus, using a manual mobile application testing strategy is not suitable when test conditions and parameters are scaled up.

• Slow rate of progress: The pace at which manual mobile application testing is conducted, the rate of finding bugs becomes slow. This slows down the entire SDLC and defeats the objective of achieving faster time to market.

• Test coverage area: To check the proper functioning of a mobile app, the mobile application testing strategy should be comprehensive. It should cover a wide test area with all the permutations and combinations of test data. However, manual testing is simply not capable of covering the entire test area. This leaves room for a number of bugs to escape testing thereby impacting the quality of the app.

 This article originally published at Medium.com :
https://medium.com/@michaelwadejr12/growing-digital-challenges-and-the-need-for-mobile-test-automation-5e4ad8d5987c