Struggling to maintain the compatibility of your mobile applications? Yes? This is probably because you are not testing the functioning of your applications on a wide range of devices. This becomes a challenging process considering there are thousands of different devices and even thousands more coming every year. The solution? Start implementing cloud mobile testing.
With these platforms, you can achieve your desired scalability, flexibility, and efficiency during the quality assurance testing processes. Unfamiliar with cloud mobile testing? Don’t worry! We are here for you.
Our article will help you understand the basic idea of running mobile test cases using cloud solutions. During our understanding, we’ll also go through its major benefits, strategies, and best practices to ensure that you’re utilizing the full potential of this entire infrastructure.
Why Scale Mobile Test Cases
Before we nose-dive into the role of cloud solutions in mobile testing, it is very important to understand why you should expand the testing reach. To shed more light over this segment, we have mentioned some of the major challenges that you will face while using traditional mobile testing solutions:
- As we already mentioned earlier, there are thousands of devices available in the market which have different screen sizes, operating system versions, and hardware configurations. So, it is almost impossible for you to generalize the testing infrastructure with these variations.
- Mobile operating systems like iOS and Android go through frequent updates to add various features and security inclusions. Therefore, you need to keep your test bench updated depending on these versions to ensure that you are providing the best end-user experience to your customers.
- It is very common for users to have different network configurations like 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi. Apart from that, you also have to account for various real-world issues like low bandwidth or unstable latency.
- If you try to incorporate all the above factors by setting up thousands of real devices in-house, you will quickly understand that it will consume not only millions of dollars but will also be a stressful job. It will become even more hectic as you have to always update this bench depending on the new market trends.
- Finally, while working on mobile infrastructure, you also have to account for localization and geographical compliances depending on the regions where your application will be available. You’ll also have to handle various local restrictions so that your application does not face any legal compliance issues.
What is Cloud Mobile Testing
Before we start discussing the implementation process for cloud-based mobile testing, it is very important to develop a clear idea about what it is in the first place. Under the hood, it is the practice of testing mobile applications on real and virtual devices that are present on cloud platforms.
In most cases, you can access these platforms using remote servers. So, the primary benefit of this process is not only cost-effective real-world testing but also access to these platforms from anywhere in the world. Let us now divert our attention towards some of the major offerings of a cloud-based mobile testing platform:
- These platforms will grant access to a huge range of real devices, emulators, and simulators so that you can create your desired testing configurations according to your target audience or personal preferences.
- By using a cloud-based mobile platform, you can easily scale the testing infrastructure to test on multiple devices at the same time. This comes in handy when you’re working on certain applications that go through frequent updates to add or remove features.
- It is very easy to integrate continuous deployment and continuous integration pipelines with cloud-based platforms. Using this process, you can accelerate the feedback loop and also execute the development and testing phases at the same time.
- Another major advantage of a cloud-based platform is that it completely eliminates the need of setting up and maintaining an extensive on-site mobile device lab.
- Finally, since you can access these labs from anywhere in the world, you can work on a remote distributed team. This also helps improve the collaboration between the team members so that you can resolve the issues quickly.
Benefits Of Using Cloud-Based Mobile Testing
To further improve our knowledge about the importance of cloud-based mobile testing in the current scenario, let us divert our attention to some of the major benefits that you can access by implementing this process:
1. Improved Test Coverage
Since cloud-based testing platforms provide access to multiple real devices, browsers, and operating systems, they will have a very important role in improving the overall test coverage of your environment. The result? You can ensure the best end-user experience to your customers, irrespective of which device they choose.
2. Parallel Testing for Faster Results
With a cloud testing platform, you can implement parallel testing to further improve the productivity of the testing infrastructure. It is the process of running multiple test cases on different configurations at the same time. The proper implementation of this step will help you execute thousands of different tests in a very short time.
3. Real-Time Debugging and Monitoring
There are multiple cloud testing platforms like LambdaTest that provide features like real-time test activity logging, native bug tracking, and comprehensive test reporting. The advantage? You can use these features to monitor the status of the testing project. You can also easily locate the faulty elements to resolve them before deployment.
4. Security & Compliance
All the major cloud testing platforms ensure that you’re implementing proper data security, privacy, and other compliances. These implementations will abide by standard practices like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2. These compliances will be even more important when you’re working on sensitive applications like health apps, banking apps, and ecommerce apps.
5. Use Of AI And ML
Want to integrate AI in testing for mobile platforms? Cloud-based platforms like LambdaTest have got you covered! Using these features, you can implement various advanced practices like self-healing test scripts, preventative bug detection, and test history analysis.
To further improve our understanding of this process, let us use the example of LambdaTest as our reference point:
LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ browsers and OS combinations and 5000+ real devices. You can also use this platform to execute automated cross-browser mobile testing with the help of Selenium and Appium.
The following sample code will help you to further understand the execution for the above step:
Scaling Mobile Testing With Cloud Platforms
To properly scale your mobile testing processes using cloud platforms, you must implement certain strategies. To help the new testers with this process, we have mentioned some of the major ones below:
- You must choose the right cloud-based platform according to your testing requirements. During this process, you should also ensure that the platform supports your currently preferred programming languages, add-on libraries, and other preferred inclusions.
- Next, you must ensure that you are able to integrate automation testing with your chosen cloud-testing platforms. This means there must be a way to integrate frameworks like Appium, XCUITest, or Selenium.
- It’s also important to properly plan for implementing parallel testing on your cloud infrastructure. This is a very important process to ensure that you are wrapping up the entire complex testing phase within a short time to reduce the deployment cycle.
- As we already mentioned earlier, implementing agile methodologies like continuous integration and continuous deployment will ensure that you’re implementing faster feedback loops. For this process, you must include platforms like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and CircleCI, which are cloud-based testing solutions.
- While implementing the mobile testing processes on a cloud infrastructure, you must have adequate measures to test the app under different network conditions. During this process, you should also consider environmental factors like low battery and CPU stress. These are very important to understand the performance of the application in a real-world scenario.
- Finally, you must create an environment of security and compliance which will be even more important as you will be sending out sensitive user information through various networks to these cloud servers. It is also important to maintain role-based access control so that all the members on the team have access to only as much data as required depending on the testing requirements.
Also Read:MyWape: A Powerful and Reliable Digital Platform for Seamless Online Experience
Best Practices For Executing Cloud Mobile Testing
Finally, let us divert our attention towards some of the major practices that we suggest the testers to incorporate within the testing infrastructure. These practices will have a very important role in improving the quality of the application that you’re currently developing:
- Before you start the testing process, you must create proper goals that you want to achieve with this process. For example, your goals can include functional testing, performance testing, and regression testing.
- It is very important to maintain the proper balance between real device testing and emulators. We suggest the testers to restrict real device testing only to critical test scenarios and use emulators for early-stage test execution.
- Similarly, you should also effectively balance manual testing and automation testing to ensure that you are not manually executing the regression test instances but also keeping the human touch for other testing scenarios like exploratory testing.
- During cloud-based mobile testing, you should continuously track the key performance metrics like pass/fail rate, execution time, and defect density.
- While choosing your desired cloud platform for executing mobile testing, you must choose platforms with cost-effective plans and also optimize the task execution for avoiding unnecessary testing. These plans will also benefit individual testers or small startup companies who don’t have enough revenue for comprehensive packages.
- Finally, we suggest the testers to use those cloud-based platforms that offer artificial intelligence capabilities. These advanced processes will help you find the defects, failure rates, and also optimize the overall test execution process.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the factors that we have put forward in this article, we can easily say that cloud mobile testing is no longer a luxury but one of the most important aspects for a business that wants to deliver high-quality mobile apps in a short time.
By using all the strategies, best practices, and implementation steps that we have mentioned in this article, you can improve the test coverage, reduce the time to market, and the operational costs associated with the testing infrastructure.
You must choose the correct cloud mobile testing solution to achieve faster, more reliable, and scalable mobile testing solutions that will help create a positive brand reputation while constantly expanding your target audience in this competitive market.
