Tips to Improve your Mobile App Beta Testing

Here in this article, we will check some points and cover a few tips that can help in your mobile app testing processes. Few points that come in general, including

  • how you can facilitate the overall application testing process;
  • what technological changes and solutions will help you to quickly bring in a testing culture;
  • what other solutions and tools will help you monitor users, test, and debug the application.

For starters, tips can help them grow faster, and for more experienced testers, they can help streamline their knowledge. Suppose your goal is to improve communication between departments and improve the quality of your product, whether you are a product or project manager or a developer. In that case, you will find a benefit for yourself in this article.

How can you improve the phase of testing?

Test in advance

The earlier you start testing, the easier it will be to make changes, and more testing will affect the quality of the product. Many development teams use excuses like “The product is not ready yet. We’ll test it later” to postpone the review. Of course, we all want our work to be perfect, so we try not to show the semi-finished design. But if you work too long without a feedback loop, the greater the chance you will need to make significant changes after the product goes to market. A common mistake is to assume that you are the user and design for yourself.

Heuristics and mnemonics

Use mind maps and heuristics/mnemonics to simplify the testing process as it is difficult to remember all aspects of testing. However, the developer’s help may still be needed. In that case, you can hire a professional developer to get it done.

Conduct both functional and stress testing

Functional testing is essential, but you can’t forget stress testing as well. Never forget that functional tests run under ideal conditions. Therefore, they will not detect the most annoying problems that can arise when people start using your application.

Prioritize

According to the rule of “quality over quantity,” it is extremely important to prioritize what you are testing. Test the parts of the application that are most important first, rather than the fastest to test — this will help you identify the most valuable bugs first. It will also allow the development team to fix the most critical parts of the application as soon as possible.

Ask questions

The most important thing is to understand how and in what real environment users use the product. For example, why test a hole in a glass if no one is going to use it? In testing, it is like in physics: if you first understand and see the physical process, understanding the equation will be more exciting and easier than memorizing it without understanding what it describes. Therefore, do not hesitate to ask clarifying questions to the customer to make test cases as close as possible to actual use cases.

Chat with colleagues

A timely question to your fellow testers or the development team will help you avoid fads (from the English FAD – functions as designed, that is, a designed function that is mistaken for a defect). Very often, novice QA engineers will see an extra 1-pixel line of a different color in their product and immediately rush to start a defect. And then it turns out that it was a brilliant move of the designer on the part of the customer. To avoid this kind of awkwardness, ask your colleagues and developers questions. So you won’t get unnecessary defects, and the customer will appreciate your proactive approach.

Provide a debug menu

It is very convenient to have a debug menu with functions that make things easier for developers and testers (especially the automation team). For example, with the ability to simulate responses from the server, open certain users, set certain flags, clear and lose sessions, reset the cache. A multifunctional debug menu has been created in many mobile applications, and neither manual nor automated testing is presented without it.

Improve the effectiveness of error reporting

By attaching screenshots and providing detailed bug reports, you will give the developer the information they need to understand the cause of the bug and fix it. For example, where does it happen, when, how many times, on what devices, on what operating system, and under what circumstances? Without the necessary details, the bug report will be useless for the development team.

Prepare yourself

It is also essential to understand the environment before starting the testing. Since the testing is being carried us for a mobile app, you must be aware that it is not the same as a desktop and the entire use-case, and the user usability is different in the case of the mobile app. Also, try to keep other gadgets running in various environments, including different operating systems or even versions.

Automatizing

Emulators and simulators will also provide helpful information, but they are just not enough. And the last thing – remember about the human factor, but do not automate absolutely everything.

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