Few QA tips for Mobile App Testers

Few areas that we need to concentrate while testing on Mobile Apps.

1. UI

2. Functional

3. Performance

1. UI

• Testing on Different Devices like Tablets, Different devices which has different scale sizes.
• UI changes based on the device Orientation
• When app shows alerts at that time it self tries to Change the orientation of the device (most of the time it crashes).
• Low battery/SMS alerts while working on the application and check if it affect your alerts/popups

2. Functional

• Notification Testing (Disabling the Google account, without Google account, Changing the Google account password, Disable Google Account sync action).
• Payloads validation (which refers to the notification to the app from your server). All the notifications should not have the license key or any secure information. It should always be a simple wake up call for that app to initiate a request to the server from your app.
• Application logs should not contain the apps informations that has pass from your app to the server and vise versa.
• Field validations
• Interrupting communication of the app
• Offline mode app access 
• Database testing - Database should be encrypted if it is a security based app
• Rooted device validations
• Interrupting the app communication with the server by making a call to the device or turning of the wifi or Drop the Data network. Any way try to disturb the data network of the device
• Auto start of the app (on device reboots). 
• Check the app communication in different networks (WIFI, Data Network like 2G, 3G). 
• If the app was developed by third party vendors like Kony/Work Light/Phone Gap then all these apps will be designed by HTML5. Most of the time if the apps are business related then these apps will maintain a session with the server. So the session ID should not visible any where. 
• Test the App on different Android OS.
• If your app uses camera then check disable the camera app from the application manger on the OS then check from your app. 
• If your app uses GPS then check it should not allow Fake GPS kind of apps to fake the gps location. So your app should always fetch the current location of the app. 
• Upgrading the app from existing app (Where it should upgrade the db of the existing app).
• If  your app uses SD card storage to write some data then try to test the app without SD card, with a new SD card, SD Card without enough Space. While app using the SD Card pull out the card...etc.

Basic Performance testing:

1. Long run (Run the app for 1 day)

2. Battery usage of the app

3. Data usage by the app

4. Device speed after using the app, it should not lag the existing speed and performance of the app

5. Use different tools like Little eye to measure the performance of the app

Note: Few of the above tips are applicable for Blackberry/android devices only.



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