In this era of digitization, it is of paramount importance to have a web presence for your brand, business and leverage it to facilitate user engagements. While ‘Social Media’ remains a top-pick while discussing your brand’s strategy, for Technical businesses and more specific solution providers, the game changes With over 1000s of apps being uploaded on Google play store and IOS app store every day.
So, if you are a solutions provider and have gone live with your application or are planning to go live soon, here are some market fundamentals to keep in check, to ensure that the end-user product or application in this case, is of highest quality and bug-free.
While market researchers and
Application performance quality assurance teams have entirely different set of principles, we have tried to combine the best practices, some most commonly left out scenarios, etc. for your ease and reference.
Scroll down to understand application performance testing and how to get started with it.
Investigate your application’s user’s pattern
With growing number of apps being launched, it is very essential that you keep a tab of your users and their usage patterns. These days multiple help options are available to help to track these fundamental metrics, like SDKs, Open-source tools, which could answer some critical questions for you and help your development team to get sharp insights.
Some frequently asked questions when doing application performance testing are:
- Which screen is most commonly used?
- Which section is often used on the screen?
- Is a different layout needed?
- When the application does crashes most?
- How does it perform when used on different devices?
- What is the time needed for data to load?
- How the functioning is effected when backend processes are in function?
While keeping a track of these insights, it is important that you share feedback with the engineering or R&D teams, for better evaluation and analysis.
Building a Test Strategy
Gone are those days, when your
Mobile performance security testing application performance testing would solely depend on running fixed test cases, fixing common bugs and going live. The users of this decade have grown so frivolous with mobile applications, due to excessive apps being made every day, that even a slight discomfort could provoke multiple uninstalls and a bad mouth publicity. Like the earlier said point, investigating your application and its user’s patterns is critical, as the strategy you would make would depend largely on it. The test strategy for application performance testing will closely determine all your test cases, scenarios and user demographics. The scenarios need to be as close to life events, as there isn’t much room for hypothesis, if you plan to go live with your application.
Thinking time in an application
Think time for an application is the time taken by the end-user to understand the layout of the application, read information displayed across screen, enter details for a transaction, etc. If you plan ahead, you would definitely need to include this crucial parameter in your test strategy, as this could determine how engaging your application becomes.
Beta Testing is a MUST
Managing your release versions is critically important, as it could easily backfire. Usually a standard approach for application performance testing is to ensure that your latest build or app version is released not for all, but in a controlled environment and the build can be rolled back, for any bugs determined at a later date. To ensure this practice, you can release the application for internal use, say 100 employees, or another set of limited customers. This will ensure that the final application build is bug-free and supports user experience like never before.
User Experience
This cannot be evaluated or tested by your engineering team or developers. This is a wide and open field, where feedback is of greatest impact. Since developers are the ones who write the code and see it from functionality stand point alone, they could have a biased opinion of user experience and hence application performance testing could suffer a side-reel. This is a subjective realm, where certain app patterns would seem normal for one app user, while provoke others to uninstall it. The most ideal situation to get the most appropriate feedback is by opting for external testing and gathering insights, reviews, feedback, etc. and benchmarking them against set standards, to get appropriate results.
We hope we have covered some interesting stand points from a business’s perspective, as well as including some insights from a market research’s domain. If you have any feedback to give or want some of your queries to be answered, kindly drop us a comment below.
Till then, keep innovating!
About Author: Sangram is a tech enthusiast, presently working as a Content Expert with Crestech Global. Tech blogging is his passion, through which he intends to explore the world of software Testing. He doesn’t just write for tech-savvy people, but also for those who find the world of technology intriguing.
