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Mobile App Performance Testing – Challenges

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Introduction

Software testing is of two categories: black-box testing- in which the internal design of the application needs not to be known to the tester; and white box testing- where the tester should have prior knowledge about the implementation of the program or software to be tested.

A performance test is a non-functional testing method that checks how well an application will run when subjected to a high degree of load. Performance parameters such as stability, speed, and scalability are estimated throughout the testing. The precise performance testing tools may carry out a wide range of trials on diverse systems.

In this article, we have demonstrated the various types of performance tools, why you require performance testing, the point to reckon, the challenges of performance testing, and useful performance testing tools available with their crucial features and protocols.

Performance Testing

Performance testing is a non-functional software testing method that examines how smoothly an application’s stability, speed, scalability, and responsiveness cling up under the workload threshold. It is correspondingly known as load testing.

Although it is a significant stage in assuring software quality, performance testing is treated as an afterthought and only performed after functional testing. And in most specimens, after the program is set to be released.

Performance testing analyzes application output, reprocessing speed, data transfer rapidity, network bandwidth consumption, paramount concurrent users, memory use, workload effectiveness, and command response times. It is a subset of performance engineering and is occasionally pertained to as perf testing.

Need for Performance Testing

Performance testing is run to offer facts to stakeholders about their app’s performance, scalability and stability. Performance testing, additionally, reveals what has to be addressed before a product is released to the market. Without performance testing, the software is likely to have challenges like slowness when several people are using it concurrently, inconsistencies across various operating systems, and skint usability.

Under prophesied workloads, performance testing will demonstrate whether their software satisfies speed, scalability, and stability criteria under prognosticate workloads. Applications that are released to the market with poor performance yardsticks due to inadequate or lacking performance testing are probable to earn a negative mark and fail to fulfil sales targets of the software.

Types of Performance Testing

  • Load testing: In this type of testing, the capacity of an operation to handle anticipated user loads are evaluated. Before the software program goes online, the aim is to identify performance backups.
  • Stress testing: In this type of testing, an application is put through its paces to analyze how it reacts to extravagant traffic or data processing. The aim is to determine where the breaking point of the app is.
  • Endurance testing: This type of testing ensures that the software application can resist the presaged load for a length of time.
  • Spike testing: It examines the response of an application to large harpoons in a user-generated workload.
  • Volume testing: Here, the data is entered into a database, and the general gist of the software is covered. The aim is to check the performance of a software operation with varied sizes of the database.
  • Scalability testing: The method investigates how readily a software scales up to nurture an increased user burden.

Points to consider for Mobile Performance Testing

Performance is a facet to hold the user. However, users will not use them if the application is lagging. Some of the points to consider for mobile app performance testing are as follows:

  • The launch time of a mobile application should be as low as possible.
  • Time to render the screen should be reduced.
  • Mobile applications should not downshift in for resource-heavy exertion such as downloading and uploading.

Challenges of Performance Testing

The critical challenges which are faced by the testers while carrying out mobile app performance testing involve:

  • Organizing diverse mobile platforms and their operating systems
  • Simulating connectivity such as Edge, 4G, 5G or Wi-Fi
  • Limitations of mobiles such as battery and resources consumption
  • Mobile phone usability
  • The varied sizes of mobile devices to run the identical app

Troubleshooting Mobile Applications Performance

After catching on to the challenges of performance testing for mobile apps, testers should trace and rectify faults.

Problem 1: Lag or languid response of the Mobile App

  • The reason for this holdup may be the RAM, cache.
  • You need to kill unwarranted courses or clear the cache. Troubleshooting the connectivity effect may unravel some of the problems that are creating lags

Problem 2: App restarting, freezing, locking up or unresponsiveness.

The following can fix the issue:

  • Optimizing the application codes
  • Software must be renovated and updated.
  • Automatic restores
  • Managing RAM or ROM (in some cases) while employing external devices
  • Wiping the cache partitioning
  • Substantiating the app function with different third-party apps and APIs
  • Mapping the mobile application conforming to the device

Some Mobile App Testing Tools

Mobile performance testing tools vary according to the devices or mobile Operating systems. Some familiar mobile app performance testing tools are:

Robotium (Android)

This app functions just like Selenium for Mobile Apps. The tester can record and play in different ways needed to perform testing.

Monkey Runner (Android)

Monkey Runner can perform tests on real devices interlinked to a PC or emulators. The implement has an API, which allows controlling a smartphone, a tablet or an emulator from outside of Android code.

Automator (Mac or iOS)

Automator was developed by Apple for OS X. The app implements drag-and-drop workflows for automating reiterative tasks into arrays for quicker revision. This saves time and trouble over human intervention to manually alter each file mutually.

Conclusion

It is indispensable to carry out performance testing in software engineering before releasing any application on the market. Performance testing ensures consumer pleasure and preserves the investment of an investor. Additionally, performance testing enhances the sale of the application or software with increased customer loyalty, happiness and retention.