Why is RPA so important for Mobile Testing?

 

The dominance of mobile phones as the preferred medium for accessing the internet is an established fact. This has created an app ecosystem where enterprises are competing among themselves to develop attractive, robust, customized, feature-rich, and secure mobile apps across verticals. Mobile testing has emerged as an integral part of this app ecosystem thanks to the rising cyber security challenges and fast-changing market dynamics. In fact, the criticality and complexity of mobile application testing are underpinned on the following criteria:

•  Testing of mobile apps should be done across browsers, operating systems, versions of operating systems, device platforms, and networks
• Quick release of newer OS versions and patches
• The varying hardware configuration of devices in terms of screen sizes, memory, processor speed, and others can be challenging
•  Unavailability of specific device platforms during testing
• Choosing a combination of devices, operating systems, and browsers to optimize testing
•  Availability of various categories of mobile apps – native, hybrid, and web and their need for testing

To address the myriad testing challenges, enterprises are increasingly veering towards adopting RPA (Robotic Process Automation.) If statistics are to be believed then the global RPA market is expected to touch $10.4 billion by 2023. Let us first understand what RPA is all about.

What is Robotic Process Automation or RPA?

It is an IT solution that lets enterprises automate many standard and mundane repetitive activities. Consequently, these activities are performed accurately and up to the desired expectations without any human intervention. It helps organizations to improve productivity, enhance efficiency, and accelerate a product’s time to market while upholding quality. RPA can be implemented in executing a plethora of tasks related to areas such as supply chain management, customer service, data analytics, and others. Its vast potential can only be achieved through meticulous planning.

When it comes to mobile testing, RPA can eliminate human errors and infuse reliability, accuracy, and transparency into the development and testing processes. It can easily scale the testing requirements, reduce the cost of testing, and take customer satisfaction to newer heights. Further, automated processes like RPA can significantly reduce the development and deployment lifecycle cost and duration of a mobile application. When a significant portion of testing is automated, the QA specialists will have the time and wherewithal to advance their skillsets and bring greater value to the business.

RPA helps enterprises in detecting anomalies in processes where anomalies are the outlier data patterns that do not seem to appear as normal. Such anomalies can constitute malicious codes to cause cybercrimes like data and identify thefts, data breaches, and malicious attacks, among others. To ensure that RPA performs its role in mobile app testing, enterprises should consider:

Processes to automate: It is not feasible to automate every process as there may be a need for human intervention. Besides, RPA can automate processes that are standardized, structured, and rule-based. So, the ones without standardization cannot lend themselves to automation.

Resources: There is a lack of trained resources for RPA given its relatively recent origins. To further add to the worries, there is a lack of availability of structured data across processes making the implementation of RPA and achieving accuracy a challenge.

Management approval: The implementation of RPA can cause disruption across the value chain due to its requirement for changes in the IT infrastructure of an organization. So, the management should approve of the implementation and oversee the disruption.

Benefits of implementing RPA in mobile application testing

RoboticProcess Automation can accrue a host of benefits for enterprises/developers/testers as mentioned below:

• Since RPA is run by specific tools, there is no need to remember any syntax.
• The QA team can create a test case by taking a simple drag and drop approach.
•  The capability of RPA testing of mobile applications can be enhanced by assigning specific jobs to different workstations.
• As a minimal workforce is needed, organizations can save significant costs on overheads.
• ince the process is executed by bots that follow a standardized approach, accuracy is assured.
•  Since there is no manual activity involved, testing can be carried out in non-stop iterations.
  
•  RPA can be flexible and does not depend on the type of testing – web-based or mobile-based. Moreover, it allows the parallel execution of tests.

One of the major challenges to testing mobile applications is managing the frequent updates and changes. So, by automating the repetitive tasks, enterprises can achieve efficiency and better detection of glitches. Also, since mobile test automation needs to be carried out on multiple platforms, virtualized devices or emulators can be leveraged. The implementation of RPA will have the below-mentioned features:

Total test coverage: RPA testing should be comprehensive and cover every aspect of development and testing – functional, non-functional, and integration.

Scriptless test automation: RPA does not need the human resource to have any programming skills. Any business analyst or Subject Matter Expert (SME) can learn to use the RPA tool. Since the bot can access the end-user system through a controlled user interface, there is no need to have any program to run the system.

Parallel execution of mobile automated testing: Customers are wont to use multiple mobile devices from different OEM vendors. And unless an application is tested across devices its quality is not validated. The RPA should ensure the parallel execution of app testing on multiple device platforms.

Continuous integration: The integration of various APIs should be properly verified.

Network testing: The functioning of a mobile application depends to a great extent on the available network. RPA testing should evaluate the mobile apps’ compatibility with different networks.

Security testing: One of the aspects of security testing is checking if the app adheres to the various security protocols and regulations. Also, since app stores will include an app only after ensuring it does not have any offensive data, prior testing should be conducted to verify the app’s adherence to all industry standards.

Conclusion

Leveraging the RPA tools can help enterprises in validating the quality of a mobile application across platforms. However, it should be done after meticulous planning to ensure efficiency. It is only by adopting the right approach for automation (web-based, cloud-based, and lab-based) that RPA can deliver the right outcomes.  

Article Original Source:

https://dev.to/cigniti/how-can-you-leverage-rpa-for-mobile-testing-3f32

What are the main challenges of Mobile Test Automation?

Organizations are releasing mobile apps in quick succession to leverage the growing appetite of tech-savvy customers. However, not every app receives user acceptance owing to a range of issues. These include functional defects, below-par performance, device incompatibility, and poor user experience. As users become more critical of such issues and are deluged with a range of alternatives, mobile application testing has become important. Surprisingly, most organizations are yet to embrace mobile test automation even as they slug it out to release newer variants of apps. So, what challenges do enterprises face when they go about conducting mobile test automation? Let us describe some of the biggest ones:

Biggest challenges for testing mobile applications

The list of challenges bedeviling the mobile test exercise is -

1.      Quick release schedules: With customers rooting for mobile apps in greater numbers, enterprises don’t want to be a late entrant and miss the bus. They go for quick build and release cycles where a thorough round of testing often becomes a casualty. Also, due to the pressing schedules, enterprises neither integrate new tests into their test cycles nor have the time to write test scripts. With DevOps and Agile being the methodologies to develop glitch-free applications, the need has arisen to develop a test suite. The suite should be underpinned on continuous innovation to address the dynamics of a complex mobile environment. However, this makes the test cycle lengthy with the release of new devices, operating systems and their variants, features, and functionalities.

2.      Choosing the right mobile app test automation tool: Every mobile app comes with different test challenges where no two are similar. Although the market is flush with many automation tools, the challenge is to find the right one that addresses the specific test requirement. So, to choose the right mobile application QA testing tool, enterprises should meet certain standards:

·         Ease of use and the ability to create a script

·   Ought to run on native and object web properties for better identification of the components

·         Ability to connect to the cloud

·         Enable more than functional testing

3.      Security: Given its growing ramifications on brand equity and user experience, security testing has become a challenging exercise. The reason being the umpteen vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to steal data or information. When it comes to the cloud, it is better to rely on a private cloud, for it provides better encryption. Also, preventing data breach on a public cloud platform should be given serious consideration by implementing mobile testing. Further, DevOps should be changed to DevSecOps for better security compliance and accountability across the organization.

4.      Diversity in devices: The mobile ecosystem has numerous mobile devices with different configurations. Such device diversity makes mobile app testing a challenging task, especially for native, hybrid, and web apps. Moreover, the type of testing differs as well vis-a-vis compatibility, performance, stress, conformance, and security. Even though native apps have a limited scope of testing, their hybrid and web counterparts are needed to be tested for on and off platforms. This can create knotty back-end issues. Both native and hybrid apps should be tested on various device platforms to ensure outcomes like quick and seamless download, performance, platform interaction, and updates.

5.      Diversity in OS platforms: One of the most challenging scenarios in mobile test automation is to account for the fast-changing operating systems and their variants. With devices operating on different variants of Android, iOS or Windows operating systems at any point in time, mobile testing can become complicated. These mainly relate to the compatibility issues when apps are deployed across operating environments. However, these can be addressed by following solutions -

·         Putting emulators into use to identify glitches and security issues

·         Testing on a set of popularly used devices and target users.

·   Using a mix of both in-house mobile lab and cloud based mobile QA testing

Conclusion

The widespread usage of mobile apps and their interfaces with myriad thirty party sites have meant vulnerabilities can creep into the system, anytime and anywhere. Also, since a significant number of mobile apps carry critical financial and personal information, they should be guarded against all kinds of cyber threats. A thorough mobile application testing framework can help identify such glitches and deliver great user experiences.