Smartphones popularity has greatly influenced mobile applications and responsive websites. Mobiles now play a major role for conducting profitable business. Enterprise mobility is enhancing efficiency of employee communication to reach out to consumers, clients and suppliers. Earlier, when mobiles played a less important role with respect to business applications, performance issues or outages were not attended with importance.
However, this situation no longer holds relevance to the present day. Nowadays, performance problems related to mobile applications result in huge loss of revenues, diminished productivity of the employees, damage to brand reputation, and many other significant losses.
Modern day consumers have very high expectations regarding the performance of mobile applications. This increases the responsibility of mobile application development teams who are accountable for delivering, reliable, responsive as well as well-designed applications.
Moreover, nowadays a number of diverse mobile devices has proliferated the marketplace, providing development teams of mobile application with a dynamic cross-section of platforms to test.
Mobile Testing is not similar to traditional performance testing. As mobile is entirely a different game, testing attributes and requirements are also a lot more steeper owing to its unpredictable nature. Load and stress testing are carried out for assessing the performance of the mobile under normal and extreme situations.
Load Testing:
Load testing is carried out for determining whether the application would be able to maintain the required number of users along with acceptable rejoinder times. The intention of load testing is basically to standardize the maximum load with respect to simultaneous users that the mobile application is able to sustain before it experiences system failure.
Stress testing on the other hand aims to validate the consistency of an application as well as its dependability over a significant span of time.
On the server side
Load testing is essential at the server’s end so for understanding the variations with respect to response times, delays in the delivery of significant messages, streaming of resource intensive packets, application crashes, etc.
On the client side
Load testing of mobile applications are carried out to address the general discrepancies related to the application behavior on diverse platforms and different handsets, CPU consumption and memory, battery issues as well as loading speed.
For sound testing of mobile applications,
- Selection of the right testing tool for automation for the success of a mobile application testing program is vital
- Chosen tool need to support all the desired platforms as well as testing for different screen types, input mechanism and resolutions.
- The chosen tool need be connected to the external system to carry out end-to-end testing.
- For identification of the most critical platform/hardware combination that needs testing, Weighted Device method of platform mix needs to made good use of.
- The end-to-end flow of functions need to checked on all possible mobile platforms at least for once.
One can make use of NeoLoad which is basically a performance testing tool that provides support for Mobile Application Testing.
Stress testing
This refers to software testing for assessing satisfactory performance under extreme as well as unfavorable conditions. These may be the outcome of process loading, heavy network traffic, maximum requests, etc.
It has been observed that most of the systems have been developed under assumption of normal operating conditions. So even if one crosses a limit, errors are mostly negligible in case the system undergoes stress testing during its development.
- Stress testing primarily lays major emphasis on the availability of the application as well as its error handling capability in face of unfavorable conditions such as extreme heavy loads.
- This testing is generally carried out for ensuring non crashing software that may happen owing to insufficient resources.
- It also helps in the determination of reaction of the hardware while in the stress period.
- It is used to identify errors in slowness as well as during the peak user loads, issues relating to corruption of data and security loopholes during the stress period
Stress testing of mobile applications focuses on a number of transactions ranging from identified to break transactions, as well as on those that are heavily stressed while testing. It also checks when a database is devoid of any load. The process of stress testing loads concurrent users apart from normal levels of the system for finding out the weakest link of the system.
Both types help in eradication of the performance bottlenecks that crop up when a number of users require access to a common resource. Identification of the problems with these two testing methods in the early phase, testers are able to upgrade hardware, optimize applications, or even employ effective strategies to make performance improvements before release of the software.
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