Smartphones are the Aladdin’s lamp of the 21st century and the Mobile Apps are no less than the “genie”. The above statement clearly speaks volumes about the popularity of Mobile Apps. With the increasing demands of the user base for mobile applications, organizations are determined to improve the quality of mobile apps. In Order to provide the best user experience, it is imperative to include Mobile App Testing in the app development pipeline.
In a fast-paced mobile app development environment where we deal with Continuous Integration and Mobile DevOps, the software development is performed frequently throughout the development cycle hence it makes no sense in leaving the app testing for the end.
Hence testing also needs to be performed frequently and in fact in all the stages of the app development cycle. In order to leave no stones unturned, QA Teams are always coming up with innovative techniques for improving mobile app testing. Rapid time-to-market can be achieved through development efficiency. Kubernetes technology allows developers to use many off-the-shelf solutions and standardize processes. As a result, managed Kubernetes makes it faster and easier to bring new products to market, and to build an efficient development and testing process.
So in this blog, we will uncover the five most fundamental practices to increase the effectiveness of mobile app testing in terms of quality as well as speed.
Implementing Agile Methodology
Among all the SDLCs Agile practices are still most popular and most practiced due to its flexible nature and the fact that in this model the development and testing team works very closely with the client to achieve efficiency.
So the ability that Agile provides to the teams to work closely with the businesses increases the quality of the end product because of the continuous feedback. Also, one significant quality of this methodology is that it allows the teams to deliver the software product in chunks which can be on a weekly or monthly basis.
Adopting Mobile DevOps and Agile Methodology
In order to achieve quality@speed, it’s no brainer that it can be achieved with the two fundamental principles Agile and DevOps. We have already discussed that Agile enables the teams to come closer to the business which ensures to deliver qualitative results.
On the other hand, DevOps helps in quick delivery of software products as it allows you to create ready to deploy codes. DevOps means Dev + Ops. DevOps can be very finely defined as a practice or methodology where you combine the Development and the operation part of building a product into one iterative loop so that each stage of the development and Operation can feed the next stage.
We can say that DevOps is a step higher than agile where the code is committed not only on a weekly basis but on an hourly basis. So DevOps increases the overall efficiency but also speeds up the development process as compared to the Agile. Keeping in mind the need of the hour to develop technological solutions which ensure “qualitative” as well as “faster” results, organizations are adopting Agile and DevOps to ensure quality@speed.
Implementing a CI/CD Pipeline
A ci/cd pipeline is a deployment pipeline integrated with testing automation services, tools, and servers that enable continuous integration and continuous delivery with the help of frequent feedback loops, allowing teams to deliver smaller chunks of releases in a shorter time. This is an apt definition of ci/cd pipeline. Let’s break this definition and try to understand CI and CD.
CI- Unlike the traditional SDLC in Continuous integration, the code is committed several times and in very early stages as well as tested and once the bugs are fixed, the build is passed for deployment at the production server. Hence in continuous integration, small chunks of codes are tested in the early stage which enables ready to deploy code, thus increasing the speed of software development.
CD- So once the bugs are fixed, then build is ready to be deployed in the mock production server. So as several commits are made in a day in continuous integration in the same way multiple releases of codes are deployed in continuous delivery. In this, each chunk of code is developed, tested, and even delivered to the mock server.
As a ci/cd pipeline is supposed to deliver the smaller chunks of codes and deploy it in a server on an hourly basis, it is evident that it increases the speed of software development by many folds. Also, we can see that the ci/cd pipeline is quite systematic, hence it is imperative to implement a ci/cd pipeline to streamline the app development process.
Implementing Continuous Testing
Continuous testing is the process of testing an application at each and every stage of the development cycle. As shown in the picture testing can be performed in all the stages of DevOps. Also, we can see that the testing gets started from quite an early stage than the traditional testing.
So Continuous testing can be implemented not only where code is written, built, or developed but almost at every stage from planning to deployment. Continuous testing is generally implemented in fast-paced app development environments like Continuous Integration and mobile DevOps where
To achieve continuous testing at every stage of DevOps, we need to perform automation testing in all the stages.
