There is no denying that mobile phones,
smart phones in particular, are in vogue these days. Gradually, businesses
across various sectors are shifting focus towards mobile applications because
users are more interested in browsing the web on their pocket size devices
rather than viewing it from bulky PC’s. The tremendous growth of mobile users
has opened up a new market which is flooded with various mobile platforms and
devices and thousands of applications to run on them.
Imagine
if the alarm on your phone didn’t go off in the morning, your old texts
suddenly went missing, or you couldn’t make that important call. This
dreadful thought actually sums up the importance of mobile application testing.
Below are some points which explain in
brief that why special skills are required in Mobile application testing.
1) Diversity in Mobile Device platforms
Android, Blackberry, Nokia’s Symbian and Apple’s
iPhone have together grabbed a large part of the Smartphone market. But these
are not the only ones; there are many other platforms that are in use like
BREW, BREWMP, Windows 7, etc. While testing any multiplatform mobile
application, it would be required to test it on each platform while carrying
out UI testing, functional testing etc. This poses a challenge as many of these
mobile platforms when triggered by a common thing might behave in a different
manner and also that the platform may have some limitations as well.
2) Diversity of the Mobile Devices
There is a huge variety of mobile
devices available in market with different screen sizes, different input
methods like touch screen, QWERTY keypads, trackball and each of them having
different hardware capabilities. Mobile devices also have different application
runtimes like Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless Java, etc. Some mobile
devices communicate through WAP and some use HTTP for communication. Thus
extensive testing of mobile application is important to ensure compatibility of
the application with devices having a variety of the above characteristics.
3)
Diversity in Hardware Configuration
Apart from diversity in platform and
mobile devices, there is diversity in their hardware also. The mobile devices
come with various processors, RAM, internal memory, various sensors like
proximity sensor, Accelerometer sensor, GPS, Gyroscope etc. There are many
challenges of diverse hardware configurations like Mobile environment
provides lesser memory and processing power for computing as compared to PC
which reduces processing speed and causes variations in performance of
applications. Therefore, exhaustive testing of mobile applications is required
to deliver optimum performance for all desired configurations of hardware.
4) Diversity in Network
We know there is always unpredictability in network
latency when applications communicate over network boundaries, leading to
inconsistent data transfer speeds. It demands testing to measure the
performance of applications for various network bandwidths of various service
providers. Wireless network use data optimizers like gateways to deliver
content and it may result in decreased performance in case of heavy traffic.
Therefore, testing should be performed to determine the network traffic
level at which gateway capabilities will impact the performance of the mobile
application.
The above mentioned challenges are just a few of
the lot, but should be enough to emphasize the need of thorough and diversified
testing of Mobile applications using specialized skills.
