by admin | Sep 19, 2019 | Performance Testing, Fixed, Blog |
Soak Testing is part of performance testing and is a kind of software testing for Systems under Load (SUL). This testing is carried out to determine and verify that the software is able to withstand high volumes over an extended period. Soak testing can uncover issues such as memory allocation, log file handles, database resource utilization, and others. A performance testing company uses soak testing to measure the stability of the system over an extended period and as part of load testing services.
A soak test is expected to execute more transactions in the entire day – those that would be typical on a busy day – to determine any issues with performance that could crop up due to a large number of transactions. This kind of test is also referred to as a stability test. Software testing experts recommend soak testing since the analysis from it forms a critical part of app development.
It is important for businesses to understand that soak testing can only be carried out by an expert company proficient in the realm of software testing. This is so since soak testing uses a whole lot of data, and only experts would be able to remove any incidental issues without wasting time and other precious resources. Such a company would be able to swiftly diagnose and rectify any performance issues, before they become bottlenecks using the most contemporary techniques, tools, and methodology.
Characteristics of Soak Testing Soak Testing is also called Endurance Testing – as the name suggests, it helps to determine whether the software being tested can ‘endure’ continuous high loads and estimate the reaction parameters of the system. There are several occasions when a business would experience peak usage over a longer duration, of their software and unless the system is able to endure such loads, it would crash and result in mayhem. For example: a popular e-commerce site declared massive discounts of a range of items over a period of 3 days. However, within a few hours the site crashed leaving the company embarrassed and the consumers extremely irate and feeling cheated. Such incidents bring a bad reputation to a company and in some cases can turn litigious.
A soak test should have the following ‘qualities’:
- The duration of the peak soak test would be regularly controlled by the available time
- The app should continue functioning without any issues even in a broader timeframe
- It must cover the testing parameters as determined by the business and testing partner
Every system has a typical support window time period. The time between such ‘windows’ helps to determine soak test coverage. A soak test is indispensable to identify a memory leak, depletion of system resources, and lessening of resources with a database management system.
In Conclusion:
Given the importance and sensitivities involved in a perfect software/system, it is necessary for specialists to conduct soak testing. Companies may not be equipped to understand and determine their soak testing requirements, and need to partner with a leading software testing company. Connect with us today to help determine your soak testing requirements, and know more about the wide range of services we offer.
by admin | Sep 18, 2019 | Selenium Testing, Fixed, Blog |
In this blog article, we have covered all the Selenium WebDriver window handling techniques which are helpful for automation testers. Let’s learn the commands.
Get Window Handles
Switch To Window
window_handle = driver.window_handles[1]
driver.switch_to.window(window_handle)
As per WebDriver W3C specification, you can switch between windows only with window handle. However, you can also write your own method to switch windows using Window name.
Switch To Window By Name
#Method Definition
def switch_window_by_name(webdriver,window_name):
for handle in webdriver.window_handles:
webdriver.switch_to.window(handle)
if webdriver.title == window_name:
return handle
#Method Call
switch_window_by_name(driver,"Window1")
Switch To Window Position
window_handle = driver.window_handles[1]
driver.set_window_position(10,10)
by admin | Sep 16, 2019 | Software Testing, Fixed, Blog |
The truth about test coverage is that there is never a 100% accurate method to gauge or calculate test coverage. However, using a combination of several metrics and tools, it is possible for a high level of accuracy. The tools and methods chosen would depend on the functionality of the project and the amount of time and resources at the disposal of the testers. All the data would help to provide a relatively stable and high level of test coverage across projects, which in turn would significantly elevate the quality of your product.
Benefits of Test Coverage Measurement
A popular dictum states that what is not measured cannot be improved. Hence, even though 100% accuracy is not possible, measuring test coverage still has several advantages.
- Meticulous measurement of test coverage enables testers to understand the duration of time required to complete project testing
- Test coverage uncovers gaps, which in turn would help testers to script and add newer tests with the aim of elevating the quality of a project
- The statistics that come through from test coverage enables testers to understand which tests perform the same function, thereby helping to eliminate too many tests. This in turn saves time and valuable resources.
How Does an Expert Software Testing Services Company Assess Test Coverage?
There are several methods that apply a variety of tools and metrics to pull together information that would indicate actual test coverage. Several are used only for some types of projects that provide pertinent and concentrated data. There are some methods applicable to any type of project and both manual and automated testing, which help to get the best out of test coverage.
1. Test Coverage by Features The testers prepare a list of all the features available to the project and ensure that the tests to be conducted cover all of them. While this step does not assess the quality of the features, it definitely ensures that all the features are listed and accounted for, such that none are left out.
2. Test Code Coverage This has a slightly elevated level of complexity – white box testing to create conditions through which testers can execute each path or branch or line of code.
3. Test Coverage through Use Case The testers examine the use case document to assess which features would remain part of the system and which ones should be removed. The test case would be based on the steps that would be part of the use case pre and post-conditions. Testers then would check the performance of the system, and any unwanted ‘behaviors’ would help them to create negative test cases. For testers to get the best out of test coverage, all these approaches can either be used in conjunction or independently – depending on the software/system.
In Conclusion
As mentioned, a reputed Software Testing company will honestly tell you that 100% accuracy in measuring test coverage is not possible, irrespective of the tools, metrics, or tests used. There will always be gaps, and collecting large amounts of data is not only time-consuming but would quickly use up a number of precious resources. Most businesses do not have the in-house ability to deal with these issues, and it is feasible and more efficient to partner with experts in this realm and the wider gamut of software testing. We excel at every realm of software testing and would love to help your business succeed – connect with us today.
by admin | Sep 15, 2019 | Mobile App Testing, Fixed, Blog |
Mobile application development has become cumbersome so does Mobile app testing. Not because of development complexity. But, because of the intense market competition in delivering niche and user-friendly apps in the market.
Let’s through some light on the market research data
On an average 88.7 apps are installed on the smartphones in the US. But, roughly 24.7 of them are used on a monthly basis. Which amounts to an average of 7.6 apps on a daily basis. The humongous difference in the usage of mobile apps is attributed to the following reasons: remaining mobile apps have either FAILED to impress and engage the users because of inadequate & improper mobile app testing strategy, improper research, poor UI/UX, etc.
Let’s delve deeper into this topic and jot down the major factors determining the success of your mobile app:
1. Unseemly Buyer Research Buyer research needs to be the most crucial and inevitable step in developing a mobile application, for all OS’s like Android, iOS, etc. One must do the following due diligence while doing research:
- Do thorough market research.
- Understand your buyer who is most likely interested in your mobile app.
- Do demographic research of your mobile app users as well.
- Arrive at a conclusion based on your research data and ascertain which gender is most likely to use your mobile app.
- Further broaden your research by conducting surveys throughout the complete spectrum of your network.
- Be a part of various forums, online communities where people talk about the latest mobile apps.
2. Competitor Analysis Competitor analysis is as important as using your market and audience research data effectively, your app would eventually crash if you develop it without possessing a thorough knowledge about your competitors.
Who your competitors are:
- The top 50 mobile apps in different Stores
- Mobile apps with similar functionality
- Apps with similar ideas
- Apps which fall under the same segment
Analyzing your competitors the following manner:
- How well your competitors have fared well so for on the app idea?
- Major functionalities covered
- Check their app compatibility in all possible OS like Android, iOS etc.
- Compare the app downloads data and reviews efficiently
- App users review data
- Ascertain their marketing strategy
After having done with your competitor analysis, you can work on developing a mobile application that can outsmart your competitor in all aspects with ease. Ignoring any of the above crucial steps could put your mobile app at a bigger risk of failing.
3. Bad Mobile app ideation Most developers have a conviction that their app ideas are path-breaking and will work amazingly well. But in reality, not all app ideas succeed. Research says that 49% of developers develop apps based on their own requirements which usually turns out to be unsuccessful.
Ponder over the following pointers before bringing your app idea into reality:
- Is your app idea niche and unique
- Is your app idea a need of the hour?
- Does is intent to solve any of the users’ needs?
- Unique ness of your app idea from your competitors.
You should have a foolproof system prepared in place for your app idea else it is likely to fail.
4. Inadequate Mobile App testing The need for Mobile app testing is obvious, but getting adequate coverage, with the plethora of Android versions and devices available in the market it can be a cumbersome task. There are simulators, but software running on a server might not show the same performance limitations.
For instance, one thread of a mobile app might try to read a database at the same time another thread is trying to modify the same database. “It’s a timing mismatch problem,” “If they don’t hit at the exact moment in time, the issue doesn’t surface. It can be overcome with a very simple log statement.” A simulator often will not illustrate the same fundamental performance limitations of a mobile device, so the race condition isn’t apparent.
There are a host of other services that can run pairings of different devices and variations of operating systems and make them available, but that would most likely be more expensive compared to a simulator. Apparently, our choice is based on the trade-off between budgets and needs. Mobile app testing should be looked at benchmarking against industry standards and user expectations to ensure that the expectations of the developers and users are in sync. Mobile testing should be done on a continuous basis. As a thumb rule one must monitor performance, look for user feedback suggesting problems, and then fix things as soon as possible for the best possible outcome.
5. Ill-timed App Development Strategy Sans proper strategy, even big Mobile app players in the industry would not have been successful.
App development strategy got to be perfect in all facets:
- How your app development should be devised?
- Turnaround time of your design strategy
- What technology stack to be used in the app development?
- How much time does it take for successful mobile app testing?
- When do you plan to launch the app?
All the above points make a perfect app development strategy. Any minor deviations in any of the above estimations, your app is sure to hit the failure road.
6. Bad UI/UX This is the biggest reason why most mobile apps crash. User interface (UI) is one of the striking aspects that not only attract the users but also keep them engaged. UI is ideally considered as the first impression of your mobile app. while launching your mobile app, you have your app screenshots prepared to put them on the Stores. And, that is where your users will make an effort to read the app description below. If your UI seems improper in the screenshots, Eventually that will end up in no downloads resulting in a great failure. Amazing user interface and user experience define the success of your app and poor UI/UX can fail your app.
Some UX factors that lead to mobile app failures:
- Low resolution images
- Poor loading time
- Broken sign up or login functionality
- Broken app navigation
- Irrelevant implementation of micro interactions
- Tiny or too big fonts
- Poor connectivity to social profiles
- No actions on clickable elements
- Inappropriate spacing between touch points
- Too much of page scrolling
7. Arbitrary Development Process Let’s learn how an arbitrary development process leads to mobile application failure.
- How to formulate the right designing strategy for the mobile app
- Which functionality to be developed first?
- How many hours of dedicated effort to be put in while developing a certain functionality?
- Which designer/developer to utilize?
- How to finalize the app designs?
- How much time is needed for end to end mobile testing?
All the above things need to be followed religiously to make sure your mobile app does not fail.
8. Ignorance of Rigorous mobile testing
While designing and developing a mobile app is considered very important. Mobile app testing is equally important. Mobile app testing is required to check whether your mobile app has any exceptions and bugs or not. A mobile app that is launched without proper testing, fails for sure. There are several types of testing to be executed in order to see your mobile app has no bugs.
- Each functionality needs to be tested as and when developed
- With each new developed functionality, don’t forget to check whether the earlier functionality works fine.
- Mobile testing is required to check whether each and every app integrations are working properly.
- Usability of your mobile app should to be tested
- Compatibility testing to be done without fail.
- Need to check whether the app works at the users’ end before going live
This is not limited to just mobile testing alone. The process after testing is even considered. The differentiating factor here is what measures we take after getting any bugs or exceptions. So, test your apps rigorously to avoid failure.
9. Inept App Launch Plan You cannot just develop an app and launch it directly on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Well, if you do this or if you have done this earlier, you would surely get a big failure hit for your app.
Without letting your target audience know about your app, how are you going to get the downloads?
10. Middling Monetization Strategy Designing, developing, testing, and successfully launching your app does not pay you anything. These are just the investments that you make. How the success of your mobile app is measured? Clearly, with the money coming in, from your app. If your mobile app is not able to make you money, then there are chances that your app has flaws and is at risk of failure. If you have noticed in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, most of the apps are free and if you are looking to charge your audience, you need to be more careful. So, how will you earn money out of your mobile app? Well, this needs a solid, foolproof monetization strategy to work on.
Conclusion
Mobile apps are a great way of doing business. But, it is equally important to make sure that it does not fail. Because if it fails, it will be beyond revival. So carefully consider the above-mentioned reasons why your mobile app can fail. Also, ensure to follow the mobile app tips given along with them to avoid the same. So make sure you approach the Best Mobile App Testing Services Company to test your Mobile Apps.
by admin | Sep 14, 2019 | Software Testing, Fixed, Blog |
More and more industries and companies are running on software today. Most of the suppliers we subscribe to deliver their goods via online digital products and services. As an engineer in the trenches, you can see how software is consuming more and more, and why our jobs as testers are more important than ever. It’s up to us as testers to keep pace with the rapid growth. We are the quality champions and leaders of our software.
As teams push harder and faster to get features into the hands of our customers, we are the last line of defense for educating our team to potential unseen consequences of our development decisions. The digital testing landscape is changing fast, and in this article, we will see how Continuous Testing helps us to deliver quality products.
Agile
In the pre-agile model, which is the classic software development Waterfall model, testers only began testing once the software requirements and development were complete, and we as testers had limited inputs and insights. It was basically a world full of silos.
Agile broke those silos down and brought everyone together as one team. That change was a significant one because it meant teams could work for years on a project without speaking or getting any feedback from their users. As you might imagine, resolving issues found in production were almost impossible to resolve, and fixing deep-seated architectural issues with the software required spending a great deal of time and money. Agile was the first wave of modern software development that addressed the issues presented in the Waterfall development approach.
DevOps
Once Agile took root, the second wave — DevOps began to appear. Again, it took some time for it to gain acceptance, but it ultimately caught on even faster than Agile. DevOps gave birth to the collaboration between software development and software operations, creating practices like continuous integration and delivery to provide services and products at high velocity. This approach creates a mechanism that allows us to quickly get our products into the hands of our users, which means quicker feedback in order to determine whether it’s delivering the value we’ve promised. Like Agile did before it, DevOps broke down even more silos between teams merging software operations with the rest of the team.
Continuous Testing- Current State of Testing
The best definition of Continuous testing is the ability to instantly access the risk of a new release or change before it impacts customers. You want to identify unexpected behaviors as soon as they are introduced. The sooner you find or prevent bugs, the easier and cheaper they are to fix. This approach is often accomplished by executing automated tests that probe the quality of the software during each stage of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The mantra of continuous testing is “test early, test often, and test everywhere in an automated fashion.” Testing begins not after everything is completed but from the start. Each step along the way serves as a quality gate, baking in excellence at each stage of the SDLC pipeline.
Now with continuous testing, we’re not only running tests in an automated fashion using the same tools and languages as the developers (and leveraging open-source libraries), but we’re doing them continually all the way through into production– beginning with development. We’re not waiting until the end like in the old “waterfall” days. It’s important to remember that continuous testing is not just about end-to-end, UI test automation. With the need to quickly release software, we can no longer rely on manual and automated UI testing only. When we talk about automation in the context of continuous testing, it’s the process of automating any manual task that is slowing down the process. It doesn’t need to be a “test.” For example, before my team could do continuous integration, we needed to have an automated deploy job for our software. Having folks manually install the latest build on the nightly automated test environment was not a scalable solution. These types of tasks are critical and need to be automated.
CI Process
A typical continuous testing process consists of seven key elements: Develop, Build, Test, Report, Release, Monitor, & Repeat. Ultimately, the process starts with testing the quality of the feature. A recent study tells that 64% percent of total defect costs are due to errors in the requirements and design phases of the SDLC. So you must be careful before you start the development, you should ask these – Is it really what our customer wants? Has your team cleared up any confusion or misunderstandings before coding even starts? Getting clear on what it is you are trying to deliver to the customer can find bugs before a line of code is ever written! This is one reason some teams use acceptance criteria practices like Behavior Driven Development to help drive this communication and test the team’s assumption against what their customers really want.
Once the team agrees on what it is they are developing, testing approaches like TDD should drive the process and let you know if your code actually meets your business objectives. Code that is checked into your continuous integration process needs to be probed for quality. Automated style checks, security, performance and unit tests, automatic tests on check-in with a required pass/fail ratio needed before promotion to production, etc., will ensure that broken code is not promoted to production.
With continuous integration, your developers need to make their code testable. If you want to write test automation for your code, you need to be able to separate it into individual pieces. The secret is to build small things that can be combined into larger things. The best way to build small things is to have a good test suite around the small things, so that when you combine them into the bigger things you have to write less tests on the bigger thing first off; it’s also easier to test the bigger things because you already have guarantees about how the smaller things work. You don’t want to write code just for testing. You want to write code that is testable but doesn’t do any more than is needed. What it often comes down to is breaking these things down into smaller pieces, and testing the individual pieces.
by admin | Sep 11, 2019 | Mobile App Testing, Fixed, Blog |
Mobile app testing is a comparatively more complicated process than desktop or web app testing given the numerous challenges faced by mobile app testers. Some of these challenges include device variations, device fragmentation, OS fragmentation, rapid release schedules, several testing tools, unexpected customer app use cases, network compatibility, battery/power consumption, and offline functioning, among others.
In addition to these challenges, there are some added challenges that mobile app testers have and could possibly encounter in 2019. The top 7 additional mobile testing challenges in 2019 are listed below:
Tackling App Performance Issues
It is pertinent in present times that mobile app testing must focus on the delivery of quality apps to users. If there are performance issues affecting the user experience with an app, mobile device users are likely to opt for a competing app. Therefore, it is a challenge for testers to enhance the user experience by tackling app performance issues such as long time to load and run an app, inconsistent performance, poor responsiveness, and incompatibility with different networks or platforms.
Greater Need for Shift Left Testing
To ensure comprehensive testing of a mobile app, testing companies need to incorporate Shift Left Testing (test early and test often approach) in their mobile testing strategy. The Shift Left Testing process enables the mobile app testers to test an app in the early stages of its development rather than testing it only before release. The use of Shift Left Testing mechanism is a challenge because it requires the deft use of automated testing tools so that the testing of an app can be performed alongside its development.
Continuous Mobile Testing Requirements
The DevOps and Agile scenarios are paving the way for faster development of apps and frequent addition of new features to existing apps. Continuous Mobile Testing requirements pose a challenge even for a top mobile testing company because of the emphasis on continuous mobile testing skills of the testers. It is imperative for mobile app testers to be experts at Agile testing in order to make continuous testing a part of the continuous integration process for updating an app with new features and functionalities.
Focus on Social Media Testing
The increasing focus on social media is emerging as another big challenge for mobile app testers in the current year – 2019. It is crucial for testers to acquire social media testing skills because the present-day mobile app users trust social media reviews more than any other data. Hence, with all mobile apps now necessitating interface with the social media, testers should be proficient in running an app by different social media platforms when they test the app at various development stages.
Global Testing of Apps
In present times, almost all mobile apps, irrespective of the operating system and functionality, are developed for mobile phone users across the globe. Given this reality, it is a challenging task for the testers at a mobile app development company to test an app globally, on a range of networks, from one location. To overcome the challenge of global testing, mobile app companies generally outsource the testing tasks, but the results of the testing may sometimes not be desirable from the perspective of global usage.
Lack of Suitable Testing Tools
Mobile app development companies often lack the right testing tools that can enable their testers to test their app for use on smart devices. Due to the unavailability of suitable testing tools, testers are not able to get adequate test coverage while testing an app on a variety of mobile devices. Without the knowledge and use of proper testing tools, testers fail to capitalize on automated testing because of which there are delays in testing and, eventually, also in the release of the app to the market.
Coping Up With App Marketing Schedules
The rise of app store and in-app advertising has made it difficult for mobile app testers to cope up with the marketing schedules of the app marketers. With market app advertising on the increase, testers at most of the leading mobile testing companies have limited time to test the app exhaustively. Since a shorter testing time is becoming a challenge in mobile app testing, it is vital for mobile app companies to put a testing plan in place when they start the development of an app.
In Conclusion:
The astounding pace of mobile app development has made mobile app testing a very critical process since the users of smartphones demand well-designed, responsive, engaging, and feature-rich mobile apps. To overcome the challenges for mobile testing in 2019, mobile app testers should build top-notch app testing strategies based on a broad understanding of the different areas of mobile testing like technology, devices, usability, and user experience. Connect with us – we keep abreast with all the latest technologies, tools, and methodologies to glide past these challenges.
