Still using only emulation and simulation software to verify the stability of your application? It is a very dangerous practice as you’re leaving your application completely exposed to various stability and possibly security issues. So, how to resolve this? It is high time that you start implementing real device testing within your application testing environment.
With this process, you can verify the functioning of your application on various devices, operating systems, and network conditions to ensure that it is consistent and performing as per your initial expectations.
Not familiar with real device testing? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will help you understand everything that you need to know about real device testing, including the basic knowledge, its challenges, strategies to use it, and also the best practices to improve its efficiency.
The What And Why Of Real Device Testing?
Are you a new tester who doesn’t even know what is real device testing? Fair enough! Let us begin from here. Real device testing is the process of verifying the stability, functioning, and performance of your application on multiple devices, operating systems, and browsers. While performing real device testing, you understand how the performance of your application changes depending on the various physical parameters of a device.
Now, one of the major questions that might arise in your mind is Why should you even run real device testing. To justify this question, let us divert our attention towards some of the major advantages and features that you can implement in your testing infrastructure using this advanced process:
- In most cases, the alternative to real device testing, emulators and simulators, cannot be able to simulate the physical parameters of a device. This means that you cannot understand how the performance changes depending on factors like low battery, broken screen, or various forms of user interaction errors.
- Using real device testing, you can understand how the CPU and GPU load change depending on various interactions with your application. It will also help you understand the influence of factors like thermal throttling and frame drops on the core functioning of your application.
- The power management is very different across various manufacturers. Therefore, if you run the test cases on real devices, you can understand if your application causes excessive drain on any particular device.
- The actual available memory on a device and the garbage collection behavior will be completely different depending on various manufacturers and real-world use cases. Factors like these can be closely analyzed while you’re implementing testing on your application.
- Finally, with emulators, you can simulate network speed but cannot replicate real packet loss or carrier-specific changes. On the other hand, real device testing helps you implement all these minute details, along with factors like an unstable bandwidth or a high latency, to understand the stability of your application in these conditions.
Role Of Real Device Testing
Now that we have covered the basics of real device testing, including its importance in the testing infrastructure, let us divert our attention towards some of the major factors that further justify including real device testing in the modern application development and software release cycles
Improved User Experience
If you are running the test cases on devices that your end users are actually using, you can ensure the application feels polished and responsive after it has been deployed. This is because you will be able to implement the following testing parameters:
- You can test the hardware touch sensitivity and gesture recognition that might vary depending on various functions, and can lead to an unwanted input issue that can directly impact the user experience on their application.
- Modern applications have a lot of sensors and peripherals, like GPS accuracy, camera performance or fingerprint scanners, and accelerometers. So you must use real device testing to ensure that your application is using all these sensors efficiently and elevating the user experience.
- By implementing real device testing, you can verify that all the assistive technologies, like screen readers or voice controls, are functioning properly so that you are creating an inclusive infrastructure for the application. This is not only a moral practice but also important to stay away from any legal complications with your app.
Larger Market Coverage
If your application is targeting a global audience, you need to understand that the device market share will massively change depending on various countries and usage patterns. For example, in the American states, the iOS devices have an advantage, whereas in Asia and Africa, Android devices are dominating.
Therefore, depending on all these statistics, you must carefully plan your test cases to ensure that you are appropriately balancing all the devices and providing the most compatible experience to your target customers.
Building A Real Device Test Lab
Excited about using a real device testing lab for your application verification process? Before you start on this step, you must understand the advantages and disadvantages of this model so that you can plan your next actions accordingly.
- An on-site device lab is a setup where all your testing devices will be available locally so that you can run the test cases accordingly. In this process, you will have full control over the devices, network configurations, and the security measures that will be implemented during the testing processes.
- This step will also help you to capture low-level logs, user properties, and debugging tools so that you can understand every minor issue that might arise in the core infrastructure of your application. This will also be beneficial to quickly release high-quality apps to your users.
- But you should also remember that to set up an onset device lab, you have to spend millions to purchase all the devices that you will be targeting during the testing process.
- You also have to consider all the additional costs that you need to bear to constantly add all the new devices that will be coming to the market very frequently. You will also factor in the hassle that will be associated with this update process.
- Very interesting data shows that over 70% of users do not update their devices for at least three years. This means that targeting the older devices will be a very important part of the compatibility phase. However, in many cases, you might not be able to buy these devices in the market as they are no longer being manufactured by the companies.
Challenges Of Real Device Testing
Like any other process in the app development cycle, real device testing also has its own share of challenges. To ensure that you are not facing any unwanted obstacles during the testing process, we have mentioned some of the most common challenges below and their solutions:
- It will be a challenging process to periodically update all the devices to the latest operating system, software versions, and other parameters. To easily overcome this process, you must have a strategic documentation that will set the expectations for the updating cycle and also the frequency of it.
- To overcome the test flakiness in real device testing, you must separate the flaky tests by reviewing the logs and screenshots from failures. In most cases, these issues will arise due to network changes or timing issues.
- To ensure that you are not mishandling the private information of your customers, you must store all this data as anonymized entries within the test environment. You should also run frequent audits within the infrastructure to ensure both security and accessibility compliance.
Investing In Cloud Testing
Since we already mentioned tthat here are multiple challenges while working with an on-site device lab for real device testing, we would encourage you to start investing in a cloud-based testing environment. What is it you ask? It is a process when you run all the test cases on real devices that are stored on remote servers.
You can access these devices as per your requirements and from anywhere in the world by paying the subscription fees of your chosen platform. To learn more about cloud-based testing platforms, let us use LambdaTest as our reference discussion point:
LambdaTest is an AI-native test execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ browsers, OS combinations, and 10000+ real devices.
LambdaTest also provides access to various automation frameworks, like Appium, to run automated cross-browser testing and automated mobile app testing on your mobile applications. It also has an accessibility extension for Google Chrome so that you can analyze the accessibility of your web application right from your browser itself.
Most Practices For Real Device Testing
Finally, let us take a look at some of the best practices that you can use to further improve the productivity and scalability of your test cases:
- While implementing real device testing, you must have a proper testing plan with all your target devices and softwares to ensure that you are running an inclusive testing infrastructure.
- It is very important to maintain a thorough documentation consisting of all the test cases, their outcomes, and the bugs detected. This documentation will not only act as a reference point but will also keep a general understanding about the current status of the application release cycle.
- If you are using automation testing with real device test cases, it is very important not to completely remove manual test cases. This is because certain testing processes, like exploratory testing, are still dependent on the knowledge of a human tester.
- We also suggest you to have a clear understanding about the current requirements of your application and your own choices. This list will not only help you to choose the correct tools for the testing process but also create a baseline expectation for the test cases.
The Bottom Line
Depending on all the factors that he covered in this article, you can easily come to the conclusion that real device testing is a very important part to deliver the best experience to your customers, irrespective of their device or software preferences. By carefully analyzing all the parameters of our best practices and challenges that you mentioned in this article, you can easily implement this process within your current testing practice.
Apart from this, you should also look out for all the new trends and innovations like machine learning workflows and artificial intelligence integrated test cases, so that we can further improve the quality of your test cases and provide such an experience to your customers that was previously almost impossible to imagine.
