Did you know 80 percent of apps are deleted after their first use? This is according to research by Andrew Chen, working with mobile intelligence start-up Quettra and based on anonymized data points from over 125 M mobile phones. Read more on that here.

Can you guess the top three reasons users uninstall their apps?
1. 1.    App freezing
2. 2.    App crashing
3. 3.    Slow responsiveness

You can find an infographic with these facts here.
 

Of course, no developer releases software they know is going to freeze or crash or be too slow. They simply don’t know what they don’t know. And in this case that means they don’t know how the app is going to perform. Why? Because their test coverage isn’t wide enough and not frequent enough. They rely too much on manual, crowd and live testing because this is perceived as low impact and low cost. As you can see, the results speak for themselves. This way of testing is ineffective and can have a huge negative impact on the user experience, on cost and your business.
 

So how do you do more testing and still deliver your mobile app quickly?
Quality must be the focus of every project. The entire development team needs to focus on it. However, if you’re testing more often and more thoroughly, you also don’t want to slow down delivery. The answer is to automate as much of the testing as possible and use a single test platform that allows you to create, run and analyze automated testing of native, hybrid or mobile web-based apps.
 

Do you need to test the front end and backend of your mobile app? Yes!
Effective testing isn’t just testing the code on the mobile device – this is where manual, crowd and live testing fails because most mobile apps have a multitier architecture. This means that the app downloaded to a mobile device is the front-end client for data and services supplied by a middle-tier/data center back-office system. This complexity means all mobile apps must be tested across both the front end and back end.

An efficient and effective way to test the mobile app front end is to create, run and analyze Appium tests. Appium is an open framework for testing native, hybrid and mobile web apps. If you want to use a device cloud to address the complexity of managing their mobile device test environment, then you can use Rational Test Workbench to automatically create, run and analyze Appium tests as well as integrate with device clouds providers such as PerfectoMobile, SauceLabs or TestDroid. Rational Test Workbench provides a single test automation platform for creating, running and analyzing native, hybrid or mobile web-based app tests. Appium is supported in all editions of Rational Test Workbench 9.0.1.1 and above.

You can also test the backend of mobile apps using the same IBM Rational Test Workbench by testing the integrations with any middleware servers and services. Instead of waiting on any dependent systems that aren’t available, you can also simulate their behaviour so testing can start as soon as possible. This way you don’t have to create a complete test environment, which saves time and cost.

Since you’re updating your mobile apps frequently, automated test execution should be run as part of your software delivery pipeline. This way you get regular feedback about the software and can assess the risk of releasing the app in its current state. The IBM Rational Test Workbench integrates with different deployment pipelines including IBM UrbanCode Deploy, Jenkins and others.

IBM Rational Test Workbench was recently assessed and IBM has been named as a leader in software testing capabilities in two separate reports from analyst firms Forrester Research and Gartner.  

You’ll see that testing more thoroughly and often will give you peace of mind and ensure you continue to delight your mobile app users!

If you’d like to learn more about IBM Rational Test Workbench, you can try some of the capabilities at no cost here.  

You can also read the Continuous Testing for Dummies free ebook. Find it here.

About the author / James Hunter, Program Director, Dev Test Platform for Hybrid DevOps

James has spent a large part of his career architecting and implementing large-scale, distributed systems in the finance, public and defense sectors. He now leads a global business segment responsible for defining technology strategy then developing and implementing solutions for both IBM and clients. Mentoring and encouraging future technical leaders is important to James. He works with students of all ages and speaks in primary schools to universities to evangelize on the benefits of technology and the positive impact software can have on our society and the environment. He has a degree in Management Systems and he is a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society. Connect with James on LinkedIn/Twitter