Automating Acceptance Testing for Mobile Apps: Getting Started

From October 2016 to November 2017, Android released 4 major versions and iOS released 9 major updates. Its very good for users but it is problematic for developers and absolute hell for testers. One such problem testers face because of fast release cycles is Acceptance Testing.

So, if I say that mobile phone softwares are evolving day by day then you won’t disagree with me. Right? This evolution is, therefore, demanding for the fast testing methods so the end user gets the best experience. Acceptance testing, which is done to test the end user experience plays a major role in the success of Mobile Applications. Testers perform acceptance tests several times with every update in mobile software. With frequent releases, complexity of tests also increases. Hence automating these acceptance tests will ease the pain of the testers.

What Is Acceptance Testing?

Acceptance testing is the testing stage performed after the product has undergone thorough unit testing and service integration testing. In its essence, it is also the final integration testing, the testing stage where you integrate the whole solution to its final ready-to-ship stage. It is done to validate the final product and to check if it is acceptable for delivery or not.Therefore, acceptance testing is also called Business User Testing.

Acceptance testing can be broadly classified into two main stages:

1. Internal/Alpha Acceptance test- Done by the internal staff before releasing the product to the external customer’s use. Usually done in an offsite dev environment that is a replica of user environment. Sometimes for large applications, testing is performed by a pilot team of users along with dedicated testers.
2. External/Beta Acceptance test- Final testing done in the live deployment environment and also involves users of the application.

In both the stages, with every change in the operating system or software there is a need to test the software. So the testers need to perform acceptance test for every change frequently.

Why Automate The Acceptance Tests For Mobile Apps?

Traditionally automation testing is majorly used to speed up unit testing, integration testing, or system testing. In case of mobile applications, frequent updates in Android and iOS call for the need of frequent release cycles which require fast-paced acceptance testing hence the need for automating acceptance test. Automating acceptance tests also helps in regression testing because of their ability to test the complete product build and save a lot of time on final app-store releases.

What Do We Get Out Of Automating Acceptance Test For Mobile Applications?

When we automate acceptance tests for mobile applications we observe various benefits. Some of which are listed below:

Provides Continuous Validation

Acceptance test is done to validate the product, and automating acceptance testing helps to validate the app continuously. In an agile development environment that is following continuous integration and continuous deployment, we now don’t have to spend time on manually validating each mobile build. Therefore, it also speeds up the release of the product to the market by eliminating the need to keep a regular check on update. As when a new update is added it is automatically tested for acceptance.

Saves From Bad Customer Reputation

Customer satisfaction is the utmost priority when you are developing a product for them. We face various types of customers and every customer does not easily let go the faults in the product. So we need our product to be perfect for the user experience. Frequent tests from the end user perspective enhance the product quality by helping the developers to correct and identify more errors. So in the end, by automating the acceptance tests we can avoid any bad reputation in the market by delivering quality products to the end user.

Helps In Easy Accommodation Of Changes

Changes are inevitable and when it comes to mobile industry then they are inevitable and regular. So these regular updates need to be incorporated in the product. Automated Acceptance Test speeds up the end user testing hence this helps you easily embrace the changes by saving a lot of your efforts.

Improves The Understanding Of The System

Automating acceptance tests increases the understanding of the system. Developers have claimed that writing unit or integration test scripts helps them understand the parts of the system but when they write acceptance test scripts they are able to understand the system as a whole.This also helps them to identify the loopholes( if there are some) in the application as they are able to understand what the system is meant to do rather than how it is doing it technically.