Since mobile devices are becoming more common in today’s digitally first world, it is imperative that applications be tested on as many actual devices as possible to guarantee their compatibility and performance. The application may be susceptible to performance, usability, and accessibility problems on less popular models if it is only tested on a small number of devices.
This complex mobile ecosystem makes Real device testing a significant problem for organisations. because mobile devices come with different screen sizes, memory, CPU power, features, capabilities, functionality, and other firmware. Also, pipeline complexity, operating system updates, as well as buying and maintaining all the necessary devices, require a huge budget, which is not affordable for many organizations. This is where a real device testing cloud comes in as the solution to this problem.
Using real devices in the cloud can supercharge the development and app testing cycles. Real device cloud provides access to a wide range of mobile operating systems and devices, helping in verifying how well different components of an application perform on real devices, in both mobile and web formats.
In this article, we’ll explore the power of cloud mobile testing and how it helps in getting accurate results. Before moving to that, we will first understand what a real device cloud is, its significant benefits, and how it is different from traditional testing.
Understanding Real Device Testing Cloud
Real device testing is a cloud-based platform that provides that gives developers and QA teams remote access to various physical mobile devices with different models and configurations. This enables QA professionals to accurately test their applications under real-life scenarios without any geographical boundaries, and the cumbersome setup and maintenance processes associated with traditional testing.
Although emulators and simulators are useful in the early phases of development for simulating the behaviour of mobile devices, they are not equally effective in detecting issues in real-life situations. Touch responsiveness, network fluctuations, battery life, and device variances are all too difficult for them to replicate.
A real device testing cloud is one way to address this. they provide developers and testers with the ability to test their apps and websites on real smartphones, tablets, and other devices, all of which are hosted on cloud-based servers. This configuration allows for more accurate testing and a better knowledge of how the applications will function under various hardware, operating system, screen size, and network configurations.
Benefits of Real Mobile Device Testing Cloud
- Real-world Test Scenarios: Real device clouds are used to provide realistic test conditions releasing the app to the end users. This enables identification and testing of some of the issues under real-world user situations.
- Cost-Effectiveness: There is no need to buy, maintain, and upgrade a sizable infrastructure of physical devices, which makes testing more affordable.
- Increased Efficiency: Ability to automate tests, access to a variety of devices with differences in configurations, screen size, operating system, and network configurations, and ease of integration into the existing CI/CD pipeline and development processes are some of the factors that make real device clouds increase the efficiency of the testing process
- Greater Accuracy and Reliability: Real devices testing will provide more accurate results in comparison with emulators and simulators and lead to a reliable and high-quality application.
- Improved Collaboration: By providing team members with shared access to devices, test findings, and a common record, it improves collaboration.
- Real-time Performance Metrics: Provides developers with helpful data on performance metrics, such as CPU and memory usage and reaction times, enabling them to develop apps that are faster and more responsive.
- Comprehensive Device Coverage: To test the software for a wide range of users and devices, it provides comprehensive device coverage, including a variety of models and operating system versions. Developers require no initial configuration to simulate the real-world use of the devices to identify the possible issues with those devices instantly.
- Better Debugging: Provides multiple debugging tools and capabilities like crash reports, built-in Appium Inspector, and DevTool in real-time to speed the debugging task.
Challenges with Real Device Testing Cloud
While there are several areas where cloud-based testing excels, they have its fair share of evident drawbacks, too. Developers and the test team must navigate potential complexities and limitations inherent in their practice. Below are key challenges.
Network Latency: Dependency on network connections to access cloud resources may cause significant issues, influencing testing results. Accessing devices remotely may result in unexpected failure, slow network speeds, and other connectivity problems, causing the automation scripts to fail, be slow, or unresponsive. To overcome this, organizations must assess testing resource locations, ensure proximity, and have robust network bandwidth to support testing needs effectively.
Data Privacy Concerns: Testing on real cloud devices may involve uploading sensitive code, user data, or credentials. The risk of sensitive data exposure from shared environments to third-party vendors necessitates robust data encryption and access control. If not properly encrypted or isolated, this may pose a risk.
Hardware Configuration: Public device clouds operate on a shared device model, which means multiple users often access the same device remotely. This sanitization process of devices before offering them to the next user makes it challenging for device clouds to replicate real-life hardware configuration issues, such as battery life, RAM performance, processor speed, storage devices, app interactions, and graphics card capabilities.
Vendor Dependency: Reliance on a particular cloud testing vendor or platform may limit future adaptability. Outages or vendor downtime directly affect the testing capability. Additionally, switching to a new vendor implies that migration to a different vendor may entail reworking or reconfiguring.
Cost Considerations: Though cloud-based testing is more affordable, especially in the case of large scales, the costs can still add up. Real device cloud providers may charge users excessive fees by passing on infrastructure and maintenance expenses, especially if consistent automated test suites or access to a large number of devices are necessary.
Security Testing: Device clouds often depend on physical devices located in a specific location. Although testers can use a proxy server to test their application in a different location, there is no guarantee that the results will be accurate.
Effective Strategies for Real Device Testing Cloud
In embracing the potential of real device cloud testing, organizations must embrace effective strategies based on their priorities to proactively address challenges and ensure a seamless and effective testing environment. Below are some strategies that will help developers and testers in the process:
Tailor the Test Environment, test objectives, and scope
Assess the application’s nature, key goals such as improving app quality or ensuring compatibility across the latest iOS and Android devices. Identify target audience devices and expected network conditions for implementing comprehensive device testing. Start by creating a test environment mirroring the user experience. Define the exact parameters and ensure scalability for anticipated traffic volumes, optimizing testing efficiency and long-term cost savings.
Utilise test automation frameworks
XCUITest on iOS, Espresso on Android, Appium on both iOS and Android, and Selenium for automated web application testing are all examples of modern mobile testing frameworks. They are easy to integrate with the choosen cloud provider.
Embrace Cloud-Based Automation
Use cloud-based automation since it provides an efficient approach to testing. It offers access to real devices without requiring extensive infrastructure setup. Go for a provider that offers a wide range of devices, integrations with the existing tools, and support flexibility to test anytime, anywhere. LambdaTest, a cloud-based test automation platform that provides a fully integrated testing infrastructure in the cloud. It is fast, scalable, and simple, enabling teams to build, test, and deploy high-quality applications quickly.
LambdaTest is a cloud testing platform that facilitates accurate testing, allowing testers to test both web and mobile apps across more than 3000 environments and real mobile devices, including real iOS and Android devices.
Testers can create scriptless tests and run them automatically in real time across multiple browsers and devices in parallel or sequentially. This speeds up the regression testing, cutting down the total test execution time. The platform uses AI-assisted test orchestration to provide smart test scheduling, auto-prioritization of tests, test flakiness detection, and visual test insight that aid in eliminating false positives and unnecessary test re-runs. It even offers AI-based predictive analytics insights to help identify trends in the performance and possible regressions before they cause issues.
Additionally, LambdaTest automatically detects inconsistencies in UI and layout shifts across versions using baseline image comparisons for pixel-perfect validation. Giving an integrated AI mobile testing environment, the platform combines the automation speed, cloud scalability and machine intelligence, to transform modern teams’ approach to quality assurance and release cycles.
Monitor test metrics
Focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs), which include testing coverage, execution time, pass/fail rates, and defect frequency. Establishing an open feedback loop is also crucial for fixing issues as they appear. Collaborating with the developers to assess test findings facilitates the identification of trends and highlights areas that require immediate development attention.
Prioritise compliance and security
Verify that the cloud provider offers excellent data security and privacy measures in addition to following industry standards and regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or other relevant standards.
Use Parallel Testing
In case of large test suites or tight sprint deadlines, run tests concurrently on multiple devices to take full advantage of the cloud. This speeds up test cycles and reduces feedback time.
Invest in training and documentation
When you incorporate a cloud-based device testing platform, host training sessions to familiarize your team with how it works. Ideally, the cloud provider will be able to help you with this. In addition, keep documenting your testing processes, including configurations set and mistakes rectified, to serve as a reference point for the future.
Leverage both Manual and Automated Testing
Although automation is useful for repetitive, regression, and smoke tests, manual testing is still required, especially for exploratory testing, UI/UX feedback, and test complex user flows and device-specific functions including fingerprint and camera. Combining human instinct together with automation accelerates release cycles.
Scale and expand
Based on initial test runs, scale up testing efforts by incorporating new devices and test cases. Keep reviewing and refining depending on feedback from relevant stakeholders and analyse device usage trends. Also, remove obsolete test cases and optimize flaky ones.
Focus on real-world scenarios
Actively manage real-time test results by testing under real network conditions like 3G, 4G, and poor connectivity. Simulate real gestures, sensors, and GPS; this will ensure that the app performs well under real user environments.
Conclusion
To conclude, with the power of a real device cloud, testing becomes faster and easier. It gives app developers quick access to both the newest and older mobile devices, such as iOS, Android, and others. This enables them to test their apps’ functionality, usability, and performance across a range of device and operating system combinations.
Developers can also switch between devices, access app performance data, and continue automated tasks. With this innovative approach, teams can remotely conduct manual or automated testing in real time on devices they do not physically own. This saves the time and cost of purchasing and maintaining a large device infrastructure.
No doubt, device clouds offer a number of advantages, including faster time-to-market, lower costs, and immediate access to both legacy and modern devices. However, they cannot fully replicate the results of testing on real devices with real users in the intended locations. To get more accurate results, it is therefore essential to test the app with real users. At the same time, integrating Selenium mobile testing into the workflow allows QA teams to automate repetitive tasks, validate functionality across platforms, and enhance efficiency when scaling test efforts.
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