Overview    

Engineering practices and Performance Testing help customers address performance testing challenges and issues, plus ensure to deliver future-proof solutions in the dynamic world of emerging technologies with reliability, high responsiveness, resilience, scalability, and high availability. Mobile-based performance testing strategies/approaches are similar to other performance testing methods. Before checking the checklists for mobile app performance testing, you need to understand how mobile app works technically.   

So, many mobile applications use a protocol such as HTTP, WAP, REST, SOAP, IMPS, or custom to communicate with the server through wireless devices. These calls get transmitted with the help of several network devices from ISP, routers, or gateways of the wireless service provider to reach the mobile application server.    

Four key components help enterprises address business challenges and enhance customer experience:  

  • Process 
  • People 
  • Innovative Tools 
  • Governance  

These key components play a major role in performance testing and help in   

  • Optimizing resource utilization and infrastructure.   
  • Predictability in delivery excellence.   
  • Achieving simpler, faster, and smarter solutions. 
  • Facilitating the availability of application systems during extreme loads.   

Check Checklists for Mobile App Performance Testing   

You may know now how the mobile app works. It’s time to develop or select performance tools to mimic the mobile application client traffic and record it from the simulator or mobile client. There are numerous tools available for mobile app performance testing, such as HP’s LoadRunner, iMobileLoad, and CloudTest. Even after having the best performance tools, performance testing service providers don’t have much control over network delays. Thus, it is necessary to understand how bandwidths and network devices can impact the application’s end-user response time and performance.   

Choose the Best Monitoring Tool   

After choosing the load generating tool, you also need to check some monitoring tools to evaluate server and client performance. To monitor the application’s performance, you can use SiteScope or DynaTrace that helps assess the server-side performance. These tools are even suitable for displaying and capturing the performance metrics from bandwidth usage, response times to error rates. With monitoring tools on the infrastructure side, you can get other performance metrics like heap size, memory consumption, CPU utilization, process counts, etc. These metrics can assist you in resolving performance issues and reducing the risk of a negative effect on the end-user experience.   

Have Sufficient Resources   

Due to resource limitations, improving the performance of a mobile app is challenging as you need to take care of battery capacity, memory utilization, CPU capacity and focus on other factors. If the developed mobile application consumes a huge memory and CPU, then the chances are high that it will take more time to load on devices. As a result, it can impact the user’s ability while multitasking on the same device with influence the speed of an application. Furthermore, if any application consumes more battery, the feasibility is fewer users will accept your application. To tackle this situation, one can develop app plugins to examine the mobile client performance and encourage users to use and install plugins on mobile devices when the load is being simulated. Plugins are able to capture performance data, and there are various tools that can be used, such as TestQuest, Device Anywhere, WindTunnel to send the same data to a central server for further analysis.  

Hire a Tester for Performance Testing   

  • When testing is out of control or you feel you’re not becoming to test the mobile application’s performance, it is the right time to get help from the experts of the performance testing company as they can check your app’s performance against different mobile phones in the market. Mainly, from the client end, your app will be tested based on I/O (Input/Output), Memory & CPU Utilization, Cache Size Availability, 2D/3D Rendering. With an experienced performance testing service provider, you can check your application’s performance against different browsers and mobile phones in the market.   

Additional Tips to Consider   

  • Check the memory leakage, if any done by the application.   
  • Check how much internet is consumed by your application.   
  • Check for battery consumption and offline data usage by the application.  
  • Check different image-sized for different mobile phones.   
  • Analyze the waterfall chart for the mobile traffic (image size, caching, compressed data, etc.).   
  • Check the variation of hardware/software because when testing a mobile application, it is essential to check the app on different devices. In some cases, if the app is running perfectly on one device but does not give the same result for other devices. There are several mobile phones available in the market, so you have to check your app with different operating systems, RAM, and processor specifications.  
  • Check the server downtime. If the server is down where your application’s data is saved, you need to store this data in the native database or consider backup servers or any other options.  
  • Conduct functional tests to check the application’s performance for designated and non-designated tasks. Also, check the compatibility of your application with different screen sizes, devices, and resolutions. Functionality testing is helpful to check the app’s integration with other services like social media, Wi-Fi, GPS/location. This test helps you check the application’s consistency and lets you test the functioning of redirect options. UI and the design issues can also be fixed with functional testing.   
  • Perform background app testing to check whether the app allows you to make and receive voice calls. You need to check how the app reacts while sending and receiving messages, call rejection, notifications.   

Conclusion   

In the end, the right performance testing tools and strategies matter as this ensures to the organization about effective mobile application performance testing. Enterprises can ensure that their apps will perform high to the market and assure scalability, good speed, and accuracy of the application to meet great users’ expectations.