Common Real Device Testing Mistakes You Should Avoid

While executing mobile app testing, the developers must recognize the importance of integrating real devices into the test bench. These devices allow the analysis of the application’s performance when it is exposed to the physical parameters of a device including the screen resolution, low battery, or fluctuating network bandwidth.

Since the modern mobile device market is highly diverse consisting of thousands of different devices, real device testing has become one of the most important parameters of the modern app development industry. It is also important to integrate other advanced testing processes like automation testing, cross-browser testing, and regression testing to elevate the accuracy of these test cases further.

With this article, we will understand some of the most common real device testing mistakes that developers and testers must avoid. We will also suggest some other most accurate solutions that can help resolve these mistakes. Finally, we will go through some of the best practices to elevate the standards of real device testing.

What Is Real Device Testing

Real device testing is the process of running an application on actual physical devices. This process aims to evaluate the software app’s functionality, performance, and usability. The real device test bench consists of diverse applications, including wearables, smartphones, tablets, and many others.

The primary advantage of real device testing over emulators and simulators is that it can replicate the physical parameters of a device which cannot be done with simulation software. Therefore, the developers can understand how the application behaves when it is exposed to parameters such as low battery, fluctuating bandwidth, or user interaction errors.

The primary objective of executing real device testing is to provide customers a seamless user experience and ensure the application’s stability on multiple software and hardware configurations.

Commonly Made Real Device Testing Mistakes

Avoiding common mistakes in real device testing can help tests deliver a high-quality product to the end users and create a positive reputation for the brand. So, let us go through some of the most made mistakes in real device testing and their effective solutions:

1. Limited Device Coverage

• Mistake: Certain testers often tend to execute the real device testing on only the popular devices and ignore the less common ones. This massively reduces the company’s audience base and makes the application incompatible on many devices.
• Solution: To solve this problem, the developers must create a testing pool consisting of a diverse range of devices from different operating systems, screen sizes, and other specifications.

2. Ignoring Different Operating Systems

• Mistake: Various small companies and individual developers try to restrict the real device test cases to only one operating system like Android or iOS. Considering the huge number of mobile users in the market, creating apps for only one platform massively limits the reach of the business.
• Solution: The testers must verify the application’s performance on Android and iOS to address platform-specific issues. It also helps them to provide a consistent user experience on both these platforms. They can also focus on creating cross-platform apps that can be compatible with both platforms without any significant code change.

3. Neglecting Different Screen Resolutions

• Mistake: Another common mistake is testing the functioning of the application on devices with a specific screen resolution and ignoring the other variations for it.
• Solution: We advise the testers to verify the performance of the application on devices with multiple screen sizes and resolutions. This approach will help them to identify and fix layout and design issues that may be prevalent within the application infrastructure.

4. Incomplete Network Testing

• Mistake: Various testers often tend to verify the performance of the app in good network conditions and ignore running it on a poor network with fluctuating bandwidths.
• Solution: We advise testers to run the application on different network conditions including 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi. This approach will help to ensure the application functions smoothly in all real-world scenarios and network conditions.

5. Overlooking Device-Specific Features

• Mistake: A common mistake is to neglect the functioning of the application against various device-specific features like camera, GPS, accelerometer, and gyroscope. These features have a crucial influence on the app’s stability.
• Solution: It is important to include all these features while creating the real device test cases for each of the supported devices.

6. Inadequate Performance Testing

• Mistake: Many developers only focus on functional testing and completely ignore the importance of executing performance testing while running real device test cases.
• Solution: To solve this problem, they must verify the application’s performance on multiple real devices for identifying and addressing crucial issues related to responsiveness, speed, and resource consumption.

7. Not Executing The Tests Across Different Browsers

• Mistake: By testing the application’s performance on one browser, various testers assume that it will mimic similar results on other browsers as well. It is a huge mistake as various browsers have different APIs and algorithms for handling the elements of web apps.
• Solution: The most effective solution to this problem is to test the functioning of the application on all the target browsers to catch and fix specific issues. The developers must also consider running the test cases on different versions of the same browser to improve the accuracy of the test instances further.

8. Not Testing For Usability Testing

• Mistake: A major mistake while executing real device testing is ignoring the importance of running usability testing on multiple devices.
• Solution: The developers can solve this problem by testing the app UI and interactions on devices to create a positive user experience.

9. Skipping Battery Consumption Testing

• Mistake: Various devices have different battery cycles and this cycle can be impacted by the functioning of the application. However, various testers often ignore running battery consumption testing on all the target devices and software combinations.
• Solution: By creating proper test cases to assess and optimize the app’s power consumption, testers can avoid draining the battery excessively and impacting the device’s performance.

10. Ignoring OS Updates

• Mistake: Various developers make the mistake of not testing the app performance on the latest mobile operating system versions.
• Solution: It is important to regularly update the test devices to the latest OS versions. It will help them to catch and address compatibility issues in the earlier phases.

Best Practices For Real Device Testing

Let us now go through some of the most important practices that can help modern developers and testers improve the efficiency of real device test cases:

Device Selection

It is advisable to include a huge variety of devices consisting of different screen sizes, operating systems, resolutions, and hardware specifications. This will help represent all the devices used by the target user base.

Considering the market share, the testers must prioritize the devices based on their popularity to address the needs of the majority of the users that the developers are currently targeting.

Automation Testing

Using automation testing, the developers can automatically execute the real device test cases. Automation testing uses a series of test scripts to emulate human interactions while communicating with the application undergoing the development process. The developers can use tools like Appium, Espresso, and XCTest to automate real device test cases while performing mobile app testing.

While automating the test cases, it is also advisable to integrate parallel testing to improve the productivity of the testing environment further and reduce resource consumption. Using parallel testing, executing thousands of test instances simultaneously on different systems and configurations is possible.

Cloud-Based Testing

It is a very expensive and hectic process to set up and maintain an onsite device testing lab for executing real device testing. Instead, the developers can use cloud testing to execute all the test cases on real devices through remote servers.

Primary benefits of cloud-based testing include the elimination of Geolocation barriers and access to legacy devices. Modern cloud platforms like LambdaTest allow the integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence to further improve the test cases. Additional features of these platforms include live test activity logs, comprehensive test reports, and native bug-tracking abilities.

Test Coverage

The developers must create comprehensive sets of test cases that cover the functionalities and use cases for all the elements present in the application.

While creating these test cases, the testers should also prioritize the functioning of the core elements of the application to ensure that at least the basic structure is functional in all instances. It is also important to focus on testing critical paths for the application architecture.

Performance Testing

While creating the test cases for real device testing, it is important to focus on performance tests that replicate real-world scenarios including various user loads, network conditions, and extended usage periods.

While executing the performance test cases, the developers must closely monitor the testing instances and keep a close watch on various analytic parameters like memory usage, CPU usage, and battery consumption.

Security Testing

Modern applications store a lot of sensitive user information including transaction details. So, it is important to perform regular security audits on the app to identify and resolve vulnerabilities.

During security testing, the developer should also consider the prospect of encrypting and protecting sensitive user information during data transmission and storage on different mobile devices.

Usability Testing

By conducting usability testing while performing real device testing, the tests can evaluate how the users can interact with the application on different devices.

During this process, it is crucial to ensure the accessibility of the application to users with disabilities. The developers can adopt this process by testing it on multiple devices that have accessibility features already turned on.

Regular Maintenance

It is important for the testers to regularly update the device inventory for real device testing. They must include the latest devices and also retire the outdated devices to ensure proper coverage of the current user market.

It is also crucial to periodically review the test scripts for real device testing and update them to accommodate any changes that have been integrated into the application architecture.

The Bottom Line

By avoiding all the above mistakes, the testers can enhance the effectiveness of the real device testing process. It also helps them to deliver a more reliable and user-friendly application. However, it is important to remember that the exact strategies for implementing real device testing will vary depending on the application type, intended audience, and other development practices.

By analyzing the target audience, the app developers can also implement certain customized features that can help them expand their market and improve their audience reach.