Planning to test a mobile application can be quite a confusing time. Do I need to buy every device my users are using? Can’t I just shrink my browser down and trust the responsiveness of what’s displayed? Do I really need to worry about how a phone’s hardware can affect the way my app will work? These are all valid questions. Using the mobile testing pyramid to guide our testing efforts allows us to be more efficient about our testing (and maybe development) efforts. In the end, all of our focus on making sure we get a quality product to our customer’s hands should be our top goal. We can all efficiently achieve that by using the mobile testing pyramid.
Most recently, my team’s effort to produce a hybrid application has allowed us to reimagine our testing process for our mobile solution. Not knowing it at the time, we were following a pattern introduced by Kwo Ding, the Mobile Testing Pyramid. This pattern focuses on the heaviest level of testing happening at the bottom of the pyramid on browsers and api level testing. Next, mobile device simulators and emulators get involved to start giving us the real life usage. Finally, real devices are used to get the full real experience your end user will deal with. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each level as well as some tips and tricks we have learned across the levels. While the focus of this talk is not on how we automated our solution, we will spend a bit of time at each level discussing how we applied our automated solutions and the tools we used to help.
Takeaways:
My hope is that with the real life examples in this talk of how we have used the pyramid, you will be able to walk away with a better idea of how to be more efficient at the different levels of the mobile testing pyramid.
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