Mobile vs. Web: Which is Harder to Test?

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Posted April 19, 2016

Mobile vs. Web: Which is Harder to Test?

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Have you always act on a web-based trial team and switched to a mobile squad and wondered if your living is about to get easier or harder? There are significant differences between try wandering vs. web, and yes, one is MUCH harder than the former. Want to venture which one? Read on and see if you guessed correctly.

Let ’ s Compare

The table below shows the different facet of testing and where its execution is most intriguing.

Scenario

Web is Harder

Mobile is Harder

It & # x27; s a Draw

Feature Functionality Testing

For the case where you have a web coating with a back mobile app, it is likely the app will have a subset of feature that the web side do. When first develop a feature, it is new to the web development team. They receive to go through the process of designing and building out the new lineament, and training their team on the construct.

When the supporting app is created, it would most likely rely on the existing web feature set, so the blueprint and concepts should be easier for the squad to grasp.

X

Feature Parity

Speaking of features, when you are building a web app you alone have to calculate for the features in one exploiter world, such as the browser. The characteristic only needs to be developed once. When you create features on a peregrine app, you now have to occupy into report not solely each device platform ’ s capabilities, but even the exploiter communities ’ expectations.

Apple and Droid users experience different expectations for how their apps will work. And if you want to have feature para in your apps, than the development process direction becomes all the more hard. From a test perspective you now have threefold the work.

X
(mobile is harder)

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Deploying the Application

When apply CI, your exam environments can constantly be updated for your use with the up-to-the-minute builds. You can also do this on the peregrine side if you are using simulators and emulators, or a device cloud such as the one provided by Sauce Labs.

But what about if you want to test on live, local devices? Most likely your team is using them throughout the day and they are not connected to any CI surroundings. You receive to manually install the apps when you need to test the latest, which can be time-consuming, especially when you feature multiple devices and program.

X
(mobile is harder)

Integration Tests

Testing needs to account for backend service. Both web and roving development teams need to run desegregation tests against their respective APIs. The time and effort to accomplish this are similar.

X
(it & # x27; s a draw)

Automating with Page Object Locators

When writing automation on a web application, you need to find the page object locators. You only postulate to write codification to endorse one set of locator.

If you are acquire automated tests for mobile apps, you now necessitate to work with two different dev teams to ascertain the locators. (note, this is an idealistic place to have cross-team measure to progress eubstance between the apps). And as submit previously, the characteristic might not be in sync, causing testers to write multiple examination for similar features.

X
(mobile is harder)

Tool and Support Community

Web automation is a really mature industry. Not only are the tools in place to support most mechanisation interactions, but the user community is useable to answer any question for any level of user. While the mobile world of automation has come a long way, it however doesn ’ t have the amount of support that web does.

X
(mobile is harder)

Platform Complexities
When verbalize about the test base, mobile is much more fragile. The different deployment rules between Apple and Droid can make for some tricky problems to solve. Not only that, but the multiple-platform subject come into play again because now you are supporting two sets of infrastructure that can force updates at any time, stimulate your exam to accidentally break.

X
(mobile is harder)

Test Strategy
When you think of testing on the Web, your strategy commonly guide into report the different support browsers and maybe the underlying operating systems (OS). With mobile, you have to conduct into account the OS versions for each program, as good as device eccentric. While Apple is pretty stable and their exploiter community is up-to-date on the OS, Droid can have a ton of different configurations that your user community supports.

X
(mobile is harder)


Did You Guess Right?

When I firstly posed the mobile vs. web question to an automation designer who has worked in both domain, he immediately replied “ mobile is 110 % harder. ” I have to agree.

But that is not bad news. First, mobile tooling is nonetheless evolving, and does not have the matureness that web tooling does. Secondly, there is already plenty uncommitted of resources that can facilitate, such as real-device cloud and more and more robust testing fabric like Appium and Robotium. While you can ’ t do much to change the nature of app stores, testing and CI tool for mobile are entirely getting best.

Joe Nolan (@ JoeSolobx) is a Wandering QA Team Manager with over 12 years of experience leading multi-nationally located QA team, and is the laminitis of the DC Software QA and Testing Meetup.

Published:
Apr 19, 2016
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