When it comes to mobile apps, businesses strive hard to make world-class user experiences a reality for their users. Understandably, manual software testing of mobile apps has become an integral part of the mobile app testing process.

Manual testing is the process that employs manual testers to execute test cases based on test plans. Manual testers do not use any automation tools. In fact, because Mobile Application Manual Testing requires manually testing an app software product, it ensures a high level of precision. Manual QA Testers look for issues that may hamper the end-user’s ability to utilize the mobile app. Businesses use manual testing as a validation process in addition to automation testing. By the same token, they evaluate and qualify a mobile product for accuracy, completeness, usability, efficiency, and more. Manual software testing ensures winning user interfaces that please the end-users.

Companies avoid 100% automation when it comes to mobile app testing — complete automation levies multiple monetary and time constraints on business. Moreover, manual testing is an essential prerequisite of checking automation feasibility.

Why is Manual Testing an Integral Part of Every Mobile Application Development Process?

Modern smartphone usage experiences are incomplete without the use of mobile apps. As mobile apps penetration increases in personal and professional spheres, app makers need to ensure that the apps they float to the market are trustworthy, useful, and well developed. The majority of app experiences fail to meet high user expectations. Adequate knowledge about target groups and their hopes and other user preferences lead to the success of mobile apps. All these factors also help in choosing the testing devices. In the end, all mobile apps need to undergo manual testing for correct functioning, user-friendly approach, and even consistency.

Manual mobile app testing ensures that before its launch, every product undergoes human supervision. While automated test scripts fail to pick up visual issues on an app UI, a human eye is well versed at it. Sometimes, even automated test scripts feature bugs. Automated testing can report false positives as well as false negatives for a mobile app. Thus, it becomes essential to incorporate manual testing modules in the app testing process. Additionally, humans are also a better judge of usability glitched on an app. Again, some mobile app testing scenarios are technically unfeasible and come with gigantic automating costs. In such cases, it’s always better to test these features manually.

Conclusively, manual testing of a mobile app allows us to understand the problem on conceptual and even an emotional level. That is why it connects the mobile app with the end-user better.

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Types of Mobile Application Manual Testing

Here are various kinds of Manual Testing for Mobile Applications that businesses need to perform:

1. Black Box Testing
2. White Box Testing
3. Unit Testing
4. System Testing
5. Integration Testing
6. Security Testing
7. Regression Testing
8. Shakeout Testing
9. Smoke Testing
10. Functional Testing
11. Performance Testing
12. Load Testing
13. Stress Testing
14. Endurance Testing
15. Exploratory Testing

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Mobile Application Manual Testing Best Practices that ASTAQC Team Swears By

Most businesses assume that manual software testing for mobile apps is slow and costly. Additionally, they find it unsuitable for scalable projects as it is not repeatable by nature. Here are some manual testing best practices for mobile apps that our team at ASTAQC follows. These best practices not only streamline our time but efforts to achieve a bug-free mobile app but also make the process cost-effective for our client businesses:

Precise Test Design and Documentation

All successful test design processes result from an agreement between business staff, project managers, developers, and testers on test coverage. Also, we record these test designs as test requirements in a test plan. Such documentation helps us to gain visibility into the test coverage. It further helps us ascertain that we are testing the right areas.

Again, we aim to document as many test cases as we can, without turning the test effort into a documentation effort. ASTAQC also ensures that the mobile app development staff and the test staff jointly develop the test designs. Because of the complementary nature of their skill sets and knowledge base its bets if these two departments work in harmony. Moreover, we maintain that the goal of the documentation should be to maximize the management’s understanding of the testing. Usually, if businesses do not document their tests, it’s impossible to understand the software quality of an appt. Furthermore, they fail at determining whether or not the testing team is testing features that are the most important to them.

Rank Test Cases Efficiently

It’s essential to establish a wholesome procedure. Also, manual testing companies must ensure that the project plan has sufficient resources and time allocated to the testing process. Thus, it becomes vital to rank test cases in order of their importance. Alternatively, companies can rank tests by the impact on quality, by risk, by the recurrence of a feature use, or other such metrics.

While the ultimate goal should be to run all-important test cases, resource constraints may prevent that from happening. Ranking test cases in order of priority will enable essential test cases to run efficiently. This optimizes the manual testing effort insight of limited available resources. In manual software testing, you are always short on time.

Clearly Define the Click Path

The most efficient thing to do in case of manual app testing is to go through all the pre-decided use cases. Then proceed to write down click paths for each one of them. Also, ensure that no steps are missed out, including the most obvious ones. Overall, this enables the testing team to reproduce a bug and to repeat the same test on different devices.

Having a homogeneous test ensures that if an issue appears only on one device or on all kinds of devices. As a result, clearly defined click paths optimize the time per test session when repeating precisely the same test on different devices.

Employ Creative Mobile App Testers

Best practices for manual mobile app testing begin with employing patient, creative, and open-minded testers. For this reason, manual testers must be able to think like the end-customer of your client business. Likewise, they must be well versed with the required documents because it can help them understand the functionality. Also, it can help identify areas with more bugs.

We at ASTAQC, emphasize testing extensive and complex functionality due to critical defects that may creep in. Again for high-test coverage, we design test cases for each module and each new modification, with prioritization of test cases. Further, the test case must specify the inputs and expected results.

"Lots of methodologies have come and gone, paradigms have changed, but the requirements are always the same; Make it good and make it fast."- Anonymous

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Why ASTAQC for Manual Testing of Mobile Applications?

Because humans are the end-users of all mobile app products, they become imperative components of the mobile application testing process too. While a big chunk of mobile app testing is automated, no one can undermine the importance of manual testing. Since mobile app manual testing ensures more significant dedication and higher quality of the end product, it becomes almost a mandatory practice. Even if we perform the majority of tests in an automated way, we can’t fully automate some types of tests. Still, with Manual testing, we can monitor user reactions and what features users like more.

At ASTAQC, our highly skilled team of manual testers prefer devices that best meet the needs of the target audience of the client business. Besides the appropriate choice of testing devices, we aim to maintain consistent standards for mobile testing. Additionally, our team structures the testing steps and formulates a thorough plan along with a full click path for every test case. Eventually, the process helps us run the same test on multiple devices and reproduce bugs if and when caught.

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