Dealing with Mobile Testing Flakiness
The app market is massive with nearly 85% of the world population using smartphones; companies are exploring this huge market to create innovative apps and hit millions of downloads. The key to succeed in the app market not just lies in coming up innovative ideas for the app but also to ensure that the created app is of higher quality, making app testing pivotal. However, the increasing versions of phones, different screen sizes, resolutions, operating systems, and other functional and non-functional parameters gives rise to inconsistent testing results. Inconsistent test results are referred to as flaky tests which makes the app buggy, unreliable, and increases the overall project cost.
Flaky tests are extremely difficult to test, their inconsistency makes it difficult to debug and identify the errors. Hence, the process has to be strategized well and best practices have to be implemented to remove flakiness from mobile apps. Eliminating flakiness is a step towards creating high-quality apps, that will eventually build a strong customer base, establish the brand, and generate higher revenue.
What is mobile testing flakiness and what are the reasons causing it?
Flaky tests are the ones that fail to produce same results when performed more than once. Such tests are unreliable and makes it difficult to debug the code. Flakiness can have a huge impact on the app quality, as the inconsistency may not give a clear picture of whether the quality parameters are passing or not. Poor quality of the app directly affects the reputation and business revenue. Hence, flakiness has to eliminated to create higher quality apps that can improve the ROI and build brand reputation.
There are multiple reasons for flakiness to occur, some of the prominent ones are:
Poor test cases: Poorly written test cases are one of the main reasons for flakiness. Poor test cases cause inconsistent results giving rise to flakiness. Hence, test case quality has to be improved to reduce flakiness and create high-quality apps.
Android fragmentation: There are nearly 24000 Android devices available in the market, making it highly diverse. The difference arising due to varied screen sizes, resolutions, operating system etc., gives rise to fragmentation issues which causes inconsistent result making the tests flaky. Flakiness due to Android fragmentation can be resolved by testing the app in Device Clouds or Device Farms to get accurate results. Accurate test results imply the tests are no longer flaky and can be used to build quality apps.
Manual testing: When organizations are performing testing manually, there is a high chance of creating flaky tests. Manual testing is not consistent under critical scenarios of regression etc. Hence, due to its mundane and tedious nature, manual testing often provides inconsistent results leading to flaky tests. To avoid flakiness and improve the application quality, organizations should implement modern testing solutions like codeless test automation, however, manual intervention is required for initial setup, monitoring, and report analyzes.
Shared resources: When organizations are running short on budget, sharing infrastructure and resources, there are high possibilities of one process coinciding with the other and cause inconsistency due to overlapping, shadowing, or other reasons. Shared resources are also one of the reasons for flakiness which can be resolved by ensuring that the infrastructure and resources are used separately for individual projects.
Unstable internet: Unstable internet connectivity can cause the speed to fluctuate effecting the tests to fail. Such instability can cause flakiness, which can be resolved by having internet connection in place.
These are some of the main reasons for flaky tests, however, there are multiple other reasons too which can cause flakiness. Organizations should invest time, money, and resources on strategizing test plan and coming up with all possible reasons that should be addressed in order to reduce/ eliminate flakiness. The ultimate goal is to improve the quality of the application and offer seamless experience to the users.
Conclusion
Mobile testing flakiness is one of the major issues that has to be fixed to achieve a flawlessly working app that you have desired. The main reasons for flakiness are listed in the article, ensure these issues are addressed. Flakiness is one of the main reasons that is depriving companies from achieving their quality goals; it is not as simple as it may seem, it has deeper layers to it which has to be analyzed and ensured that all kinds of inconsistencies are eliminated.
To streamline your testing process and yield the best results, invest in a good test automation tool that will suit your requirements. Tenjin Online is one of the test automation platforms that will help test web and mobile apps efficiently. It’s a SaaS-based, codeless platform that self-serviced and requires minimal human intervention to operate. Try some of these efficient test automation tools to improve the testing process and reduce flakiness.
