Chapter 1. Ensuring Five-star Rating in the MarketPlace

The star rating system on mobile marketplaces, such as Google Play and Application Store, is a source of positive as well as negative feedback for the applications deployed by any organization. This system is used to measure various aspects of the application, such as like functionality, usability, and is a way to quantify the all-elusive measurement-defying factor that organizations yearn to measure called "user experience", besides the obvious ones, such as the appeal and aesthetics of an application's graphical user interface (GUI). If an organization does not spend time in testing the functionality adequately, then it may suffer the consequences and lose the market share to competitors. The challenge to enable different channels such as web applications through mobile browsers, as well as providing different native or hybrid applications to service the customers as per their preferences, often leads to a situation where organizations have to develop both a web version and a hybrid version of the application.

At any given point of time, it is almost impossible to test an application completely, and to cover various permutations and combinations of operating systems, their versions, device manufacturers, device specifications with various screen sizes, and application types, with solely employed manual testing techniques.

This is where automation comes to the rescue. However, mobile automation in itself is very complex because of the previously explained fragmentation issue. In this chapter, you will learn how not to fall into the trap of using different tools, frameworks, and techniques to address these differences.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to mobile test automation
• Types of mobile application packages
• Mobile test automation overview
• Some common factors to be considered during mobile testing, including Interrupt testing, form factor testing, layout testing, and more
• Overview of different types of mobile automation testing approaches
• Selection of the best mobile testing approach depending on the project
• Troubleshooting and best practices