Mobile: A growing gap in your test automation strategy?

As traffic fast shifts to mobile devices, you can’t wait for users to discover gaps in your testing coverage and strategy. This calls for a new approach to test automation creation, learning lessons from test automation history and fulfilling key principles for scalable mobile testing.

This five-part article series considers how mobile test creation can scale to meet mobile’s ascendancy today. This blog opens by considering mobile’s rapid rise. Part 2 will next consider why automation teams today might struggle to meet the vast “combinatorial explosion” created by mobile.

Part 3 will in turn draw five historical lessons from commonly-used test creation techniques, which will be inverted by Part 4 into four principles for scalable mobile test automation.

The series will end by setting out how framework-agnostic, model-based test generation fulfils these four principles for scalable mobile testing. It explores how dynamically targeting test generation matches mobile’s vast combinatorial explosion, generating tests that continuously cover an optimal blend of logic and devices.

Want to read all five parts now? Download Curiosity’s latest eBook, How to Scale Mobile Test Automation.

Ready to get started with scalable test generation for mobile? Simply book a meeting with a Curiosity expert or start your free trial of Test Modeller today.

Test automation needs to catch up with mobile  - fast

At a time when many teams are pushing to scale web and desktop automation frameworks, users are fast-shifting to mobile. The following stats why mobile should have an equal or potentially privileged position in your testing strategy, alongside testing for laptop and desktop users:

Mobile traffic accounts for around 60% of all web traffic when compared to desktop [1]. In fact, mobile overtook desktop traffic in 2016, and its total share of traffic has likely grown since this article was written. Check the live tracker to find out.

Mobile has accounted for the majority of eCommerce sales globally since 2016 and was forecast to reach 73% of all eCommerce sales in 2021 [2]. Mobile users are increasingly impatient when it comes to quality. In fact, the average mobile app loses 68% of its users in the 3 months following its download [3],  while 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load [4].

A growing gap in your test automation strategy?

These trends show how mobile apps and websites are increasingly important to businesses, who must appeal to a growing number of switch-happy mobile users. That means delivering quality and innovative experiences to users of both mobile sites and apps, and test strategies must adapt to reflect the growing business value of mobile use.

Yet, current rates of automated testing remain low across web and mobile. This suggests that automation teams today are struggling to meet existing demand. Part 2 of this series will consider the additional demand that mobile testing risks placing on these hard-pressed teams, quantifying the vast volumes of additional test logic created by mobile use.

Want to read all five parts now? Download Curiosity’s latest eBook, How to Scale Mobile Test Automation.

References:

[1] Statcounter (2022), “Desktop vs Mobile Market Share Worldwide – November 2022”. Retrieved from https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile/worldwide/#yearly-2011-2022 on 12^th December 2022.

[2] Daniela Coppola (Statistica: 2022), “Mobile retail commerce sales as percentage of retail e-commerce sales worldwide from 2016 to 2021”. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/806336/mobile-retail-commerce-share-worldwide/ on 12^th December 2022.

[3] Nayden Tafradzhiyski (Business of Apps: 2022), “Mobile App Retention”. Retrieved from https://www.businessofapps.com/guide/mobile-app-retention/ on 12^th of December 2022.

[4] Think with Google (2022), “Mobile site load time statistics”. Retrieved from https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/mobile-site-load-time-statistics/ on 12^th December 2022.