Mobile app testing plays an important role in determining the success of the app in the target market. Since your customers will access the app from different devices, it is crucial to validate how your app’s performance across these platforms. Cross-browser testing is an important aspect of app testing to check if your app works on different browsers, which may run on different devices and operating systems.
Cross-browser testing is a form of front-end testing to verify that the app works efficiently across multiple browsers and configurations. It ensures that the web or mobile app delivers a flawless user experience, hence improving your customer retention and conversion rates. It establishes that the app works consistently, without any dependencies, or compromise in quality. Cross-browser enables the QA team to assess the rendition or appearance of your app page in different browsers.
Cross-browser issues may occur because sometimes browsers have bugs, or they implement features differently. With the right mobile cross-browser testing tools, you can perform these tests on the target browsers, OS, and devices. Your end-user might be using any of the devices with their choice of browser or OS. Therefore, you need to have wide test coverage, to establish the performance, UI, compatibility, and stability of the app across various combinations to provide a high-quality user experience. Here are few effective strategies you need to follow for conducting robust cross-browser testing.
Establish a Baseline
For setting up the strategy for performing cross-browser tests, you need to prioritize the test scenarios to streamline the execution of the tests. Identify the scope and objectives of your business, to decide what primary functionality and UI usage your app intend to offer. It will enable you to select the test cases, create a testing plan for aligning the test operation to your business goals.
Choose Target Testing Platforms
The QA team needs to execute the same test cases on different browsers, devices, and OS combinations to ensure that it delivers stable performance across all the target platforms. They need to select different browsers other than those they regularly use on the devices, for better coverage. They must include the slightly older browser versions in the test procedure too, as some target users still use it to access the app that doesn’t support the latest CSS and JavaScript features. While selecting the devices, they must use devices with different capabilities. The browser usage share also varies based on geolocation. Hence, the QA team must target the browsers and devices using analytics to understand how the end-users will access your app.
Choose the Right Tools for Automated and Manual Testing
In manual testing, the QA team will sequentially execute the test scenarios. Test automation automates human interactions via code. The QA team can use the automation test tools to prepare test scripts to execute it on the different browsers any number of times. However, the tool must have quality reporting features to provide visibility into the test results. Based on the browsers and scenarios you need to test, choose the right testing method according to your testing team’s capabilities. Check out online cross browser testing. Automation tools also facilitate script-less testing. You can integrate these tools into your CI/CD pipeline to continuously execute the test until you receive positive results for debugging process. It can reduce your overall testing time, provide wider coverage of test scenarios, and allow you to reuse the test cases.
Infrastructure
You need to set up the right testing infrastructure to execute the tests. Select the right emulators, simulators, and real devices that you require for cross-browser testing. You can install browsers on virtual machines to perform the tests. While it is a feasible testing method, it may not produce reliable test results and can validate your app features up to a certain extent. It is because these devices can only emulate certain characteristics of real devices, and does not allow you to test your app against various network connectivity, and features. You can also set up a testing lab with real devices to conduct tests in real-world scenarios.
Alternatively, you can set up a cloud-based testing infrastructure. It enables you to execute the tests on a remote lab of secure devices and browsers.
Testing/Discovery
Once you plan and build your test strategy, and build your testing infrastructure, it is time to execute the tests. The cross-browser tests help to validate the SSL, CSS, and HTML of your app across the various browser and device combinations, and other front-end elements like page layout in different resolution devices, fonts, verification of pop-ups, date format, and more. Once you’ve discovered a bug, you need to try to fix it. Check how widely the bug persists on different combinations. After you fix the bug, repeat your testing process to ensure that it does not still exist. Refine your tests to improve the quality of your testing efforts.
To Conclude:
These tips will help you to correctly approach cross-browser testing. It will enable you to develop the right strategy to efficiently meet the browser compatibility benchmarks. You can optimize the front-end elements of your app, and keep your end-users happy.
