Mobile apps testing is a very interesting and exciting activity, but at the same time, it can have some technical problems and difficulties.

For example, every day 5-20 new features, more than 10 technical tasks, and 5-10 bug fixes may be released. Of course, the internal and external structure of an app changes really fast, so managing with traditional technical documentation isn’t always handy and correct.

Often it can happen that such documentation may be out of date and not relevant. And this can happen every day – from the moment of development beginning to its support in production.

Only after running personal experiments and tests on the project, one can conclude that traditional check lists, as main documentation for supporting mobile app testing, are the most effective. Such documents are easier to make and use in practice.

But even they can be very confusing and difficult to understand, especially in the situations when a team has only a few hours for exploratory testing and which must be in the next release.

In such a situation, the visualization method allows to save much time, that is so precious during testing of everything. In this case, mind maps can be helpful, which are easy in use, like check lists, but have more illustrative example in a visual form.

Further, we’ll analyze mobile app testing, based on mind maps (a product for iOS will be an experimental subject). Additionally, we’ll talk about a useful list of actual resources, which help during the development of mind maps for mobile products, so that a tester won’t forget about any little script.

The Basis for Mind Maps Designing

Let’s start to review the structural characteristics of the product with the help of mind maps. As you can see from the picture below, all topics for tests are divided into 10 basic categories, each of them has some amount of branches.

Functionality

This group is the biggest by its content. While testing functional productivity, it’s very important to be sure that a created feature (component) works fully with programmed rules and behavior models. We can refer such tests to this group:

UI

“User interface” group is very important, because a fact, of how handy the user interaction with the app is, allows to know if the utility is popular and actual in its field.

Navigations

Let’s imagine that you got a simple push-message “You’ve become the winner in the rebate” on your phone. You open it and, unfortunately, you’re “frozen” on the tab “The app updated the system privacy policy”, and you can’t close or hide it.

You’re trying to do everything – it’s very interesting what exactly you won – but all is for nothing, a screen with the tab doesn’t disappear. In order to make this happen just once and with the tester only, it’s important to check the functionality of the whole program navigation:

Payment Transactions

In this paragraph, we can rephrase one statement, that became a classic – “Test the payment system as if your own income totally depends on it”.

Statistics

In the times when A/B tests are widespread, decision, if the released feature was useful, fully depends on data science opinion. So, it’s very important that all statistic data, which you share with a user, have to be totally correct and actual:

Network

When you test a mobile app in a quiet office with great Wi-Fi connection, you should remember that final users may want to use your app in the elevator, subway, public transport or in some other places, where a signal is poor or inconsistent. The mobile app has to react safely on any network change.

Automation

If the company is practicing auto tests, you shouldn’t ignore them!

Cross-Platform Tests

If a developed feature was primarily designed for iOS, but it has a “brother” for Android devices, you need to be completely sure that its behavior is totally consistent. You shouldn’t ignore the opportunity to catch those defects, that were discovered by other QA specialists while testing another system platform.

Communication

At this stage, you have to be confident that all interested parties are totally satisfied with the app and certain features.

Other

How to Learn to Visualize

The mind map, described above, can be used on any project. But for developing a custom variant, you need to follow the next steps:

• Prepare the script – come up with some idea, it can be different: from the feature name to the whole project;
• Find a great number of ideas, which are fully related to your project. Use a brainstorm – your task is to write all available ideas for testing, which you’ve thought about. They can be either little or big ones.
• Use any testing methodology.
• Remember about previous experience or solutions from similar projects.
• Call your co-workers – let your colleagues in the team or office help you (all QA engineers are different personalities. Someone is more talented in technology, someone is less).
• Global web – you can visit thematic resources, which will help in such problems solution.

Where and What to Search

www.ministryoftesting.com

It is a resource with the basic ideas on the methodology of mobile app testing.

MindMap — Heuristic Testing Strategy Model

Here you can find a lot of actual questions, which will be interesting for qualitative end-to-end testing.

www.testingdiaries.com

Many subject matter specialists consider their checklists for mobile app testing as the most effective ones because all necessary tests are recorded in the form of expected results and show, what exactly the ideal running mobile app needs to look like.

Traditional mnemonics from the mobile testing field, such as COP FLUNG GUN and LONG FUN CUP allow to describe effectively all aspects of a current mobile app, as well as to emphasize functionalities, similar to it. With the help of SFDPOT, you can form any test ideas in the simple form of questions.

Now let’s proceed with the books – Hands-On Mobile App Testing: A Guide for Mobile Testers and Anyone Involved in the Mobile App Business – in this material, there’s a detailed view on the most effective and modern tools for non-functional testing of mobile app productivity.

Also, the book Tap Into Mobile Application Testing gives the first-rate base for utility testing, clearly explaining, what’s worth special attention and why.

[highlight dark=”no”]NB![/highlight]

• Filter thoughts and ideas, that appear in your mind. In the beginning, there will be not so many of them, and something will be definitely repeated. You throw out all that’s unnecessary. Choose the correct name. Then make a subject implementation. Short and accurate content looks much better than long and confusing one;
• After you finish working on the list elaboration, you need to categorize all your ideas, using pattern classification, which looks the most suitable by its application field, the kinds of testing and so on. As a result, you will have formed a list, which is divided into sections;
• Visualize. Visualization – is one of the main criteria for creating the most qualitative and circumspect mind map. The designed scheme should be easily perceived. On the Internet, there’re lots of apps and utilities for quick designing a mind map (for example, the program https://simplemind.eu is a perfect option for making quick drafts and then correcting them).

In additional list we can put such resource:

https://coggle.it/

http://www.mindmaple.com/

http://blumind.org/

www.text2mindmap.com

http://wisemapping.com/

And the last thing:

1. Try to develop 1 element of the diagram for one defined kind of test;
2. Using sublevels is better than long, confusing elements;
3. Use free apps, you don’t need to waste time on a trial version: or you should immediately choose what you want, otherwise, when you want to change a diagram you will get a payment bill!

Outsourcing Testing Services implies the usage of different tools and technical opportunities for testing of mobile app productivity. Mind maps – is a good thing, with the help of which you can quickly test the app performance.

Analysis of data from different product companies, which specialize in mobile products development, points to the fact that usage of mind maps increases the speed of general app testing up to 10%!