Testing Android application as a way of reaching the top at Google Play

Basing on the results of 2012, Android OS became the leader on the world’s market. Its share is over 53% (by the results of ComScore’s research). For comparison, Apple’s OS has 36%.

Android outran its competitors even on European market, where iOS has been holding the leading position for a long time. Another achievement is downloading to Google Play over 25 billions of mobile applications.

The statistics show what great potential in the market of mobile devices and applications Google Inc. has today. From one point Android developers are provided with wider opportunities for further improvements. But at the other hand they face strong competition by other mobile developing companies and day-to-day growing demands from the users for more advance devices and applications. Under such conditions the process of testing Google Play’s offers becomes more and more important.

Android-based Smartphones and tablet computers have significant differences in both software and hardware. They can have various form factors and screen resolutions, use it’s own versions of operating system and processor’s instructions set, provide the support of front camera, NFC, external keyboard and other modules. All this should be taken into account when developing applications.

Not all Google Play’s publishers can allow themselves a large number of testing devices for checking on their products. Also, as practice shows, it is hard for a mobile developer to evaluate the application from the user’s point of view. Therefore special people are usually being hired to test new programs all the way through the project’s life circle. Mistakes and errors can be done by skilled world-known developing teams as much and often as amateur programmers. For example, recently “Habrahabr” community posted a list of bugs and flaws in Android’s application “Yandex Metro” for smartphones.

Off course, none can guarantee the 100% correct work, but the efforts of specialists in the fields of testing and usability can minimize the number of errors and flaws. The result of such work is a highly qualified product able to reach one of the top positions at Google Play. Android software developers can both do the complex testing of the application’s quality or focus on separate tasks (functional, automatic, terminating, stress or usability testing). Let’s examine the subject more detailed.

Functional testing allows checking the application according to requirements in the specification. It enables to either test the app generally or choose one or more basic functions. The black box method is one of the most common types of functional testing. It examines the functionality of an application without peering into its internal structures or workings.

After the correction of mistakes or implementation of some new functionalities the regressive testing might be applied. It allows to detect errors in the previously working parts of code (helps to catch the bugs that appeared in working functions after the changes had been applied).

Informations provided with the support of the company "ECMAsoft" (Android and iPhone development)

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