Building high quality mobile apps is a process that many developers underestimate.
In order for you to confirm that your app is of high quality, it has to go through quality assurance. In plain English terms, you have to test your ENTIRE app, to ensure things works as expected.
This can take up to 2 weeks to do, which sounds pretty crazy, but that’s actually common for larger applications.
The even crazier thing is, we got this down to 15 minutes, and would have been able to get it down even more with the latest features in TestSweets.
Why does it take so much time
Let’s look at one of my previous client applications. It’s a food delivery service that has 2 apps, the app the customer orders with and the app in the restaurant that receives the order.
Here is our actual testing document (for only the customer app), that shows the features, with the number of test cases for each feature next to it.
There are 545 test cases in total, with an average of 10 steps per test case.
Before every release we do a full regression test (Confirm that all features work exactly as defined in the specs). Regression tests are required because the client was making over $50m / year which on average is over $130k per day in food orders.
There is no room to make a mistake, and extremely high quality cannot be assumed, it has to be proven.
To go through only these test cases, on only one device, takes 3 hours of continuous manual testing. This excludes the writing up of bugs, or screen recordings that has to be done, and uploaded when a bug is found.
So let’s round the time down to say it will take 1 day in total to test on 2 devices, 1 Android and 1 iOS.
We required testing to be done on at least 3 devices per platform, which means 6 days in total. During that time if there’s a blocking bug we need to fix that bug, redeploy, and then the regression test starts again.
So how do we avoid this?
By speeding up the regression testing process
We sped up our testing using a no-code test automation tool that allows testers to automate their work, without the involvement of developers.
From my experience, the average developer that is not required to write automated tests, will not write automated tests.
This means that your team will forever have a quality bottleneck and can only move as fast as you can manually test your app.
That’s why we built TestSweets, to solve this issue.
We converted all of the test cases into automated tests, which dropped our regression testing down from the two weeks mentioned to about 15 minutes to run on all the devices.
We literally reduced the regression testing time by 99.99% , and that’s an underestimation. From 10 days (14400 minutes) to 15 minutes, at any time, by any individual.
And using the new responsive automation point placements we could add in more devices to test on without having to rewrite any tests giving us more coverage for the same test cases.
How does this unlock your team potential?
Imagine that you have a critical bug that needs to be fixed, and it affects a core part of your software.
Before you release that critical bug fix you’ll have to spend the time testing the app. So you have a certain number of days delay, on any work you want to deploy live.
Now imagine, a developer completes their work, they open up a tool, click play, and the tool confirms that every single feature still works as expected before this new fix was deployed.
That workflow means you can confirm a developers work faster, which means they can move to new tasks faster, which means you can release more often.
Not only that, but the testers can focus on exploration testing, instead of repeating the same steps over and over on different devices and not pushing the limits of the app to find new places where it breaks.
Automation is the key to unlocking speed, and with TestSweets your testers can do the test automation while the developers build new features.
Good luck with the improvement of your team performance.
Let’s work together
If you’re a company working with Flutter, with revenue higher than $3m per year, we have an enterprise offer for you.
We will write and maintain all your automated tests for you and your team.
Reach to automation@filledstacks.com if you want to work with a team focused on team performance through automation.
If you want to start automating your quality process yourself, here’s a 7-day free trial to try out TestSweets.
