What are the Key Challenges for Mobile Application Quality Assurance?

In a study from ABI Research (June 2011), users of enterprise B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business to customer) smartphone and media tablet mobile applications are forecast to grow at a CAGR of nearly 90% and exceed 830 million active users by 2016. Another study by Gartner Group indicates that 428 million mobile devices were sold worldwide in 2011 Q1, a 19 % increase from the previous year. In addition, more manufacturers, carriers, and other 3rd party application aggregators are or will come up with their own mobile application stores to compete with Apple. Hence, the opportunities are greater but so is the competition, and the importance of quality. With increasing users and applications, new tablets and smartphones are released on a weekly basis, with differing form factors, features, and screen resolutions. Combined with different operating systems, versions, models, and network infrastructures, keeping up with changing market needs can be daunting. Summarizing some of the major issues:

• Limited display areas (although increasing), miniature keyboards, less processing power and memory capacity than PC devices lead to a myriad of user interface issues combined with difficulty in meeting user performance expectations.
• Lower bandwidth of a mobile connection resulting in higher latency which can impact not only the performance but also the functionality of the MobileApp.
• Mobile UIs that are still evolving with unique UI layouts that are different from what a user expects or different from the OS underlying platform visual capabilities resulting in applications that work as “designed”, but possibly do not meet user expectations and hence viewed as poor quality.
• Mobile Handset proliferation leads to a need for targeting development and testing since its not possible to develop and test on every device.
• Different Mobile Platforms/OS (Android, IOS, BREW, BREWMP, Symbian, Windows 7, Blackberry (RIM) and so on combined with different OS versions and platform limitations lead to possible functional inconsistencies.
• Different Mobile Carriers and Manufacturer partnerships may implement common features preinstalled in the device with slight differences which your application may depend on.

So when your product management team is assembling their mobile application strategy and rollout plans for porting applications to mobile platforms, raise your hand! And bring up some of these issues so they can be integral to the implementation plan.