With the mobile app market growing at an annual CAGR of 8.6%, the demand for robust, high-performance B2B and B2C mobile apps is at its peak. Naturally, this leads to users having high expectations and zero tolerance for bugs or performance issues in mobile apps. To ensure that mobile app development services enhance users’ expectations and perform seamlessly, developers need continuous testing. However, mobile app testing can be complex across platforms, OS, network connections, carriers, and situations. That’s where mobile app automation testing comes into play.
Mobile app testing optimizes mobile apps, helps businesses save time, reduces errors, and improves user experience. But if you utilize mobile app testing automation tools like Katolan it can do more. So, let’s understand how Katolan using service virtualization can help you automate your testing workflows and deliver high-quality apps faster and more reliably. Additionally, this blog will also discuss how to prevent different types of automation testing issues especially flaky tests while using Katalon for an efficient testing process.
Unlocking Efficiency: Katalon’s Impact on Mobile App Automation
Mobile app automation enables teams to deliver high-quality applications faster and more reliably. With testing automation apps like Katolan, it becomes easier than ever. Katolan is a cloud-based mobile app automation tool that is easy to use, scalable, secure, and affordable. In addition to helping businesses automated testing services, it can also provide detailed reports and analytics to help businesses monitor and improve their app quality and performance.
However, this benefit can be compromised by several testing issues. Especially, testing challenges like flaky tests. These tests while undergoing the process can unpredictably pass or fail for no clear reason. Flaky tests not only lead to wasting of time and effort but also hamper the progress in SDLC . But with the introduction of Katalon Studio, a comprehensive test automation solution, things seem easier. Katalon Studio 8.1 comes with many new features and enhancements that can help you manage flaky tests more effectively.
How to Avoid Flaky Tests Using Katalon: Step-by-Step Guide
Flaky automated tests can have various causes, but these are the 8 most common ones we encounter. By knowing these problems, you can improve the reliability and stability of your test automation.
- Lacking a suitable framework
- Writing hardcoded test data
- Relying on X, Y coordinates or XPath to identify elements
- Sharing test environments
- Creating tests that depend on each other
- Test not beginning in a known state
- Inadequate testing data management
- Not using proper synchronization
These tests can be a major source of frustration and inefficiency for developers and businesses alike. However, there are some best practices that can help you reduce flakiness and improve test reliability:
1. Explicit Wait
A mismatch between test execution speed and application response time can cause flaky tests. So, to avoid this, use explicit wait in Katalon Studio to specify the conditions that must be met before the test proceeds. For example, you can wait for an element to be present or visible on the page before interacting with it. This way, it can ensure that tests don’t perform actions on elements that are not ready yet.
2. Retry Mechanisms
The feature in Katalon allows you to automatically rerun failed tests, giving them a chance to overcome temporary issues that might have caused them to fail. For instance, if your test fails due to a network error or a minor glitch, the retry mechanism can help you catch these errors and turn them into consistent passes.
3. Stable Locators
They play a crucial role in identifying and locating elements on the web page. Use stable locators, such as IDs or unique attributes, to help you avoid flakiness caused by locator changes. These locators are less likely to change between test runs or application updates, making them more reliable and stable, unlike dynamic locators which are more likely to change due to any variations, leading to flakiness.
4. Data Management
To ensure that your tests run in a consistent and controlled data environment, it’s necessary to set up proper data management. To do this, you can create and clean up test data during the setup and teardown phases. This enables you to avoid flakiness occurring due to data dependencies or conflicts, such as duplicate records or missing values.
5. Logging and Reporting
Thorough logging and reporting in your test scripts also is helpful in avoiding flaky tests as this empowers you to trace the root causes of flakiness. So look out for failure patterns such as test data, precise environment, time-centric issues, or any anomalies that are causing inconsistent test outcomes and leading to flaky tests.
6. Implement Testing in Isolation
When you separate your tests from shared resources and dependencies that are primarily causing complexities, this not only simplifies your test suite but also improves its reliability. Tests that are independent, without relying on the results of other tests, are more robust and less affected by the domino effect of flakiness.
7. Testing Precision With Service Virtualization
Service virtualization allows the simulation of external dependencies, and along with Katalon, it can enhance the accuracy and reliability of your testing process. It provides consistent responses from virtual services regardless of the real-world scenarios such as availability and performance. This way, testing can focus on the functionality and quality of the system without being affected by external factors.
Mobile App Automation & Katalon: Match Made in Heaven
As discussed earlier Katalon is more than just an automation tool and offers many benefits for testers and ultimately businesses. Other than making testing easier and quicker for QAs, it offers a host of other benefits. Some of them are:
- Test Case Creation Made Easy
One of the major benefits of using Katalon is that testers can record their interactions with the mobile app, allowing the tool to automatically generate test scripts. It’s quite a user-friendly approach and speeds up the test development process. This is helpful for testers with limited or no coding experience, ensuring that testing can be done quickly and accurately. - Seamless Integration
There’s no doubt that CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, or Azure DevOps, among others have significant value for businesses seeking to automate their mobile app testing. So, with the help of Katolan, they can incorporate mobile app testing into the CI/CD pipeline, and achieve continuous testing, ensuring the reliability and quality of their apps throughout the development and deployment process. - Custom Scripting
This feature enables testers and developers to design automation scripts that cater to their unique requirements running from testing scenarios to complex app functionalities. Using languages such as Groovy and Java, users can not only create custom testing scripts but can also handle intricate user interactions or unique testing needs by adjusting the automation to their exact project requirements. - Object Repository
Katolan offers a centralized repository, where testers can store and organize UI elements, thus making script maintenance easier, and improving test reliability. This is also beneficial in the case when the app user’s UI changes, updates can be done in one location. This ensures that scripts stay current and avoid test failures due to sudden UI changes.
Wrapping Up
A smooth and seamless mobile app automation is crucial to keep the software’s quality, scalability, and reliability. With toolsets like Katalon, achieving goals of portable test automation that speeds up the software development cycle with quality and accuracy seems possible. Mobile testing with Katalon offers a seamless transition for testers with or without any experience in web automation. After all, from practical scalability and maintenance to cloud-based test executions, everything a tester needs to get started is on one platform.
However, some testing challenges can make an app or software testing difficult and frustrating tasks. One of such challenges is flaky tests. These tests reduce the reliability and confidence of the test results. Flaky tests also lead to wasting time and resources in debugging and running the tests again. In this blog, we discussed how with the help of Katalon and using service virtualization, testers can be rest assured and offer top-notch quality assurance services. These are some of the tips and best practices that we recommend for reducing flakiness in mobile native app automation with Katalon.
If you have any questions about how to run Katalon to automate testing, get in touch with us today. Our QA experts will guide you to run efficient and effective testing!
