The Business Value of Continuous Mobile Testing for Enterprises
In today’s accelerated digital environment, we know customers have increasingly high expectations for software functionality and performance. We’ve seen more enterprises adopt a “mobile first” approach to their business strategy (think Microsoft’s “cloud first, mobile first” approach under Satya Nadella), as mobile apps increasingly become the first customer touch point for many SMBs and enterprises.
With 90% of US consumer’s mobile time captured by apps, the ability for companies to deliver seamless (and bug-free) user experiences across multiple devices and OSs is increasingly becoming the norm, not the exception. As such we’ve seen a global rising demand for mobile testing solutions across commercial and corporate sectors.
The global mobile testing solutions market is predicted to grow from US $2.2 Billion in 2016 to $13.3 billion in revenue by 2026. While many organizations have clued in on the value of investing in mobile app development, many enterprises continue to underestimate the critical role of implementing continuous mobile testing for their QA teams. This is damaging for companies that strive to be mobile-first or have user-facing mobile channels, as we know “customer experience has become perhaps the top differentiating factor that separates the leaders and the laggards”, as recently noted in ZDNet.
“Although more organizations are making use of mobile solutions, mobile testing is still viewed as a relatively new skill in the development cycle.” Image via World Quality Report 2016–2017.
How continuous mobile testing affects the bottom line
Customers are becoming less forgiving of app crashes; only 16% of users will try a failing app more than twice, and 48% of users will not use an app again after encountering a major issue. Mistakes can cost market share, and companies that fail to deliver on app functionality and performance will find themselves struggling to recapture those leads again.
A failure to implement continuous mobile testing will also impact your brand; an app that delivers a poor user experience from the start will negatively affect your customer’s perception of your company as a whole. And of course, in the era of social media, companies may find themselves struggling to recover from negative online feedback and bad app ratings, as both the consumer and enterprise mobile app space gets increasingly crowded.
Image via TestObject
Continuous mobile testing is also critical to the DevOps process; as more companies adopt agile practices to facilitate speed to market, release cycles have shortened for app updates, and this has accelerated the need to implement testing at every stage of the product release cycle.
Test automation also becomes an imperative, and you will want to implement automated testing software that can be integrated with your existing CI tools for your DevOps team. You can learn more about manual and automated testing here.
Test automation saw a 17% jump in 2015, with “maturity and availability of a variety of test automation tools” cited as the key drivers for greater adoption. Image via World Quality Report 2015–2016.
The proliferation of digital platforms will continue to shift “the way your customer learns about your product, buys your product, and uses your product.” (World Quality Report 2015–2016). Mobile testing continues to play a critical role in the customer experience journey, and it’s business value cannot be understated, as we know a failure to implement continuous mobile testing can potentially hurt your brand, and indeed the bottom line, from the beginning.
Hannes Lenke is the CEO of TestObject, a leading mobile testing provider that offers a comprehensive cloud based platform for automated and manual testing. Hannes is a co-founder of Berlin Mobile Quality Crew, which aims to bring people together who want to share their knowledge and experiences in mobile testing. You can follow Hannes on Twitter here @hlenke.
