The growing dependency on mobile apps means users are increasingly impatient with anything less than a flawless user experience. Errors and slow performance can lead users to abandon an app—and even a brand. Our recent Every Experience Matters report found that long load times (58%) and app crashes (52%) are among the top five issues that try users’ patience. These issues erode trust, with 53% of users uninstalling the app if it crashes, freezes, or incurs errors.
Time to resolve is critical. According to our study, 44% of reported errors take more than a day to fix. Not only do bugs cause user attrition, but they also decrease developer productivity: the more time developers spend addressing issues, the less time they can spend on innovation to enhance their products. This all adds up to lost business.
But how can you find and fix issues quickly without slowing down the release cycle? Read on to learn more about how the enhanced Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud can help development teams debug faster and deliver quality at speed.
Common Mobile App Development Challenges That Lead to Slower Releases
According to recent research, 44% of developers say their biggest pain point is fixing software bugs and errors.
Mobile app development has become increasingly complex, leading to more dependencies and inefficiencies that lengthen release cycles and drive up the cost of development. Do any of these mobile app development challenges sound familiar?
Siloed teams create slower hand-offs and inconsistent feedback loops, reducing team efficiency
Lack of depth of information and context on issues increases the time to identify and remediate them
Need to parse through countless logs and reproduce bugs to find the root cause of test failures and errors, impacting productivity
Actionable error and crash data is hard to capture when spread out among tools, and the low signal-to-noise ratio makes error prioritization painful
Triage processes are manual and lengthy
These challenges result in slower debugging, higher time to resolution, and critical bugs escaping into production: all things that impede feedback loops across the SDLC, leading to slower releases and lower-quality apps.
How Sauce Labs Mobile App Diagnostics Can Help
To help software development organizations deliver best-in-class mobile apps at speed, we’re excited to announce that we now offer the most comprehensive suite of diagnostic test information and quality signals in the Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud that enables teams to quickly determine the root cause of errors in their code and test failures in the pipeline.
Here’s why Sauce Labs mobile app diagnostics are different from anything you have experienced before:
Provides the broadest suite of app diagnostic information and in-depth insights to accelerate debugging and reduce red (failed tests) to green (passed tests) time.
Integrates pre-production and production quality signals to create continuous feedback loops that allow for optimal risk visibility and coverage early in the SDLC.
Enables teams to prioritize the errors and test failures that matter the most with complete data and context on impact.
Improves testing efficiency with faster, continuous feedback loops necessary for collaboration.
With more context and more actionable data, teams can build better, more reliable apps faster. Deeper insights into their data enable developers to understand the root causes of test failures and errors in code prior to release.
Sauce Labs Mobile App Diagnostics Features
Here’s a closer look at the features and how Sauce Labs mobile app testing diagnostics can be used.
API and Network Capture: Where’s the issue coming from?
As API and microservice usage continue to increase, many errors can originate from API changes during app development and require granular insights to uncover the root cause of mobile app issues. With this feature, teams can easily capture API and HTTP/S requests during their Android and iOS/iPadOS mobile app tests on real devices, for both manual and automated testing.
How this benefits you:
Save time by quickly identifying where the issue is coming from
Better understand app behavior with granular insights
Record network flow for every test
Locate faulty API calls
Another key benefit for Sauce Labs users is the ability to record HTTP transactions (HAR file) and use the results to rapidly generate functional API tests that help you perform API monitoring of production environments and capture real user scenarios.
Use cases you can address:
App complexity: Efficient testing of modern, performant, and secure applications requires insight into the interactions and the ability to isolate dependencies.
Root cause identification: Network logs can help identify if an issue is related to a service or if it's a regression in the application. Is the service offline? Was the API contract honored?
Prioritization and remediation: Know which issues are on the critical path and start remediation sooner. Route support requests and group issues related to the same service to the right development teams, quickly.
Performance issues: Identify services that slow the responsiveness of your app (timeout when performing a task) and identify issues in page rendering (missing information, images, and other assets.)
Error and Crash Reporting: Where’s the error happening in the code?
Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud and error monitoring and reporting from Backtrace provide deeper insights into the root cause of application failures, strengthening the pre-production coverage provided by front-end test automation frameworks like Appium. Users performing real device testing with Sauce Labs can greatly reduce the time to detection and resolution of errors and crashes.
How this benefits you:
Enables you to capture, prioritize, and resolve mobile app errors and crashes that matter, before they impact users.
Allows you to debug a failed test faster with complete context and information
Integrates quality signals from pre-production and production to create a continuous feedback loop that allows for optimal risk coverage early in the SDLC
Provides a better understanding of error trends to guide the testing strategy
Additionally, this also helps teams using error reporting to scale manual and automated testing with instant access to thousands of Android and iOS devices on the Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud. This allows run regression tests to be run on real devices after the development team resolves errors to ensure their fixes do not incur unexpected consequences.
Mobile app testing use cases you can address:
Root cause identification: Automated and accurate capture for all exceptions, hangs, crashes, and low-memory events.
Error prioritization: Flexible deduplication and powerful query engine for accurate grouping of errors customized for teams.
Error and crash resolution: Access to all threads, call stacks, custom metadata, global annotations, etc., and seamless integrations with tools teams use, to support speedy resolution.
Error trends spotting: Understanding of error trends to guide your testing strategy (e..g, how often an error happens, on which devices, etc.).
Device Vitals: Why did my app crash?
The device vitals feature provides depth and context for visibility into the performance of a device or app under test, helping to improve the time to resolve test failures.
How this benefits you:
Improves the time to resolve test failures by leveraging app performance data in real-time
Reduces app risks by understanding the app’s behavior and catching defects early in the test phase
Optimizes application performance before hitting production by simulating a near-production environment
Mobile app testing use cases you can address:
CPU performance: Detect CPU leaks and overuse that may lead to performance problems, overheating, battery drains, and crashes
Memory performance: Learn how much memory is used by the app and track where a reduction of the memory footprint is needed to lower memory leaks. Charts can be utilized to identify where outliers are happening.
UI responsiveness: Measure the delay in the UI responsiveness of apps under test (for example, page load times, responsiveness, and more.)
Collaborate better and faster
Collaboration is key to success as software development and testing is a team sport. With the ability to easily view and share the test results of your manual and automated tests, including rich test assets such as video recordings, screenshots, commands, test logs, and the whole suite of diagnostic information, teams can create the fastest feedback loops that enable development teams to debug faster.
Faster debugging and resolution also means developers can save precious time to focus on what they love i.e. driving innovation and bringing cutting-edge mobile apps to the market.
Drive Quality at Speed with Sauce Labs Mobile App Diagnostics
Give your customers the great mobile app experience they expect and meet the competition head-on with mobile app diagnostics in the Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud. Empower your development team to build, test, debug, and deliver quality mobile apps that they can release faster and with confidence.
Watch the Sauce Labs mobile app diagnostics demo video, and see how it works with a free Sauce Labs trial.
