The content of this post is excerpted from the Sauce Labs webinar Resolve Mobile App Test Failures and Errors Faster with Kristian DeVito, Senior Solution Engineer at Sauce Labs.
Bad customer experiences on mobile apps are costly—faced with crashes, freezes, or wait times, frustrated users will abandon brands, share negative reviews, or even simply uninstall the app. 25% of mobile app users have written a negative review of a company after a bad experience, and 20% report they have abandoned shopping with a brand altogether.
Tasked with maintaining positive user experiences through the quick discovery and resolution of errors and crashes, mobile development teams face numerous challenges due to lack of data, inefficient workflow management, or difficulty prioritizing issues. In this post, we’ll outline how using a real device cloud solution for mobile app testing can help alleviate those roadblocks and help teams streamline debugging.
The (Time-Consuming) State of Debugging
Today’s mobile apps are complex—they rely on a higher number of dependencies on downstream services and third-party APIs like geolocation APIs, checking and billing APIs, and extra authorization.
With limited context for errors and crashes, it can be difficult to pinpoint the location and root cause of issues. When teams are bogged down in hunting for the cause of an issue, they can see frustrating increases in both mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR).
When we talk about debugging pain points, there are several commonly cited by development teams:
Lack of data: Without a full view of an issue provided by data, teams run into roadblocks when trying to gain context and insight about the customer experience.
Log-surfing: Parsing through countless logs and reproducing bugs in order to identify the root cause of failures is inefficient and time-consuming. When the error reporter doesn’t provide needed context, sometimes reproducing the bug on a local device isn’t an option.
Slow communication and feedback loops across teams: When the teams involved in finding and resolving bugs—from development to QA—don’t have a collaborative workflow, slow hand-offs and feedback loops cost precious time and resources. A more streamlined approach for reporting and documenting bugs is one that accurately and comprehensively inputs data directly into a ticketing system to keep your workflow and logs in one accessible place.
Capturing and prioritizing issues: When you’re seeing up to hundreds of thousands of errors and crashes per day, it becomes impossible to sort through the noise. Teams need the ability to identify and prioritize risks early in the app life cycle to quickly identify which areas are impacting the majority of users and to allocate resources to the highest priority issues.
Put simply, the way many teams are required to identify and resolve issues is frustrating and time consuming.
Happily, there’s a better way. Detecting and resolving issues can be faster with the use of a cloud-based real device testing solution. Read on to see how you can kiss those pain points goodbye.
How Real Device Testing Can Help
Today, best of breed mobile testing strategies incorporate emulators, simulators, and real mobile devices to gather test results on hardware, software, and real-life user scenarios. Real devices offer diagnostics and signals that instill a higher degree of confidence in your app’s performance in real-world scenarios.
For companies unable or unwilling to take on the operational burden, costs, and security risks of hosting physical or on-premise real devices, a cloud-based solution like the Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud offers many advantages. Real device cloud benefits like having instant and secure access anytime, easier scalability, expanded device coverage, and no responsibility for maintenance make for accelerated test execution with low error rates.
Ultimately, a real device cloud can give you everything you need to accelerate the resolution of issues and release of mobile apps by enabling faster determination of root causes of failures in the pipeline and errors in code.
But What Exactly is a Real Device Cloud?
A real device cloud is a mobile app testing environment that provides on-demand access to real iOS, Android, and other mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). Mobile app development and QA teams can test their apps on different device/OS combinations to get real-world feedback and ensure optimal coverage for their organization’s target customers. A real device cloud can integrate with popular mobile testing frameworks like Appium, Espresso, and XCUITest.
Whether through automated or manual (live) tests, a real device cloud helps you ensure the best experience possible for not only your customers but also your development and QA teams.
How a Real Device Cloud Can Help You Debug and Release Faster
Essentially, a real device cloud is the next best thing to holding a physical device in your hand, offering the ability to access and interact virtually with any of these devices through the cloud, without any of the operational burden of maintaining them in-house.
Every piece of information in your testing session can help you get to a faster resolution—what the customer is doing, what interactions are taking place, the UI experience, and real device data like CPU performance and memory.
Once you start seeing the results of a cloud-based real device testing solution, you just might wonder how your team ever worked without one. Take advantage of the following real device cloud capabilities to debug and release faster.
Capability | Helps you answer... | Benefit it provides |
Error & Crash Reporting | Where in the code is the error happening? | See the full call stack and logs of your tests to get complete context and insights on errors to capture, prioritize, and resolve them faster. Debug apps without the need to recreate errors in your development environment. Access full data across your entire testing suite in one place. |
API & Network Capture | Where is the issue coming from? | Quickly identify the source of mobile app issues with the ability to capture API and HTTP/S requests and responses for mobile app tests. Generate API test scripts by uploading the network HAR file into our API Testing solution. |
App Performance (Device Vitals) | Why did my app crash? | Get deeper visibility into app performance with real-time vitals that include CPU usage, memory usage, and UI responsiveness. |
Interactions | What happened in this session? | Fix UI problems faster with the ability to access user interactions and associating the test session actions with the app's UI. |
See How Sauce Labs' Mobile App Diagnostics Works
Enough talk—let's see Sauce Labs' mobile app diagnostics in action with this demo from Kareem Missoumi, Staff Solution Engineer at Sauce Labs.
Start Debugging Your Mobile Apps on Real Devices Today
The Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud offers the most comprehensive suite of diagnostic test information and quality signals to help mobile app development teams find and fix the root cause of errors in their code and test failures in the pipeline—fast.
Sign up for a Sauce Labs free trial and start testing your mobile app today.
