Today, mobile devices are much more than just communication tools. In addition to calling and messaging functions, mobile devices enable us to do many things more easily and quickly in daily life, therefore they play an important role in our lives.

Of course, daily usage habits have made the quality of mobile software even more important. Ensuring the quality of mobile software is possible with software tests, just like the quality measurements of software on the computer. However, testing of mobile software may differ from traditional software testing at some points. This is due to the diversity of mobile devices.

How Should Device Selection Be?

Many items need to be taken into account when planning software tests. Determining which device or devices to use is a very important point for mobile application testing. Device selection is also necessary for desktop application testing or website testing, but this point is even more critical in mobile testing as there are so many mobile devices on the market and new ones are added all the time.

So, how should we choose the device that we will test from among so many devices?

Parameters for Mobile Application Testing

Market share:

Devices should be selected based on their popularity in your target geographic market. If Turkey is accepted as the target demographic area, it is necessary to determine the most preferred devices in the Turkish market.

Below you can see the 12 most preferred mobile devices in Turkey in 2019.

Screen Size and Resolution:

One of the important issues in device selection is to choose according to screen size and resolution. Screen sizes and resolutions of devices have become important to ensure User Interface (UI) compatibility.

Equipment:

The more important the screen size and resolution are when choosing a device for testing, the more important is the performance of the application.

Operating System and Version:

Apps need to be tested on different operating systems and versions to ensure they support various platforms. When it comes to operating system, Android and IOS operating systems come to mind. The version distributions are as follows:

 

Android OS version distribution:

 

iOS version distribution:

 

In addition to these;

  • Find out which devices often cause problems,
  • It should be determined what type of network connections the selected devices support,
  • Devices suitable for manual and automatic testing of the software product should be classified and selected accordingly.

As a result, more test cases are needed to ensure applications are successful on a large number of devices.

References:

Mobile Testing Software Testing