Meet 2016's Mobile Testing Challenges

Over at Ministry of Testing, Rosie Sherry polled the community for their thoughts on the biggest challenges for mobile testers in 2016. Given the breakneck speed of change in technology, I'd expected to see at least one totally new mobile testing challenge to watch out for, or a big change coming down the pipeline that would force testers and QA teams all over to rethink everything.

Instead, you'll recognize most of these problems, as they've come up before and some have even been discussed on our blog here at test IO. One of them, "in the wild testing," or as we call it here – real world testing – is the cornerstone of test IO's testing philosophy and the reason for our existence.

This means that the software testing community is already on track. We've already figured out the major issues facing mobile product testing, and any changes in the issues are mostly incremental, not huge shifts in the field. We can expect that fragmentation will increase, that pop-ups will continue to cause issues, and that we'll still struggle with making apps native or in webview. It's only the degree that they're important that will change. For example, hopefully "mobile last" will become less of a problem as the importance of mobile filters up (and down) into all levels of the organization.

In short, if you're already aware of these problems and are working on solving them in your company, you're on the right path.

Here's the full list of mobile challenges:

• Unexpected pop-ups
• In The Wild Testing
• Fragmentation (covered previously in "Mobile Fragmentation Sucks")
• Native vs Webview
• Mobile Test Automation
• Commoditization of Android
• Slow Automation Tools
• Mobile Last
• Immature Automation Tools

Make sure to read the full descriptions and the proposed solutions over in Rosie's original post. If you think there are big challenges coming down the pipeline for mobile testing and they aren't covered there, please share them in the comments!