Mobile application development can be said to be a relatively new discipline that started and has grown in the last couple of years due to the ever-growing reliance of human society on mobile devices like smartphones or Tablet PCs, for example, in shopping, social networking, or even banking.
However, mobile application testing can be rather challenging because of the necessity to consider numerous types of devices, platforms, resolutions, and connection types. This is where cloud-based device farms and remote testing services have become invaluable tools for developers.
By leveraging these solutions, teams can simultaneously test their apps on hundreds of real devices, catching bugs early and delivering robust mobile experiences for all users.
What is a Device Farm?
A device farm refers to a cloud-based testing environment where developers can test their mobile apps on several smart handheld devices and tablets that they would otherwise have to buy and maintain as physical devices with equal functionality. They enable instant access to a virtual remote laboratory of actual iOS and Android devices in cutting-edge data centers.
Developers can quickly and easily set up testing sessions, upload their application binaries, run automated and manual tests remotely, and view results. Some key aspects that define device farms include:
- Extensive device coverage: Large device farms typically have hundreds of devices spanning various operating systems, resolutions, form factors, and even device locations/networks for geo-distribution testing. This allows developers to test broadly.
- Scalability: Resources can be dynamically expanded based on testing needs, allowing tests to be run simultaneously across many devices. This dramatically accelerates the testing process.
- Device management: Devices are managed, maintained, and updated remotely by the provider to ensure they reflect current production configurations that end users experience.
- Automated testing: Many farms support automated test frameworks like Selenium or Appium to enable the creation of strong, repetitive automated scenarios for regression and smoke testing.
- Real device emulation: Apps are deployed and tested on actual physical devices rather than emulators, ensuring a realistic test environment that accounts for hardware dependencies.
- On-demand access: Developers can simply log into the testing console and have devices assigned on-demand based on their testing needs. No need to wait for or manage physical devices.
- Interactive testing: Manual testing sessions can also be facilitated, enabling testing of app features that require human intervention and validation of things like UI/UX.
Benefits of Using a Device Farm
With such extensive coverage of devices, operating systems, and versions, device farms help eliminate many of the pitfalls developers encounter when failing to thoroughly test across a wide range of mobile configurations. Some of the key ways testing on a farm improves quality and productivity include:
- Issues identified pre-release: When testing occurs early and covers hundreds of test environments, it lets developers address bugs before they reach customers rather than through post-release firefighting. This dramatically improves customer satisfaction.
- Avoid platform dependencies: Problems stemming from memory limitations, processor speed, OS versions, device fragmentation, etc., are revealed, letting developers build more solid apps optimized for real-world use.
- Streamlined testing workflow: Device setup and cleanup happen automatically. Developers focus on running tests, enjoying efficient parallelization and reduced turnaround times versus physical labs.
- Automated testing scaled seamlessly: Smoke tests and repetitive automated checks can easily scale across many devices, improving efficiency and freeing teams for more strategic testing.
- Manual testing made easy: Cloud tools simplify interactive testing sessions on any device, which helps validate new features. By connecting remotely, testers can naturally test from anywhere.
- Coverage expanded cost-effectively: Rather than purchasing many devices that quickly become obsolete, farms provide on-demand access to hundreds of devices for an affordable usage-based price.
By leveraging these cloud solutions, development teams can have greater confidence that their applications will perform well everywhere, from older budget phones to high-end tablets that customers worldwide use. The increased test coverage leads to higher-quality apps, stronger brands, and reduced support costs.
How Does Device Farm Help with Mobile Testing?
There are several specific ways in which cloud-based device farms help improve mobile application testing workflows and outcomes compared to traditional local testing methods. Let’s examine some examples:
Automating Regression Testing
Re-testing key app functions is critical to avoid introducing regressions when releasing updates or new versions. Regression suites became prohibitively hard to execute reliably across physical devices. Farms empower teams to build automated solid tests once using Appium or other frameworks and then easily re-run them across all device combinations after each code change. This critical and repetitive process can be seamlessly parallelized into any number of real devices for enhanced productivity. Issues are rapidly identified before impacting users.
Addressing Device Fragmentation
A major headache of mobile development is how to effectively test for the wide spectrum of devices, OS versions, languages/locations, and other variabilities that impact real-world performance. Local teams lack broad coverage, while cloud farms provide this at a low incremental cost. Projects avoid bugs tied to memory/CPU limits, different screen sizes/densities, or changes across OS releases, as many customers encounter. Apps are hardened to varying environments.
Validating Network Conditions
Internet connectivity, carriers, and network speeds customers experience can dramatically impact apps. Device farms let developers model realistic network conditions from 3G 5G to LTE, even simulating roaming. This exposes loading, latency, and offline usage problems that are not apparent on LANs. Network flakiness is found and handled gracefully through intelligent caching.
Scaling Manual Testing
While automation excels at repetitive checks, manual testing remains critical to evaluate Look/feel, usability, and intricate features best done by humans. However, requiring testers to physically sign out devices intermittently is slow and limits testing capacity. Cloudsupported remote interactive testing removes friction, letting solo testers simultaneously evaluate apps across many real handsets from a single workspace. Issues are efficiently tracked.
Implementing Geographic Testing
Factors like device location, nearby networks, and even languages/keyboards vary greatly depending on customers’ countries/regions. Testing on local hardware will never cover this. Farms, however, let developers easily model infrastructure worldwide to flush out bugs unique to devices operating in China versus India versus Latin America and so on efficiently from headquarters. Issues with certain languages display properly, too.
Mobile testing optimizes using flexible, scalable, and cost-efficient device clouds. Development teams can expand their test coverage into previously difficult-to-reach areas while accelerating testing cycles. The result improves quality, reduces overhead and issues, and delights a more diverse set of international customers with a reliable mobile experience wherever they are located and on their devices. This makes for strong, resilient applications and brands.
Tips for Leveraging Device Farm for Efficient Mobile Testing
Having explored how device farm services work and the benefits they provide, the natural next question is how to properly employ them as part of the overall mobile testing strategy. Here are some tried-and-tested best practices for getting the most value when using a remote device lab solution:
Select Devices Wisely
While the variety is appealing, only include the devices and OS combinations most representative of a project’s real customer base for focused testing in the farm matrix. Consider factors like region, the typical age of devices used there, and app purpose when deciding the portfolio.
Develop strong Automation
Leverage a library of Appium scripts that thoroughly exercise core app journeys/regressions with zero manual testing time. This base ensures fundamental functionality and sets a foundation to expand the scope from there as needed with new features.
Architect for Testability
Design apps with injection, abstraction, and other test-first principles in mind. This drastically improves capabilities for mock data and injection- points to simulate real scenarios reliably in an automated fashion without actual live services/hardware dependencies.
Encourage Early Adoption
Factor the device’s cloud into milestone planning so testing begins in the design phases rather than waiting until late development when problems are costly. Catch issues at the root during architecture/early development sprints.
Incorporate Cloud Credentials
Store device farm login information for various pipelines, including CI/CD, so that tests can be effortlessly executed as part of every code change, catching slip-ups fast. Teams use only minutes per day to achieve extensive test coverage continuously.
Implement Throttling Practices
Simulation of low-power devices or over-the-air software updates is critical. Tools should incorporate wait periods, artificial throttling of CPU, and networking to accurately model slow hardware or latent field deployment conditions remotely that are challenging to replicate locally.
Leverage Debugging Tools
Some device farms support novel remote debugging features like screen sharing, network inspectors, or logs collection to expedite issue reproduction and resolution when problems occur during cloud testing. These prove invaluable to teams.
By implementing the methods above, development pipelines can reduce the work required while expanding the scope of mobile testing via the seamless integration of device farms as a cloud service. The net effect is catching issues much earlier, avoiding regressions proactively, and increasing overall quality – empowering teams to deliver better mobile experiences confidently.
Efficient Mobile Testing Using Cloud Platform
A cloud-based platform is beneficial as it helps run mobile app testing on extensive device labs. One such cloud-based platform is LambdaTest.
It is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution. It supports manual and automated testing on a remote test lab with over 3000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations.
Parallel testing exponentially boosts test throughput. Integrations with frameworks like Appium allow tests to run within CI/CD pipelines for continuous quality assurance. Detailed reporting and debugging tools help identify and fix issues quickly.
Competitive pricing combined with the free tier makes it affordable for all budgets. As a one-stop shop with expanding features, LambdaTest is positioned as a complete solution. Compared to competitors’ high costs jeopardizing agility, LambdaTest keeps organizations agile with lower costs and seamless infrastructure.
Established and growing companies can rely on LambdaTest to thoroughly validate mobile apps across devices worldwide, helping deliver great experiences through solid, efficient testing on a scale previously out of reach.
Wrap Up
Cloud-based device farms have emerged as a transformative technology for helping organizations overcome the historical challenges around thoroughly validating mobile applications across the wide spectrum of real-world devices and existing conditions. No longer constrained by limited local hardware or complex provisioning logistics, teams can now test more efficiently than ever via on-demand, elastic remote access to hundreds
