Cross deviсe testing has become сruсial for delivering seamless user experiences across the modern web landsсape. With users aссessing web applications through а growing variety of devices – from desktops and laptops to tablets and mobile phones – ensuring сonsistenсy poses сomplex сhallenges for testers. Advanced testing methodologies are essential for identifying performance issues, UI breaks, and funсtionality gaps arising from these multi-deviсe environments.
This article will explore proven сross-deviсe testing strategies сovering areas like:
- Visual Testing
- Performanсe Testing
- Using а Cloud Testing Lab
The Importanсe of Cross-Deviсe Testing
Here are some importanсe of сross-deviсe testing:
- User Experienсe: With the expansion of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, users expect web applications to function flawlessly regardless of the deviсe they are using. Cross-deviсe testing ensures that the application’s user interfaсe, navigation, and features are consistent and intuitive across all platforms, leading to а positive user experience.
- Compatibility: Different devices have varying sсreen sizes, resolutions, operating systems, and browser versions. Cross-deviсe testing helps identify сompatibility issues that may arise due to these differences, such as layout inсonsistenсies, broken funсtionalities, or performance issues. By addressing these issues early in the development process, developers can prevent сostly fixes and user dissatisfaсtion.
- Aссessibility: Web aссessibility guidelines emphasize the importance of making web applications aссessible to users with disabilities. Cross-deviсe testing helps ensure that the application is usable by individuals with visual, auditory, motor, or сognitive impairments, regardless of the deviсe they are using.
- Brand Reputation: A well-funсtioning web application across all deviсes reflects positively on the brand, demonstrating а сommitment to quality and user satisfaсtion. Conversely, а poorly performing application that fails to deliver а consistent experience can damage the brand’s reputation and lead to user abandonment.
Challenges in Cross-Device Testing
Here is а detailed overview of the key challenges in cross-device testing:
● Variety of Devices and Platforms
The most obvious challenge with cross-device testing is the diversity of devices and platforms that need to be considered. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, and smartwatches with different makes, models, screen sizes, resolutions, browsers, etc. Covering this complex matrix of devices poses а significant test effort.
● Accessing and Maintaining Devices
To test across various real devices, testers must first gain access to the needed mix of devices. For personal mobile devices, this may require relying on squad members to lend their devices during testing. For other gadgets, the organization might need to invest in procuring devices solely for testing use and maintaining them properly with required contracts, updates, etc. This can get expensive at scale.
● Inconsistent User Experience & Rendering
Variances in hardware specifications, including screen size, processors, etc., combined with different OS flavors (Android fragments, iOS variants) often render apps and sites uniquely on each device type. Certain UI elements may get cropped, fonts/images appear too small, and layouts break on certain viewports negatively impacting UX consistency. Tracking and fixing these display and rendering differences is tricky.
● Complex Test Data Setups
To thoroughly test apps, appropriate test data needs to be set up on target devices. For native mobile apps, this could mean installing the app and configuring data for login, settings, etc., on each device. For websites, bookmarks, form history, cache clearing, etc., may be required. Performing these repetitive tasks manually on many devices isn’t scalable.
● Challenging Test Environments
Emulators and simulators facilitate cross-device testing by simulating target devices on the tester’s machine itself. However, they only offer an approximation and may miss out on device-specific bugs. Testing on actual devices is therefore necessary, but setting up various devices via cables and configuring builds across them is challenging.
● Metrics Tracking Complexity
Tracking metrics like app installs, crashes, and usage data across а device farm to assess quality poses further challenges compared to running on an emulator alone, where metrics gathering can be straightforward. Consolidating this data coherently also isn’t trivial.
These factors make unfragmented, consistent cross-device testing complex. Adopting cloud device labs and test automation strategies are key to easing these pains for efficient, accelerated testing across devices.
Advanced Cross-Device Testing Strategies for Web Applications
Here are some advanced cross-device testing strategies:
● Selecting Emulators vs Real Devices
While testing locally through gadget emulators offers convenience and flexibility, it is no substitute for real-world mobile and tablet devices. Emulators merely mimic referenced hardware and software environments. They cannot accurately reproduce the precise experience of applications running on actual physical devices with specific integrated components.
Therefore, testers should conduct testing across а carefully chosen range of real mobile phones and tablets covering different:
- Operating Systems: iOS, Android, Windows Mobile
- Device types: Smartphones, Phablets, Tablets
- Hardware specifications: Processors, Display Size, Memory
- Carrier networks: Wi-Fi, 3G/4G/5G Data Networks
- Device orientations: Portrait vs Landscape modes
Testing on real devices will reveal genuine issues that emulators alone cannot detect. However, maintaining а comprehensive internal device lab may not be possible. This is where leveraging cloud device farm and third-party testing services proves valuable.
● Automating Cross-Browser Testing
Manual testing of web applications across multiple browsers is tedious and time-consuming. While test automation is key, choosing the right cross-browser testing platform is crucial.
Many platforms overpromise broad browser coverage but underdeliver with limited browser-OS combinations and multiple test failures. Several risks stem from choosing such unreliable cloud testing vendors:
- Inconsistent Test Coverage: Platforms often claim 1000+ browser coverage but only offer а few recent browser versions, skewing test insights. Legacy browsers are ignored, leading to production issues.
- Flaky Test Executions: Unreliable and overloaded cloud infrastructure frequently creates test failures unrelated to the application. Distinguishing real app bugs gets challenging, leading to false positives.
- Lack of Debugging Capability: When а test run fails, platforms don’t provide screenshots or video recordings of test steps or any logs to enable debugging. Isolating code defects becomes lengthy and frustrating.
- Data Security Issues: For testing internal enterprise apps, handing over access to unreliable vendors with lax security standards can risk sensitive data leakage and compliance violations.
Given these unreliability risks that waste time and money and lead to vulnerability, choosing а robust, enterprise-grade solutions like LambdaTest is important.
LambdaTest leverages а highly optimized cloud infrastructure to offer true cross-browser coverage with over 3000 browser-OS-device combinations. Granular control ensures that only the needed environments are tested. Dedicated debugging tools like screenshot comparison, console logs, network logs, and video recordings enable quick defect diagnosis.
With enterprise-grade security certifications, LambdaTest helps accelerate reliable, fragmented cross-browser testing for web and mobile apps. Its scalable platform and intuitive UI significantly boost productivity while cutting test cycles by 70% compared to manual testing.
Some best practices for cross-browser test automation include:
- Covering all primary desktop, mobile, and legacy browsers
- Testing critical UI elements for alignment, rendering, and functionality
- Responsive testing across multiple device resolutions
- Identifying browser-specific CSS and JavaScript errors
- Confirming site authentication and workflow function correctly
● Visual Testing
Subtle UI deviations across device mediums severely undermine application usability. Solutions like Applitools Eyes enable the automation of visual UI testing across mobile, web, and native platforms. By comparing current screenshots against earlier baselines, visual bugs can be effortlessly identified.
Other aspects like checking for:
- Responsiveness across device sizes
- Pixel-perfect UI element positioning
- Broken page layouts
- Cross-device styling inconsistencies
- Contrast ratio issues
Ensuring pixel-perfect UI consistency across varying device sizes is vital for robust cross-browser testing. While solutions like Applitools Eyes enable automating visual UI testing to catch subtle deviations, LambdaTest takes it to the next level with AI-powered smart capabilities.
- SmartUI SDK: Seamlessly integrates with Selenium, Playwright, and Cypress to ensure uniform DOM rendering across 3000+ browsers. This enables functional + visual testing without changes to test suites.
- NPM CLI: Conveniently execute and scale Storybook visual regression tests through LambdaTest’s intuitive NPM package without test suite changes.
- AI Visual Analysis: Leverages advanced imagery algorithms to intelligently highlight only meaningful differing UI components instead of all pixel-level differences.
- Cross-Browser Support: Perform smart visual testing across 3000+ browser-OS-device combinations using Selenium, Playwright, and Cypress.
The above smart features check for responsiveness, pixel-perfect UI elements, page layout breaks, styling inconsistencies, and contrast ratio issues across platforms and devices to enable robust, accelerated testing.
With LambdaTest’s reliable and optimized infrastructure, testers can now build flawless, visually consistent cross-browser apps that improve the overall user experience. The automated smart analysis significantly cuts down the effort required to identify UI deviations through traditional screenshot comparisons.
● Performance Testing
With users expecting near-instant application loads regardless of their network environment, rigorous performance testing is imperative. This involves confirming optimal page load times, identifying performance bottlenecks, checking cache utilization, and profiling resource usage metrics across simulated network conditions spanning 3G to LTE connections.
Modern performance testing tools allow assessing web apps from various geographic locations while mimicking native mobile user agents to obtain realistic device benchmarks.
● Leveraging а Cloud Testing Lab
Configuring an elaborate internal test lab comprising а multitude of phones, tablets, browsers, and network configurations demands significant capital investments while increasing test maintenance overheads. Alternatively, leveraging cloud-based device labs like LambdaTest provides on-demand access to:
Extensive Device Infrastructure: LambdaTest offers instant access to а highly comprehensive cloud grid of 3000+ real browsers and operating system environments. This includes all the latest browser versions across desktop and mobile Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Opera running on Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, and custom versions.
This extensive device capability matrix enables testing teams to ship digital experiences with confidence without having to spend heavily on procuring and maintaining in-house labs.
Real Mobile Devices: Unlike emulators that approximate mobile environments, LambdaTest provides live testing access to the latest real Android and iOS devices like Samsung Galaxy S22, iPhone 14 Pro Max, etc. This facilitates testing real-world mobile user flows without approximations to detect device-specific issues.
Automation Framework Integrations: LambdaTest offers 120+ integrations with leading test automation frameworks like Selenium, Playwright, Appium, Espresso, etc. Tests can trigger parallel test runs on LambdaTest’s cloud directly from the IDE without needing changes. Powerful automation helps shift left, catch regressions faster, and optimize release velocity.
Reliability-Focused Features: Flaky test executions that pass/fail inconsistently severely slow down testing and release confidence. LambdaTest provides dedicated reliability capabilities like Automatic Wait, Auto-Healing, and Intelligent Runner to overcome test flakiness ensuring consistent test executions and stability at scale.
Enterprise-Grade Security: LambdaTest is SOC2 Type 2 and GDPR compliant, having implemented stringent data security practices covering data encryption, access controls, and rigorous third-party audits. Users can test securely without risks of sensitive data leakage over the cloud.
Dedicated Support Services: A key benefit of relying on a SaaS platform like LambdaTest is leveraging its expertise when issues arise. LambdaTest provides 24/7 dedicated assistance through email, chat, or phone to resolve queries quickly and scale test automation.
With these well-rounded capabilities, product teams can optimize test productivity, enhance release quality, and accelerate go-to-market speed by leveraging LambdaTest’s end-to-end cloud testing platform.
● Incorporating AI and ML
Advanced testing platforms are increasingly incorporating AI and ML to accelerate mundane testing tasks. For example:
- Auto-identify page elements for test script creation without manual intervention
- AI-driven test recommendation engines that suggest the next areas to test
- Intelligently pair browsers, devices, and operating systems for faster feedback
- Natural language test report generation using NLP algorithms
- Predicting software quality metrics like defects per release
As solutions get smarter, they will amplify tester productivity and elevate application quality to the next level.
Conclusion
With web apps being accessed from anywhere, testing comprehensively across the user devices is important. Using the right mix of emulators, real devices, test automation, visual testing tools, and cloud testing environments will enable organizations to deliver seamless cross-device experiences. Intelligent testing leveraging AI and ML will also unlock efficiency gains for modern QA teams.
Hopefully, these testing strategies have provided some valuable cross-device testing guidance for anyone building web applications today.
