Common Bugs: Mobile Testing

Testers are often thought of a person who find bugs, but have you ever consider how testers actually consider testing ? At the heart of testing is the capability to ask challenging and relevant questions. You are on your way to becoming a good tester if you blend your investigating/questioning skills with your domain knowledge. When I am talking about mobile application testing following quick questions comes in our mind:

• What platforms should this product work on?
• What is the application is supposed to do?
• What happens if I do this?

Mobile testers will often adopt the mindset of different types of people — not literally, of course, but the ability to think, analyze and visualize themselves as different users can be quite enlightening.
Testers might put themselves in these shoes:

• Novice user,
• Experienced user,
• Fan,
• Hacker,
• Competitor.

The most common type of mobile testing bugs that I encountered are as follows:

Functional

• Login/Logout : Bugs related to Login/Logout process.
• Input Validation: Bugs related to valid/invalid inputs.
• Error/Warning Messages: Bugs related to error and warning handling mechanism of the applications.
• Crashes: Bugs related to the crashing and forced closing of the application.
• Mobile Interruptions: Bugs related to the mobile interruptions such as incoming call,SMS and battery notifications.
• Connectivity: bugs related to the network connectivity such as GPRS, 3G, poor network, wifi , Airplane mode , APN settings and no networks.

Usability

• Layout/Readability: Bugs related to the general layout and readability issues of the applications.
• Orientation: Bugs related to the orientation portrait/landscape of the application.
• Navigation and Paging: Bugs related to the navigation and paging.
• Zooming/Multitouching: Bugs related to zooming IN/OUT and multitouching issues.

Security

• Password Validation: Bugs related to weak password validation.
• Cookies: Bugs related to insecure cookies validation.

Localization

• Grammar Errors: Bugs related to general grammar errors of the localized applications.
• Misspeled words: Bugs related to the misspeled words, phrases of the localized applications.
• Misspeled/Incorrect Punctuation: Bugs related to the misspeled or incorrect punctuation or symbols usage  of the localized application. For instance usage of currency symbol.

Others

• Installation/Uninstallation: Bugs related to the installation and uninstallation of the applications.
• Configurations: Bugs related to the configurations of the applications.
• Upgrades: Bugs related to the upgrades of the applications.
• Background Process: Bugs related when the application  is working in the background.
• Battery and Memory Usage: Bugs related to the  issues when the application consumes high battery and memory.