Testing is a crucial part of application development, with so many mobile apps available in the market delivering high-quality apps at a faster speed is essential to ensure their success. To assess the quality of the developed application and ensure that it works as intended, testers and developers perform various tests. To perform all the tests they leverage mobile device labs which provide them instant access to a wide range of real devices on real device cloud, enabling them to quickly release high-quality mobile apps to users.
Through the mobile device lab, testers can automate their mobile app testing and run tests while simulating real user conditions. As a result, they can improve the testing speed and ensure the quality release of their mobile app delivery.
However, the success of a mobile app largely depends on an effective test strategy that aligns with the testing goals. However measuring the success of test strategy is not a simple task, as it involves various factors and perspectives. However, some common testing metrics can help in evaluating test strategies to ensure the success and quality of mobile apps. These metrics are key indicators of success that assess the apps’ performance by identifying areas that need to be improved.
The effectiveness of mobile apps can be measured by using mobile app success metrics. These metrics will allow for measuring and improving the attainment, commitment, maintenance, conversion rate, and app performance.
In this article, we will discuss some of the methods and metrics of measuring mobile app’s performance and success. But before proceeding with that we will first look at what testing metrics are, what are their importance, as well as their benefits. So let’s get started with the measuring success and quality of mobile apps using the below-mentioned metrics.
What are testing metrics?
Testing metrics are a way to measure and monitor the test activities. They indicate the efficiency, effectiveness, quality, and performance of application testing techniques. More importantly, testing metrics allow developers to collect data about various testing procedures and plan for ways to make them more efficient. Test metrics provide insights into the team’s test progress, productivity, and the quality of the application under test.
Rather than just providing reports test metrics provide tangible answers to the following questions,
- What has been tested?
- How long will it take to test?
- How much will the testing cost be?
- How severe are the bugs?
- Numbers of bugs found, fixed, reopened, closed, or delayed?
- Number of bugs that are not found?
- How good were the tests?
The aim of collecting test metrics is to provide different testing techniques that help to improve various aspects of the application test process including its quality, security, user satisfaction, development cost, and performance.
Why are testing metrics important?
Here are some reasons software testing metrics are important:
- Defines testing goals and helps quantify the results
- Provides insight into risks associated with the app.
- Improves the test planning process and develops new strategies to optimize the app’s functioning.
- Assist in identifying areas for improvement.
- Minimizes costs associated with defects.
- Improves user experience by providing insight into how users interact with an application.
- Optimizes processes that are involved in app development.
- Through testing metrics, the test team can improve the quality of testing techniques used in each phase by identifying ineffective, irrelevant, incompatible, or time-consuming test cases.
Mobile app testing metrics to ensure success and quality
To make it easier to measure the success of the mobile app below are some mobile app testing metrics that will help to understand the overall performance of the app and identify key areas of improvement.
User growth rate
The user growth rate is a fundamental metric for measuring mobile app success. and customer acquisition trends can reveal a lot about your business. A declining user growth rate indicates a problem with the app that requires immediate attention. Hence developers need to investigate issues that might be causing user churn and fix them.
Download and installation
App downloads are a great metric to know the app’s success. This metric indicates how much recognition the app has gained among users in the market through the number of app downloads via the app store. Downloads indicate how many times an app is installed.
If people are not downloading the app, or there is a discrepancy in the number of downloading and installation, then this signifies that there might be some technical issue in the installation process that can be set right. Also, it is suggested to try out app store optimization to accelerate the download.
App retention rate
App retention rate is an important metric that tells about the number of users who continue to engage and re-engage with an app on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. This app metric indicates the return of users after they first time visited the app p. If the number of users rises, it indicates that the app is a success.
These metrics provide a clear view of the app’s growth by validating how well in-app experiences keep users interested. This helps to inform how users interact with the mobile app and also overall user satisfaction. Nevertheless, it is always important to focus on this metric to keep the users stuck to the app consistently.
App churn rate and abandonment
The churn rates indicate the opposite of the retention rate. The main focus of this metric is finding out why users leave the application. The metric tells all about the number of users who uninstall or leave the app, especially the active ones. A high churn rate indicates that the app still needs to retain many of its users.
Therefore tracking the churn rate is quite important for app developers so that they can apply other metrics to know at what stage the users abandoned the app. This will enable them to understand what features are lacking in causing dissatisfaction among users, and how they can be approved for maximum success of the app.
Crashes
App crashes are inevitable and common in mobile applications. If an app continuously crashes or freezes then users are left with no choice but to drop off or abandon it.
Therefore it is important to track crashed sessions and affected users in real-time, export the detailed crash logs, and identify the point where the app crashed, why the problem is occurring, and then fix them as quickly as possible. Therefore crash analytics and reports are the key metrics developers can focus on to deliver a flawless performing app to the end-users.
Session length metrics
Session length metrics indicate how much time users spend in the app during a single visit. Sessions start as a user opens and performs actions in the app and it ends either when the app is closed or after a certain period of inactivity.
The number, and length of the sessions depend on how engaging the pages or features of the app are. The longer the users stay, the more they are engaged. Session length may or may not be the most significant metric but, the longer a user spends in the app, the better it is.
Session depth provides further insight into your customer engagement levels -. The more they are engaged, the greater the chances they will convert.
Registrations and subscriptions
This metric indicates how widely the app reaches users by assessing whether users register and create a login account after downloading a mobile app. If users like the app, there is a very good chance that they will register for the app. As a result, this would improve your user base.
But if the users encounter complexities during registration or they need to fill up lengthy forms with a lot of information, then there may be chances for fewer registrations. This may also be because the app landing page is lacking or the loading time is way too high. Therefore if app developers want more people to register for their apps after downloading them then they need for these to be fixed, and set right.
Active users of the app
This is another important metric to consider for measuring an app’s success rate as it provides a measure of the user base. This metric keeps count of users who are actively using the application post-download and those who have abandoned the app.
App views, ratings, and feedback
These app metrics can prove most useful for measuring app growth and improving the quality of the app. User ratings, the number of user views, and reviews from users are easy to gather and help in providing an idea of the users’ overall reaction after using the app.
If the app gets more positive reviews, then this would mean that the app is performing amazingly. In case, it receives negative reviews, then that would mean that it requires focusing on the issues and getting them fixed in time to improve its quality and performance.
Utilize LambdaTest to expedite the application testing process
In this ever-changing environment of application development delivering great user experiences on mobile apps is uniquely challenging. However, testing metrics act as a savior that helps to measure the success and quality of mobile apps. They offer a numerical framework for assessing the efficiency, efficacy, and general quality of the testing procedure.
Metrics can be used by testing teams to acquire useful information, identify areas that need more attention, improve application performance, enhance user experience, and deliver high-quality applications. Thus choosing the right testing metrics and using them accurately is the key to getting the desired results.
LambdaTest is an automation testing platform that supports automation of all kinds of mobile, and web applications without any hassle of installation. Integrating LambdaTest in the application testing process can improve the quality of the overall application, and expedite the release cycle. It is also supports all major automation testing frameworks such as Selenium, Appium, Playwright and other.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that allows faster test running both manual and automated tests of mobile and web applications at scale. The platform enables testers to perform both real-time and automation testing by providing testers access to more than 3000 environments, real mobile devices, and browsers. This enables the tester to ensure comprehensive test coverage across various configurations, speed up the testing process, and enhance app quality.
Leveraging this platform testers can perform parallel testing which allows them to execute tests concurrently across multiple browsers and devices, thus optimizing efficiency. Its screenshot and video recording features allow capturing screenshots and recording videos of the entire test sessions. This provides visual evidence of test execution which enables better bug reporting and documentation.
Identifying every single bug a user may encounter is essential because if they remain undetected then they cannot be tracked, monitored, or resolved. LambdaTest provides various debugging and bug-tracking tools that help to obtain accurate information on bugs, which facilitates early bug detection, faster feedback, improved collaboration, and increased test coverage.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it can be said that understanding mobile app testing metrics is imperative to measure the success and quality of the app. With all the above-mentioned metrics, there is no need to worry about measuring app quality and improving its growth.
