How can I do performance testing of Mobile Application?

Question

I have a task of testing a mobile application by manual testing.

I have to do performance testing and also load testing for this application.

So, how can I test it manually?

Do I need to use any automation tools for it?

Please suggest to me proper way for performance testing of mobile application.

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

Performance testing doesn't only mean many users hitting the same thing at the same time.

There are various aspects of performance testing which you can opt to do manually.

As you said you have to test a mobile application, you can test,

1. Whether it works in the same seamless manner on a phone with low hardware, OS and memory configurations as it does on a phone with high memory and hardware or does it hang or get slow.
2. How much battery does it consume? How much memory and CPU does it occupy?
3. Does it get slow if used for a long time?
4. Does it maintain a local database on the phone? If yes, does it get slow with increase in size of the database?
5. If it requires internet connection how well does it work with slow network connections like 2G or bad WIFI?
6. Have few applications open in background and then try to run your application. Does it hang or get slow?
7. And so on...

For load testing you can get the HTTP requests the app makes to a remote server and use tools like JMeter to generate a load of several users. But that's to test your host server and possible your applications interaction with the server under heavy load.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

Normally performance testing of mobile application is not required as mobile applications have only one user and if you're happy with application load time, responsiveness, rendering times, etc. - you should be good to go.

If your application is being updated frequently and it is relatively big and complex you might want to automate the steps and set some thresholds which define maximum operation completion time. In that case check out the following tools:

• Appium
• Calabash

If your application explicitly relies on backend server, i.e. it's intensively using web or database to display data you may want to check the performance of the backend i.e. when several hundreds or thousands users are using the application in the same moment. In that case you can simulate the traffic which is being sent from multiple mobile devices, collect and analyse backend metrics and key performance indicators. You can do it with i.e. Apache JMeter - see Load Testing Mobile Apps. But Made Easy for details.

All mentioned tools are free and open source.

Answer 3

1. You can try to turn on the screen rotation and rotate the screen and instantly click on some functionalities and check if they behave they way it is expected or not.In my workplace we had issue that when the screen is rotated the functionalities wouldn't work or would take time to respond.
2. To test it on different network, you can configure the router to which your device would be connected and provide the network download and upload speed to a standard speed for slow network.
3. You can check the behavior of the app when the phone is offline from data.

Answer 4

To check the performance of Mobile Application - First you have basic knowledge of Jmeter and Jmeter is a java application and it is a platform independent. With the help of jmeter we have to perform performance testing(load testing , stress testing and volume testing).

Answer 5

I feel your question is a bit contradictory/too broad of a scope. You will first need to decide what exactly you want to test..

Manual testing is usually only good for functional testing (seeing if it works the way it should). If you want to do performance testing there are multiple tooling options to consider:

1. do you want to test the app itself (GUI) on a mobile device, if yes then you are looking in to something like Ranorex.
2. Do you want to do a performance/load test of the backend that the app is using then you can consider JMeter. You can record the steps from the mobile device using a local proxy (on a PC device) and play these steps back with a predefined amount of users/iterations/...

Answer 6

Yes, JMeter can record HTTP or Https request going to the server from your mobile application also. It is required that mobile and JMeter are on the same network.

Below is the configuration required:

Configure your proxy server in JMeter to run at a specified port. Set up the proxy on your mobile wifi settings and enter the same port number that is used in the recorder. Install the Root CA certificate on your mobile. Hit server requests from your mobile and observe it getting captured by the specified controller.