Mistakes are inevitable, which is why having a QA team is crucial to ensure the accuracy of your work and safeguard your well-being. While surgeons rely solely on themselves, programmers are fortunate to have additional support. A QA team plays a vital role in delivering high-quality products to clients and approaching applications from a user’s perspective.
The bugs we encounter on a daily basis can be categorized into three groups:
- App-specific bugs: These bugs are directly tied to the business logic of the application. Detecting them can be challenging, requiring a deep understanding of the app’s intricacies. It is essential to document test cases for this type of bug.
- Platform-specific bugs: Each mobile platform, such as Android and iOS, has its own set of bugs that are specific to how the operating system functions.
- Bugs related to fundamental elements of the app architecture: This particular category of bugs is the most prevalent and often overlooked. Let’s examine some of these bugs in more detail in this article.
The Pitfall of Button Tapping/Clicking
Let me bring your attention to a common challenge that programmers often encounter. While buttons may appear innocuous, they can become a substantial source of issues if the potential for rapid clicks is not adequately addressed. This situation requires thorough testing, especially in applications that involve crucial actions like payments or message sending, as unintentional repetitions can occur. Consider the predicament of inadvertently tapping the “Pay” button twice and consequently being charged twice for a transaction. Such scenarios highlight the importance of implementing robust mechanisms to handle rapid clicks and prevent unintended consequences for users.
The Importance of a Progress Indicator
Additionally, it is vital to incorporate a progress indicator to keep users informed about ongoing operations. Numerous situations involve actions that take a considerable amount of time, and it becomes crucial to notify users that something is currently in progress. This applies to scenarios like screen/content loading, and lengthy network operations triggered by button clicks (such as profile editing or image uploading). Consider a user attempting to update their profile image by tapping the “upload” button. Without a progress indicator during the image upload process, which may take a while, the user might mistakenly tap the button multiple times, assuming that nothing is happening.
The Hidden Time-Bomb: App Crash upon Button Tap
Picture the unsettling experience of stumbling upon a concealed “time bomb” nestled within your app. This insidious issue often emerges with buttons that lie hidden within the depths of the application, particularly within settings or obscure sections, making them susceptible to being overlooked during development and testing. However, when unsuspecting users encounter and interact with these buttons, the consequence is nothing short of disruptive—the application crashes abruptly, leaving users bewildered and frustrated. The gravity of this situation underscores the criticality of diligently inspecting every nook and cranny of the app’s functionality, ensuring that hidden buttons are thoroughly tested and accounted for, sparing users from unexpected disruptions and preserving their trust in the application.
App Orientation: Portrait/Landscape Challenges
Have you ever experienced the frustration of changing your screen orientation, only to find that the current state of the application was not saved? This issue often occurs in the Android system, where a specific screen element, known as an Activity, can be destroyed during screen rotations, resulting in the loss of its current state. As a result, previously selected checkboxes or dropdown values may be cleared after the rotation. While an increasing number of applications restrict the use of landscape orientation to mitigate this issue, it still persists in applications that allow horizontal viewing.
The Significance of Push Notifications
The process of implementing push notifications in an application may appear daunting at first, given its inherent complexity. Yet, the significance of push notifications as a communication and engagement conduit between the app and its users cannot be overstated. These notifications hold immense value in capturing users’ attention and fostering meaningful interactions. Therefore, guaranteeing their seamless functionality becomes paramount to facilitating effective user engagement. Developers must navigate intricate configuration processes, optimize delivery mechanisms, and conduct thorough testing to ensure reliable and timely delivery of push notifications. By prioritizing their proper implementation, app creators can harness the full potential of push notifications for enhanced user interaction and satisfaction.
Enhancing Input Types for User Experience and Security
One of the primary considerations is ensuring that the appropriate keyboard type is displayed. This simple step can greatly assist users by presenting a keyboard tailored to the input field type. For instance, a phone number field would benefit from a numeric keyboard, while an email field should provide a keyboard with the “@” character. Surprisingly, users appreciate this attention to detail.
Another crucial aspect to address is the input type for passwords. Using a plain text field for passwords is inherently unsafe. It is far easier for someone to read a password over someone’s shoulder than it is to decipher keystrokes. Therefore, it is imperative to utilize a password input type, providing an added layer of security.
Error Handling: Ensuring Smooth Application Execution
It is crucial to incorporate error handling into your application. However, it’s important to consider that displaying errors directly from the server may provide valuable information to programmers, but it might not always be meaningful to the end user. Ultimately, we develop applications for the benefit of users, not programmers. Therefore, it is advisable to prioritize showing user-friendly messages like “Invalid login credentials” rather than exposing technical codes like “401” to the end user.
Optimizing Page Layout for Various Screen Resolutions and Densities
As the development of mobile applications continues to expand, the requirements involved are becoming increasingly diverse. Device models vary in terms of size, resolution, and operating system versions. As a diligent QA professional, it is your responsibility to ensure that the application maintains an appealing appearance across all these devices.
Ensuring Button Selectors are Present
Remember to include selectors for all buttons. This feature helps users recognize when an action has been executed, preventing unintended duplicate clicks. This is particularly crucial for actions that have a prolonged duration, as mentioned in points #2 and #1 earlier in this article.
Avoiding Repeated Results in Lists
This issue pertains specifically to Android and relates to the functionality of “ListView.” Essentially, when scrolling, each newly revealed element at the bottom of the list reuses the view of the element that has just scrolled off the screen. This can result in both cells, the new one and the one that disappeared, displaying the same data. Understanding this mechanism is essential, as this issue commonly arises.
Conclusion
Considering the points discussed, it is reasonable to acknowledge that the bugs mentioned in this article may be relatively easy to detect but challenging to remember. It is crucial to identify and resolve these problems before releasing the app to end users. To all developers, I encourage you to make the work of QA teams easier by considering the aforementioned aspects during software creation. And to all QA professionals, I hope you encounter these challenges sparingly.