How to Maintain App Quality at Scale

Testlio

April 11th, 2024

In February 2024, approximately 89,000 mobile apps were released via the Apple App and Google Play stores—37,000 and 52,000, respectively. That’s about 3,100 mobile apps per day, and that’s not even counting the apps released via other platforms. 

App consumers know they have options, and if your app isn’t cutting it for them, they can simply delete it and find a better one—which means you can’t afford to scrimp on app quality assurance. 

App quality covers various aspects—functionality, usability, performance, security, and customer satisfaction, to name a few. Does the app have all the necessary features to do its job well? Does it do what it says it will? Is it fast, responsive, and reliable? Does it deliver a positive user experience?

Yet, as apps grow and scale, comprehensive QA can often feel like a bottleneck with too many scenarios to test for. In this article, we’ll share insights on how you can efficiently maintain app quality at scale. 

Challenges in Maintaining App Quality

App scaling can be an exciting time for developers. However, as your app grows in size, feature set, complexity, and number of users, maintaining app quality can also become a hurdle. 

• Increasing Complexity: More features and integrations mean more potential points of failure.
• Diverse User Base: Expanding to wider audiences can introduce new usage patterns and behaviors, necessitating broader testing and optimization strategies.
• Resource Allocation: Scaling app development requires balancing resources between new features, maintenance, and quality assurance, which are often under tight budgets and timelines.
• Technological Evolution: Keeping up with rapid technological changes while ensuring the app performs well across platforms and devices requires considerable time and resources.
• Testing Coverage and Efficiency: As the app scales, more sophisticated testing strategies are necessary to ensure the app is thoroughly tested.
• Performance and Load Handling: More users means more traffic and bandwidth demands, which can affect the app’s ability to perform according to standards if not managed properly. 
• Consistency Across Regions: Global apps must deliver consistent quality and performance across different regions, taking into account local regulations, languages, and cultural differences.
• Feedback Integration: Managing and integrating feedback from a growing user base to improve app quality requires efficient processes and tools.

Strategies to Maintain App Quality

Despite these difficulties, there’s a silver lining. Below are strategies you can employ to maintain app quality at scale:

Leverage Test Automation

Automated app testing is key to scaling app quality. By automating repetitive testing tasks, teams achieve consistent quality while freeing up valuable human resources for more complex tasks. Plus, you get faster feedback cycles, increased test coverage, and parallel testing capabilities.

To ensure ideal outcomes, automate stable tests with high passing rates. Regularly update test scripts to reflect changes in the app—outdated tests can lead to false positives or negatives. Additionally, integrate automated tests within CI/CD pipelines so every change made to the codebase is automatically tested. This helps catch and fix bugs early in the development cycle. 

It’s important to note that building test automation capabilities can be quite challenging.  The shortage of skilled professionals and the ever-evolving tools make it difficult to hire test automation experts in-house. To ensure comprehensive automation coverage, you could consider partnering with QA experts to help set up automated testing strategies tailored to your app’s needs. 

Test with Real Users 

Real-world feedback allows developers to understand how actual users interact with their app, what issues they face, and what improvements they want. 

Some strategies you can use to collect feedback:

• Support channels, social media platforms, and user forums so users can easily share their experiences and feedback about your app
• Usability testing sessions to observe how users interact with your app
• Beta testing to check whether new features or new versions of your app are ready for mass rollout
• App analytics, usage data, and crash reports to identify areas for improvement

All these channels can provide insights into your app’s usability, functionality, potential bugs, and performance under real-life conditions.

Manage Updates and Iterations

Good update and iteration management is critical to maintaining app quality over time. This means ensuring new changes do not break existing functionalities, smoothly deprecating outdated features, and maintaining backward compatibility. 

Regression Testing

Regression testing verifies that new code changes do not affect current features. By automating and integrating these tests into your CI/CD pipeline, you can test code as soon as it’s submitted, identify unintended consequences, and ensure new releases maintain the integrity of existing features.

Deprecation

When deprecating features, communicate changes in advance. Provide clear timelines and reasons for the deprecation, and include all information in your app’s change logs, documentation, and announcements. Gradually phase out deprecated features instead of removing them abruptly to give users ample time to adjust and migrate. 

Backward Compatibility

Implement API versioning to make updates without disrupting the service for existing users. This way, you can introduce new features or changes while older API versions remain stable for those who haven’t upgraded yet.

Feature flags, meanwhile, let you roll out new features gradually and control who sees them. This allows you to test new features with a small group of users and quickly remove them if issues arise.

Test your app thoroughly to make sure new updates work well with older versions. This includes checking for data integrity, user experience, and functionality across versions.

Want to learn more about the best ways to test your mobile apps? Check our 9-step mobile app testing strategy checklist. 

Scale Your Resources Without Hiring

Enlist the help of a community of users and developers to crowdtest your application, identify issues, and recommend improvements. Crowdsourcing not only allows you to quickly collect feedback from various types of audiences but also uncover issues affecting specific user groups or device architectures. 

By utilizing a global network of experienced quality engineers and software testers, you can scale your QA and make better use of your internal team for more strategic projects. Crowdsourcing partners can help accomplish this by reducing idle time, performing testing outside of regular business hours, and ensuring resource efficiency by helping you scale your resources up or down as needed.

Managing app quality as your app grows is no easy feat, and an expert QA partner like Testlio can be a game-changer. We bring specialized skills to the table and a world-class testing platform for your various testing needs. Reach out today to know more.