Mobile app development and testing can be a very difficult process, but high pressure from consumers, competitors, and even internal elements can make things worse and even hurt the process, according to a survey conducted by data gathering and analysis firm Testplant. Pressure to innovate and iterate quickly is heavy, especially for large companies or makers of popular Android and other apps, and can cause mistakes to be made or the final product to be haphazardly rushed out. The fact that little or no testing can sometimes go into apps being put out for download because of this essentially makes the consumer’s wishes backfire; by putting on the pressure to get more, better apps in a shorter amount of time, consumers are actually pushing developers to put out buggy, unfinished, and untested apps in some cases.
To put that sentiment into numbers, Testplant’s survey found that 42 percent of the respondents felt that they were asked to develop apps in an unrealistic time frame and more than a third said that the pressure hurts testing in particular. This data is backed by more data from the survey; specifically, almost half of all the respondents admitted to putting out apps that were not tested in the manner that they would have felt is right, and 45 percent even went as far as releasing apps that they knew would not live up to certain quality standards, then simply updating them later. 60 percent of the respondents said that most of the pressure that fueled those decisions came from within the company, while almost half said it came from watching what their rivals are doing.
Half of the respondents said that their companies’ apps would begin moving into the IoT sector or enabling IoT features, while 58 percent said the same of AI, and finally, 60 percent of them said that they or their company were planning or working on apps that use machine learning and other AI conventions under the surface. Those are all extremely difficult and time-consuming concepts to create and test, so some firms are turning to automated testing of certain app functions. Even then, you not only have to develop an app and iron out bugs over time with testing, but you also have to develop automated testing software and possibly hardware in order to have it save you time that would otherwise be spent on manual testing.