These days advancement in digital connectivity has completely changed people’s lives. With the increasing number of online applications on which the daily lives of people massively depend, testing has become essential to ensure its reliability and quality.
Testing an app on hundreds of real devices before launching into the real world is quite challenging, but what is more mind-boggling is getting access to those real devices.
Therefore many organizations have started adopting high-tech labs that are remote test labs, operated remotely and specifically target device behavior regarding speed, memory usage, and battery consumption. Remote test lab environments are the most efficient solutions to improve the scalability, flexibility, and efficiency of the modern testing process.
In this article we will explore the potential of remote test labs, explaining their benefits and challenges, and the best practices for initiating modern remote testing. We will also look at some of the best ways to maintain effective remote test lab management. Before we do that let’s understand what a remote test lab is.
What is a Remote test lab?
Remote test labs are virtual labs that allow testers and developers to access laboratory equipment, like real devices, and test remotely over the internet. The remote test lab ensures that the app is tested on all possible devices and delivers the best user experience. Utilizing a remote test lab helps in finding and fixing bugs as early as possible, reduces the time-to-market, launches more features, and covers all possible real mobile devices
Remote Test Lab is a solution that provides developers the facility to control real devices remotely through a web browser. Developers can interact with the device in real-time and comprehensively test their application before its production.
Testing an application using a remote test lab means conducting application test cases from a location where the testing team is not physically located. The testers remotely access tools using cloud testing technologies, or virtualization to perform this process. Integrating with cloud technologies or remote test labs enables developers to access all the required tools, dependencies, and libraries through multiple online servers.
Using a remote test lab, developers can conduct testing of a website or application on real devices from any location over the internet rather than being physically present in a lab setting. It is particularly useful and cost-effective for testing applications that are fully cloud-hosted. This remote test method has gained popularity in recent years due to its convenience, cost-effectiveness, and ability to reach a broader and more diverse user base.
Understanding the need for a remote test lab
The rise of remote work and distributed teams has fueled the growth and adoption of remote testing in recent years. In earlier days, compatibility of an application on the desktop was the only concern of testers and developers as desktops were the only platform for accessing multiple applications. However, the evolution of technology has led to an increase in the usage of applications on mobile devices, tablets, and even IoTs.
Hence, creating and maintaining an in-house test lab for all modern devices becomes hectic and expensive for developers. Moreover, testers must also go through the hassle of updating thousands of newer devices entering the market annually.
To overcome this challenge testers opt for using a remote testing setup. A remote test lab helps not only save infrastructure costs but also saves a lot of time that testers can invest in other crucial areas of the app development process.
Benefits of remote test labs
Remote usability testing offers various benefits; let’s have a look at a few of them.
Cost-Effective
Remote test labs offer the advantage of being more safe and cost-effective compared to in-lab testing, eliminating the need for physical testing infrastructure, equipment, and materials, and reducing the cost of maintaining them, also the testers do not have to physically travel to the location of the test bench to execute the test cases.
Time flexibility
Remote test labs provide testers the capability to access real-world testing environments from anywhere in the world at any time. This approach helps to improve global collaboration and test implementation round-the-clock. Remote testing environments elevate testing efficiency by providing the test team with a more realistic and practical testing experience.
Scalability
Remote testing is easily scalable. Since the developers do not have to configure a physical testing environment, they can easily and quickly scale the test infrastructure up or down depending on the need. This means that developers can seamlessly conduct multiple tests with a larger number of test cases in parallel.
This scalability of the remote test lab allows for easy comparative tests of different versions, interfaces, or flows by recruiting for multiple simultaneous moderated sessions.
Real devices access
Providing access to real devices is another advantage of remote labs, which might otherwise be unavailable, expensive, or difficult to access. Testing the app on real devices in the real user world, rather than in-lab environments, helps to get contextual insights into the user’s natural interaction with the application.
Accessibility and convenience
Another major advantage of remote test labs is the flexibility and convenience of access from anywhere and at any time. This means that testers and developers can complete their testing tasks on their schedule and at their own pace.
Reaching beyond physical proximity provides developers with increased accessibility and convenience to gain insights from users across different locations, environments, and demographics. The approach facilitates testing applications internationally before launch, expanding the global user experience.
Faster feedback
App developers and testers also believe that a remote testing lab is crucial in streamlining the testing processes and helps gain a faster feedback cycle. This feedback cycle allows for quickly resolving errors before releasing them to end users.
Limitations of remote test labs
While remote test labs offer numerous benefits, there are some limitations as well to consider when using them.
Limited environmental control
One of the main drawbacks of remote test labs is the lack of direct physical interaction and control over testing environments. Developers and testers may not have the same level of hands-on experience and testing as in traditional in-person laboratories.
Without having direct control over the testing environment developers can miss out on noticing fine details and making dynamic adjustments. This can impact the accuracy and richness of application testing compared to in-lab testing. Therefore the user’s behavior and appropriate feedback can potentially affect the test results.
Technical issues
Conducting testing in a remote test lab, testers may encounter technical problems that can disrupt the testing process. Connectivity problems, incompatible software, or device-related issues may arise when working with off-site participants. This as a result can lead to frustration and may directly affect the quality of an application.
Unstable network connections can lead to lag and poor video quality during remote sessions, testing tools may not perform consistently across different operating systems and browsers. The inability to access smartphones, laptops, webcams, or microphones, can complicate the entire testing process.
Limited assistance
In remote testing, there is no face-to-face interaction which can result in a less personal and emotionally disconnected experience. Testers may struggle with tasks or encounter difficulties but cannot get immediate assistance like in a lab setting. This can lead to getting stuck or abandoning tasks in advance as a result of rapport building and the depth of received feedback gets impacted.
Despite the above challenges, a remote test lab can prove to be valuable when testers use it with careful planning, clear communication, and appropriate remote testing tools based on specific testing needs.
Best practices for remote test lab implementation
Let us now go through some of the best practices that can help modern testers efficiently manage a remote testing lab while elevating its efficiency and productivity:
Establish proper communications
Clear communication among remote team members is essential to avoid interruptions or bottlenecks and successful remote testing. Testers must establish clear communication channels, including video conferencing tools, and chat platforms to initiate smooth collaboration among the team.
During this process, it is also important for the app developers and testers to be aware of the time zone differences that can impact the communication channels. So, it is essential to plan the communications accordingly to avoid interruptions or bottlenecks.
Define the roles and responsibilities of team member
The roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined by the app tester for each of the team members involved in the remote testing. It includes the testers, developers, test leads, and system administrators. Well-defined roles and responsibilities help testers avoid confusion and ensure accountability during the entire testing process. This is because the team is responsible for efficiently solving the application errors and quickly forwarding them to the deployment phase.
Implement security measures
Security is one of the most critical considerations for remote testing infrastructure, because, using a remote test lab environment, sensitive applications get tested like banking and health apps, including their sensitive features which have a lot of important security-related user data.
Therefore app testers need to implement robust security measures, like multi-factor authentication, encryption, and access control mechanisms safeguarding the user data and infrastructure against any breaches or unwanted access.
Automate test processes
In modern application test cycles, developers need to correctly conduct thousands of different test instances to guarantee the proper functioning of the application. Executing these processes with a manual testing approach will take a lot of time from several weeks to months to complete.
Instead, testers can opt for automation testing to automatically execute these test cases on their target devices and other combinations. Additionally integrating automation testing with a remote test lab, testers can streamline repetitive tasks, including report analysis, test execution, and report generation.
This process helps the app developers and testers save time, and use it to invest in other complex areas or create unique features for future application iterations.
Monitor and analyze test reports
It is suggested to continuously monitor the performance of the remote testing environments and infrastructure utilizing monitoring tools and analytics dashboards during different stages to identify the potential bottlenecks or issues in the application development and testing process. This approach will help testers track key metrics, including resource utilization, execution time, and overall test coverage.
Provide training and support
Using and handling a remote testing environment, testers and developers must need to be fully trained. Providing training and support by offering training sessions, rich documentation, and online tutorials will help app testers get familiarized with best practices and troubleshooting crucial techniques to maintain the stability of the testing infrastructure, and efficiently utilize all the resources of a remote test environment.
Encourage team collaboration
Fostering a culture of collaboration and sharing knowledge among the remote testing team members will help in exchanging ideas and insights and improve the testing processes collectively. This can be achieved with regular meetings, peer reviews, and brainstorming sessions.
Adapting and Iterating the Test Instances
Finally, the application testers must develop a mindset of continuous improvement and adaptation when working with a remote test lab setup will help application testers gain insights and solicit feedback from team members and stakeholders to identify problem-related areas and make necessary improvements. Using this feedback testers can also implement changes to validate improvements by conducting additional rounds of testing.
Utilizing cloud-based testing platforms
A wide range of tools and platforms are available to facilitate remote testing. Modern cloud-based testing platforms support test automation with remote access capabilities by providing on-demand access to multiple testing environments and resources. Integrating a remote test lab with platforms like LambdaTest makes it easy for a remote operator to facilitate continuous testing and monitor test cases parallely.
LambdaTest is a robust cloud-based automation testing platform that allows testers and developers across different locations to work together by logging in from any device and anywhere. This platform allows app testers to expand their target user reach and achieve quality by increasing their application compatibility with legacy devices and older and outdated browser versions.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that allows running manual and automation testing of web and mobile applications at scale by providing access to more than 3000 environments, browsers, and real mobile device cloud.
This platform can also be integrated with CI/CD, bug tracking, and collaboration tools that help elevate test reporting and debugging with real-time test activity logs. Hence members of a remote testing team can monitor bugs and errors even when the tests are still running and can work together on the test case and have the issues fixed on the go.
Conclusion
Testing the applications on real devices is imperative, the regular launch of feature-rich devices has made it a challenging task for testers to validate the applications in the dynamic ecosystem by investing in and maintaining a dedicated lab. Therefore a reliable and convenient alternative to achieve quality is utilizing a remote test lab that offers access to a large or possibly every device and network type for application testing.
Remote testing has become an increasingly popular way of evaluating and improving application quality and user experiences. However, it is important to consider the limitations of remote test labs and carefully design and implement them to ensure intended testing outcomes.