Effective mobile application testing that meets all the requirements of modern quality assurance can be challenging. Not only do teams need to create tests that cover a range of different device types, operating system versions, and user interactions—including swipes, gestures, touches, and more—they also have to maintain the infrastructure and device fleets necessary to run these tests. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive testing strategy that can be implemented by all members of the mobile app team, regardless of technical proficiency.
Datadog Mobile Application Testing delivers fast, no-code, and reliable mobile app testing on real devices in the cloud. This lets any member of your team—whether they’re technical or non-technical—create and maintain automated tests that seamlessly integrate into your CI/CD pipelines, so you can ship mobile apps with confidence and increase your release velocity.
With Datadog Mobile Application Testing, you can create and run end-to-end tests for your applications on both iOS and Android. Datadog runs these tests on real phones and tablets (as opposed to emulators) to provide a realistic, step-by-step representation of key application workflows with screenshots of each step and detailed pass/fail results, so that your team can quickly visualize what went wrong and fix it. Additionally, these tests automatically adapt to minor changes in your app, simplifying the task of test maintenance as your app evolves.
In this post, we’ll show you how to use Datadog Mobile Application Testing to:
Create tests in Datadog Mobile Application Testing
Datadog Mobile Application Testing makes it easy to create, update, and maintain tests, easing the load on your developers and helping them release features without bugs that could impact your customer experience and the success of your business.
Say you’re a mobile app developer looking to run a test on the latest version of your ecommerce application, which fixes a bug in the checkout process. To create a new test in Mobile Application Testing, you can select New Test under UX Monitoring in the left-hand sidebar, as in the example below.
Next, select the app you’d like to run your test with. You can choose an existing app from Mobile Applications list, which contains all the applications you’ve already uploaded to the platform, or create a new one.
Then, choose the version of your app you want to test—if your app contains multiple versions, you can select a specific version to test or select Always run the latest to ensure your tests are always running on the latest version of your app.
From there, you can set the name of your test, the environment you want to run it in, and any additional tags to help share the results of your tests and make them easily visible to other teams. Then, choose which devices you want to run your test on.
Datadog Mobile Application Testing allows you to record a test just one time and replay the test across different devices on that same operating system, including both phones and tablets. This allows you to get a more holistic picture of user experience across devices while saving time and developer effort. Tests can be run manually, on a schedule, or via CI pipelines.
Record your test with our no-code test recorder
Datadog Mobile Application Testing allows anyone on your team, including non-technical users, to create and run tests by simply clicking and navigating through the most important flows in your app—instead of writing code—just like your users do. This ease of use helps you scale your testing and easily train new team members to create reliable, end-to-end mobile application tests across the most popular devices. Once you load your device, you can then start clicking through the flow that you want to capture, and Datadog will automatically record these actions as steps.
For instance, say you want to capture a checkout flow and make sure it works from end to end. You’ll click on the Chairs category, pick the Wicker Chair product, add it to your cart, go to your cart, and checkout.
Datadog automatically records and names each step you carry out in the user flow you are testing. Each step supports advanced options, such as waiting, continuing if a step fails, considering a test as failed overall if a single step fails, and disabling screenshots.
For example, let’s say you have a step that you know might fail but doesn’t block you from completing your test flow. You can select the option to continue if a step fails in order to complete the rest of your test and ensure that a subsequent step will not cause a separate issue.
Mobile app tests also support Assertions, which test the content presented to the user in your app—for example, whether or not text is present on the screen at a certain step, such as a confirmation screen that says, “Thank you! Your order has been placed.”
Mobile Application Testing also supports local and global variables which allow you to reuse commonly used values within (or across) tests to make test creation even easier. For example, let’s say a common workflow that occurs in many of your tests is logging in. You can save your credentials (email and password) as variables so they can be easily reused across tests and updated from one central place should they ever change.
In addition to automatically recording your interactions with a device, you can manually record steps using the actions available under the Special Actions button, including tap, type text, scroll, wait, deep link, and other options.
Finally, the Step Replayer allows you to replay each step in the test one by one if there are specific steps you want to double-check, or to run through them all sequentially.
View test results and debug
After you’ve created a test, it will appear in the Synthetic test page alongside all the rest of your mobile app, browser, and API tests.
The test details page provides metadata about the test itself, including the name of the test, the app being tested, associated monitors, and more.
Below this data, you will find a rundown of the most recent successful and failed test runs, broken out into steps. Clicking on a step will show you a highlighted area of the app that’s been interacted with, which is helpful when you’re debugging and want to figure out what interaction led to a failure.
With the ability to customize your tests, run them across many devices and operating systems, and drill down to more granular information about each test, you can better understand how users interact with your mobile application and identify issues with the user experience more quickly.
Ensure efficient and robust releases with Mobile Application Testing
Datadog’s Mobile Application Testing provides no-code tooling for creating, maintaining, and running mobile app tests across the most popular devices at any time, enabling technical and non-technical team members alike to test mobile applications and ship features with confidence. With self-healing tests, maintaining your test suite is easier than ever, and our robust scheduling and monitoring makes running these tests simple and cost-effective.
Mobile Application Testing complements Datadog Mobile Session Replay, RUM, APM, and browser testing, offering a unified testing platform for all your application’s needs. Additionally, Datadog offers built-in integrations with the most popular CI providers like GitHub Action, Jenkins, and CircleCI.
