Developing mobile applications is very different from developing PC software or even embedded software. Mobile development is meant to be agile, and a lot of great tools and practices have been developed for that agility. However, doing something manually — such as testing an app — is never agile, which is why test automation has shown tremendous growth among app and game developers, speeding up their doings and yielding robust and better results.

To achieve compatibility between users, devices and the market, including test automation as a part of the agile development process is typical. Fortunately, a lot of tools are available, and test automation is a perfect fit for this process. For example, let’s say your typical development sprint is two weeks. You have daily standups and a lot of scrum activities, and you own internal policies that gear development to the final product. Test automation offers a significant value-add by enabling testing to be done in parallel — for example, as nightly test sessions. By the next morning, the tests will have been finalized and the results of the latest regression will be ready for review. Fixing an issue earlier will save a lot of time and get developers to finalize the product sooner; most importantly, it cumulates to better quality, with fewer bugs.