Do you have a question -- What are KPIs and Metrics and the differences between them? Then read this blog post. It will help in knowing the differences and how each help the other mutually and remain exclusive.
The sixth question from season two of 100 Days of Skilled Testing is:
How do you determine the essential performance metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) when assessing the performance of a mobile native app?
Why I Focus on Metrics Here?
Here, in this blog post, I will focus on Metrics and not KPIs. If you have read the above referenced blog post on KPIs and Metrics, you will learn,
- The KPIs are defined objectives by the business.
- Knowing this is important.
- But, to accomplish the KPIs objective, one has to extract the contextually suitable metric from the system and have to evaluate it.
As a test engineer, I evaluate from technical perspective with an orientation of business thoughts.
- So, the identifying and defining the metrics makes more sense to my role.
- Hence, I pick the Metrics.
A KPI example for a mobile app,
- The set percentage [what percentage?] of five start rating in store with positive emotions in a review.
What may be the KPIs, I will have to correlate it with [a] metrics so that we work towards accomplishing the KPIs set.
What is Performance to Mobile Native App?
The Native App
A native mobile app is an app developed for a particular mobile device or platform like Android and iOS. The native apps developed for one platform cannot be run on another platform. That is, Android app cannot run on iPhone, and vice versa.
The Android apps are written in Kotlin, today. The iOS apps are written in Swift. The native apps can be developed in a way that it can run both in offline and online mode based on its business objectives.
An example of the native app which we can easily understand is,
- WhatsApp for Android and iOS devices
Performance and Native App
For first, my mobile device is not my customers device. The Android device fragmentation makes it much more challenge with computing power offered for devices by OEMs.
Though, iOS have its fragmentation on OS version and device's computing power, it is not huge when compared with fragmentation of Android devices. This is a challenge for Android mobile app in all aspects and especially in performance.
The performance will indicate different advantage, risks and problems to a native app on a platform and its devices. The performance can be classified into different areas for native mobile apps.
It can range from, being deep technical areas to the experience a user expresses in using the app in a given context. Everything is performance here!
Hence it is not easy when talking about performance in the mobile's app space. While it is so ambiguous and hard subject, how one can pull the metrics for the performance here?
From a technical perspective, the word "performance" is not specific; it is vague. If one says, the mobile app is performing well, what does it mean?
- Is it fast?
- Is it consuming low battery power?
- Is it consuming less memory?
- Is it not consuming much network?
- Is it smooth to interact, responsive, and no jank experience?
- Is it intuitive and secure?
- Is it number of crashes?
- Is it having a consistent update and bug fixes?
What you say?
The Common Metrics - Android and iOS
- App Install Time
- App Launch Time
- Cold Start
- Warm Start
- Hot Start
- Private Memory Size of App on available Heap
- Number of Views
- Garbage Collection - Frequency
- Data Residual Size and Sharing
- Network Payload Size
- Energy Consumption in Workflows
- Wakelocks and its Impact
- Frames Skipped
- Open Threads and Processes
- Storage & Data Size
- App Size
And, more. Each of these are own deep area for analysis and tuning the performance.
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