Any product that is produced for the consumers is tested before making it available in the market to check if it’s working as expected. Because the products that don’t keep up to consumers’ expectations will fail to attract more people to buy them, eventually incurring a huge loss to the company. The same is applicable to apps too! The app market size has touched a whopping number of $428 billion in 2022, with this huge market potential, the app development companies cannot afford to go wrong by releasing poor-quality apps. A new stats states that nearly 88% of apps have uninstalled apps because of bugs that cause inconvenience. So how to reduce the uninstall rate and improve app quality?

Undoubtedly, testing is an important part of the whole software development lifecycle, and it identifies errors across the process to improve the app quality. It is directly related to the success or failure of the app and has to be performed well to get the expected outcome. From a business perspective, it becomes important to measure the testing activity to understand how well the strategy is implemented, hence, test coverage is the parameter that offers the software testing metrics.

As test coverage provides the metrics of the testing process, it helps in improving the overall quality and aids in the success of the app. As it increases the rate of success, organizations are also investing in test coverage practices to monitor and streamline the testing process, thereby, working towards building high-quality apps. Let us understand test coverage in detail and the benefits of implementing it to improve the app’s success.

What is Test Coverage?

Test automation is certainly an important parameter that improves the quality of the software, but what is more important is to understand its metrics and analyze the testing process. Metrics gives a detailed insight on how well the testing process is performed, does it need improvement, do you need to make changes, etc., The information gathered can be analyzed and implemented for process improvement. Test coverage is one of the popular parameters that provides accurate metrics of the testing process.

Test coverage is a critical parameter that calculates how much of the app is tested with a set of test cases to identify any errors or defects in running the application. For example, if 80 of the 100 test cases have been executed, the test coverage will be 80%. Hence, by calculating the test coverage, the app testing metrics can be inferred and used for further process improvement.

Test coverage depends on various factors that include the efficiency of the test coverage tool, deadlines, and team’s capabilities. All these factors when combined with a well-planned testing strategy can improve the final results significantly.

Why is Test Coverage Important?

Test coverage is essential as it is an indicator of the app's quality. By implementing test coverage, one can examine the efficiency of the test and get more scope to improve the process. Furthermore, test coverage tracks the quality of testing and provides a quantitative measurement of the process. This is highly significant as it finds out inefficient test cases and allows to improve the quality.

Test coverage is important for the following benefits it offers:

• To get the maximum benefit, higher test coverage can be implemented by creating and executing more test cases. This process will allow to cover more test scenarios and identify bugs more efficiently. Higher test coverage will improve the quality, which will offer seamless user experience, and eventually improve the ROI.
• Test coverage allows to identify bugs earlier, hence, reducing the time and cost that goes in the process.
• While performing tests with a greater number of test case, it goes deeper into the process to check for any hidden bugs, making the process resilient and bug-free.
• Test cases helps in identifying the inefficient test cases and removing them from the process, thus, supporting quality at speed.
• Test coverage provides metrics of test automation, hence, accelerating the app quality and making it a success.

Conclusion

As mentioned in the above article the need for test coverage, organizations have already started including it as a part of their quality improvement strategy. It is a critical factor that improves the app quality and accelerates its success. Hence, do not forget to include test coverage in your quality improvement strategy whenever you are developing or testing a software application.