Jmeter Mobile Native App Testing

Question

I have Two Question related to Native App Performance Testing?

1)I have a Payment App, and it comes with bank security which is installed at the time of app installation. It sends an token number and rest of the data in encrypted format. Is it possible to handle such kind of request using Jmeter or any other performance testing tool, do i need to change some setting in app server or jmeter to get this done ?

2)Mobile App uses Device ID, so if i simulated load on cloud server it will use same Device ID which i used while creating script? is it possible to simulate different mobile ID to make it real-time?

any Help or references will be appreciated ..:)

Answer 1

(1) Yes. This is why performance testing tools are built around general purpose programming languages, to allow you (as the tester) to leverage your foundation skills in programming to leverage the appropriate algorithms and libraries to represent the same behavior as the client

(2) This is why performance testing tools allow for parameterization of the sending datastream to the server/application under test

Answer 2

I'm not an expert in JMeter. But work a lot with Loadrunner (LR) (Performance Testing Tool from HP). Though JMeter and LR are different tools, they work under same principle and objective and so objective of performance testing.

As James Pulley mentioned, the performance testing tool may have the capability. But the question is,

Have your tried recording your app with JMeter? Since your app is a native kind, please do the recording from simulator/emulator and check the feasibility. JMeter might not be the right candidate for mobile app load testing.

Alternatively there are lot of other tools available (both commercial and opensource) in market for your objective.

Best Regards

Answer 3

With the raise of several mobile network technologies, load testing a mobile application has become a different ball game in comparison with normal web app load testing. This is because of the differences in the response times that occur in different mobile networks such as 2G, 3G, 4G, etc. Additionally the client being a mobile device has plenty of physical constraints such as limited CPU, RAM, internal storage etc. All of these need to be considered while conducting performance testing of a mobile application if one wants to simulate a scenario close to a real time condition.

Coming to your 2 questions,

1) Yes it is possible but the amount of manual effort that needs to be invested to make the script execution ready might vary (since you are mentioning there is data in encrypted format - some are easy to understand and some are just crude and difficult to handle using JMeter). But there might not be any app server setting that would be required to change (unless of course you are unable to handle the encryption with JMeter in which case, the encryption might have to be disabled for QA phase)

2) As rightly said by James Pulley, these values can be parameterized. However, I fear that these values will be validated by the app server and hence the values need to be appropriately fed in the requests.

You can refer to this link for reference on how to do Mobile Performance Testing for Native application http://www.neotys.com/documents/doc/neoload/latest/en/html/#4234.htm#o4237 .The same could be extrapolated to JMeter to an extent.