The growth in mobile adoption worldwide and their reach of 7.2 billion people has made us talk less about desktop native applications and more about mobile apps. It may also give a perception that desktop application usage is on a decline now. However, that is not the case.

Users looking for a more immersive experience, are engaged in work requiring high-performance software, like to play games, or work on enterprise solutions are just a few among a large portion who always prefer desktop applications. Hence, desktop applications do play a vital role for businesses, and an even bigger role than that is played by desktop application testing.

Table Of Contents

1 What is a Desktop Application?
2 What is Desktop Application Testing?
- 2.1 Benefits of Desktop Testing
3 Challenges with Desktop Application Testing
4 Types of Desktop Application Testing
5 Limitation of Desktop Application Testing
6 Desktop Testing fundamentals
7 What Approaches can a Tester take for Desktop Application Testing?
8 Why Automate Tests for a Desktop Application?
9 How to Perform Desktop Test Automation with Testsigma?
10 Best Practices for Desktop Application Testing
11 Conclusion
12 Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Desktop Application?

A desktop application is software that is downloaded, installed, and run on the local system consuming local resources of the system (desktop). There is essentially no one domain for which desktop applications exist. They can be made to accomplish any type of task and provide a vast range of functionality. Some of the popular examples of a desktop application include Adobe Photoshop (for photo editing) and IntelliJ (for software development and testing).

There are a lot of reasons why users prefer a desktop application even though the same organization has released a mobile and web application:

Access to system calls: Desktop applications are more powerful as they can access the system calls which is not possible with web apps. This includes powerful calls like creating a child process of its own.

Can work offline: Desktop applications are not necessarily offline i.e. working without the internet. This was the case a few years ago but today most of the applications are hybrid and eliminate extra load from the system. For example, Adobe Photoshop will provide various packages only after the user downloads them from within the application. But, they do provide major functionalities offline unlike web apps that cannot be accessed without the internet.

More powerful: If the application is heavy such as video editing or a gaming application, it will always be run in its most powerful form on a desktop. This is because such applications require a lot of resources and they get a good share of them locally. On a shared infrastructure it is impossible to devote 5GB of RAM per user. Moreover, actions taken on a desktop application have a much faster response than other types of applications. Notice how much time fast-forward takes on a Netflix (or any other streaming platform) player and a media player (like VLC) installed on your system.

High security: The data associated with desktop applications is stored locally and not on a hard disk located on another continent as in cloud applications. Hence, the data is always secure and the limited internet functionalities also work as an additional security layer limiting any interaction with the outside world in the application.

Stable: Desktop environments are more stable because the external factors that affect the application change less frequently. For instance, a major operating system update is expected only once a year but browsers provide their updates every fifteen days.

Apart from these major reasons, you would also find desktop applications a good choice when professional software is required, or you are releasing an enterprise solution software to the users. These suit perfectly with the desktop environment.

What is Desktop Application Testing?

Desktop application testing is the process of testing a desktop application to verify the correct working of its functionalities and whether or not it satisfies all the requirements.

While a lot of time spent in desktop application testing inclines towards functional testing, a tester also covers UI testing, UX testing, etc. The reasons for this behavior are that generally, choices for desktop applications as opposed to web applications are limited. You can count web-based music streaming applications at your fingertips but it is not the case with eCommerce applications. With limited choices, UI is not the priority, instead, the end-user is more concerned with the functionalities of the application and the features it offers.

An excellent example of this is Audacity – a music editing software that provides basic user interface but powerful features.

Audacity remains the most popular software on Fosshub and has garnered more than 114 million downloads as of 2022. Desktop application testing makes sure each of those features works as expected on every user’s system.

Benefits of Desktop Testing

There are numerous benefits to desktop application testing for the organization as well as end-users:

Better-quality application: Desktop application testing ensures bugs are exposed and rectified before the application reaches the customer. This enhances the quality of the application.

Business reputation: A buggy software will always be talked about in the community channels with active participation. Such talks not only bring down the reputation but also the active users per month. Hence, a business loses revenue that could have been avoided with desktop application testing.

Ensures cross-platform issues: A binary installer may correspond to a specific platform but the same platform can be hosted on different types of machines. For instance, a Windows-powered desktop with a 42-inch display and a 21-inch display can both install the software. Desktop testing ensures that both of them can view and operate the application with a similar experience.

Improved security: A part of desktop application testing is to ensure there are no weak points in the software through which data can be breached. This keeps data secure on the local machine and ensures the trust of the user in the application and the business.

Easy to maintain: Consider a buggy desktop application that is released to the users but no one was affected by the bug. Due to this bug, the dependent code written later on will be buggy as well. After a couple of months when the application shows its defective nature, it will be too big to handle and maintain. Even if the developers find the bug one month before the users do, the code written after the bug will also need maintenance hence increasing the operational costs of the organization and curbing the developers in enhancing the application with the same speed.

The benefits of desktop application testing provide solid evidence of how important it is and why it should be done exhaustively in-depth and not just similar to breadth testing. However, if you are someone who has worked with web testing, or any other type of testing before, will face some unique and serious challenges in desktop application testing.

Challenges with Desktop Application Testing

Desktop application testing attracts a series of challenges for which testers should be prepared beforehand.

Extremely fragmented screens: The first thing a tester may observe as part of the desktop world is that we see a lot more types of desktops than mobile phones. The screen size of a desktop is between 13 inches to 55 inches with almost all middle ranges covered. This is a large variation for which a tester needs to check their application’s performance.

Moreover, desktops are not only divided on the screen variations. These screens come with powerful hardware that varies on each desktop as well. For instance, the refresh rate of one desktop can be 60Hz while the other can be 144Hz. Such hardware variations can impact the performance of an application and hinder the experience of the user.

Operating system variation: Desktops are powered by many operating systems. These include Windows (~73%), macOS (~15%), Linux (~4%), and ChromeOS ( ~2%) just to name a few. The problem with a desktop application is that with each OS there are certain limitations on API, system calls, etc. Hence, some features may not work exactly as they would on another one. This creates a challenge for testers as now they need to create separate tests for separate operating systems and keep track of changes done in the functionalities of all of them.

Display and hardware settings: Desktops provide a lot more freedom to the users in terms of customizations for display and hardware. The user can change the settings (such as refresh rate) or put a lock on how much RAM can be used. Such settings are important for a desktop application to run smoothly. Testers should identify the threshold values and display them in the application as well as on their download page.

A Windows 10 settings panel

Shortage of good tools: A website is published every three seconds somewhere around the world. Such a high demand for getting a website on the internet is accompanied by a high demand for creating software that can test them. Similarly, a shortage of demand for desktop application testing tools can be seen. They require complex functionalities and modules and are harder to manage by their manufacturers. Finding the right tool for the project sometimes, therefore, becomes a challenge.

Scripting test scenarios: Desktop applications are complex. Unlike web applications, each module in a desktop application can affect the hardware including the operating system calls or other system settings (such as the default audio device). Such modules require complex testing scenarios to ensure that the application is of the highest quality without any bugs. These become a challenge for the testers as not only the scripting is hard but making sure each corner is covered successfully is a tiring job in itself.

Along with this, one can assume that the regular automation testing challenges will always exist with the testers and the organization (such as finding someone who knows the programming language of the scripts). However, maybe we can simplify these challenges by boiling down the process of desktop application testing into a few major types.

Types of Desktop Application Testing

Desktop applications are complex and require focus on a lot of areas when they are in the testing phase. A few major types are highlighted below and can be considered as listed in their order of priority:

Installation and update testing

The first type of desktop application testing on the priority list is installation and update testing. This is because all our complicated features are of no use if the user is not able to install the application or update to the newer version. Multiple scenarios can be covered here. A few among those are:

Testing successful installs.
Testing successful uninstalls.
Interrupting installation and then starting again.
Interrupting uninstallation and then starting again.
Upgrading to a newer version.
Testing for file deletion post uninstall.

It is important to conduct each test case/suite/scenario in each release or feature push to ensure each line of code works as expected.

Functional testing

As mentioned earlier, users of desktop applications are more concerned about the features they provide rather than how they look or feel. You may hear people say “I need a good code editor that has a debugger, syntax checking, terminal integration, and a lot of plugins in it”, rather than “I need a code editor that looks and feels great while coding.” Therefore, functionality testing (or functional testing) comes second in the priority list.

Functionality testing deals with verifying the functionality of the application and whether it is stable and working correctly or not. This includes repeatedly executing the functionality with various scenarios and inputs. The main focus of functionality testing of desktop applications is “what works and what doesn’t” rather than “how things work”.

Performance testing

The part of desktop application testing that deals with “how things work” is performance testing. The testers list down performance criteria and measure their application against them and note down the results. For instance, measuring the bootup time i.e. how much time it takes for the application to be ready to be worked upon after the user clicks the setup is an important performance criterion.

A tester’s job is to measure the parameters, get them approved by stakeholders, and maintain a threshold value always. This includes keeping these values inside the ranges for all future releases even though the code base keeps getting bigger as the application scales up.

Please note that load testing (measuring the load an application can handle in various areas) also comes under the performance testing domain.

Usability testing

Once the installation, functionality, and performance are verified, we need to make sure that the user faces no trouble in using the application. They can navigate easily and the application provides intuitive features as well. For instance, a hamburger menu should always result in additional options rather than a button for recording the audio (an example of audio applications). This is achieved through usability testing.

The usability of an application is hard to assess by the testers because they know every functionality beforehand and they see everything as a technical user. Therefore, testers take help from actual users by providing them with a beta version of the software and recording their actions as they operate on the app. Testers may also take a feedback survey to achieve the same goals and redirect them to the developers so that they can improve the usability.

Platform compatibility testing

Whatever we tested for a single platform in the above testing domains, needs to be repeated to all the target platforms now. This is to ensure that the application is compatible with the hardware of the platform. Hence this type of testing is called “platform testing”.

Platform testing is a major pain point in desktop application testing due to the highly fragmented desktop world (as discussed in the previous sections). There are no shortcuts to ensure the same quality with fewer systems. Due to this, it is recommended to always choose a tool like Testsigma that supports real devices, easy scripting, and automation to do the heavy work. Performing compatibility testing manually can cost the organization a lot of time and money which they are often short of.

Security testing

A desktop application deals with a lot of sensitive components inside a computer. This includes access to the operating system, system settings, and data files with respect to the application and access to other files in the hard drive. A breach in this system can exploit a lot of personal information that no organization would want. Hence, to avoid such scenarios, we conduct security testing of the application and close down all such holes before release.

Regression testing

Finally, there is a large suite of regression test cases required to be run on each code push all the time. These are generic and make sure that the new code does not break the old stable code in any way.

Regression tests are kept as a low priority in this list because they are not that aggressively worked upon. The time allotted for creating regression tests is lower as compared to other types of desktop application testing in each release. However, it is a continuous process and as the application scales, a lot more tests are added in the farms.

These types of desktop application testing will cover all the domains of a desktop application making sure the application never fails or crashes at the end-user’s side.

Limitation of Desktop Application Testing

Desktop applications are challenging to develop and test before they are pushed for release. While these challenges can be overcome or avoided by careful planning and making correct choices, certain limitations in this process cannot be overcome as of today. A tester should be aware of such limitations to avoid testing in that direction only to know later that the process cannot be completed.

Too many hardware pieces

Desktops are complex machines. They are upgraded and optimized daily to run in their most optimal forms. A desktop released today may consider a different hardware configuration from the desktop released a few months later. In running each application, there is a lot of synchronization between these hardware components which is impossible to judge in testing. While we can always ensure major hardware issues are taken care of (such as RAM and battery usage), a lot of minor components are left as an assumption.

Small automation coverage

100% automation is not recommended in any type of application (such as web app automation) and desktop applications are no exception. The only difference in this case is that it is not intentional to avoid complete automation here but a limitation. The complex network of hardware and application modules restricts us from designing automation scripts for each line of code. Rather, testers try to automate the most obvious scenarios and conduct complex testing manually.

Mimicking real-world scenarios

Real-world scenarios in the case of desktop automation are not predictable. While a browser runs applications that consume the same hardware as a browser, desktop applications are diverse and use different parts of a computer. A user may not always start, end, or operate the application in a defined pattern all the time making it harder for the testers to mimic all the real-world scenarios. This limitation is overcome by testing certain defined patterns that can cause a fatal failure leading to crashes or can hang the application.

Vast platform diversity

Desktop operating systems are vastly different from each other. They not only work in different patterns but have different architectures and support different calls. For instance, Unix systems provide the “chmod” command to change the permissions of a file or a directory. This command is not available on Powershell and therefore if any module of your desktop application is using it, they have to find different ways to do the same job on other platforms.

In this scenario, the desktop application testing limitation is that there is no common path that can be walked for all. If the application is supported by four operating systems, all four will have different test cases with different functions. It will require deep knowledge of operating systems and their architecture.

Time-consuming

Another limitation of desktop application testing is that it is an extremely time-consuming process. Due to this, it is hard to follow the principles of web app automation or even mobile automation that works mostly on agile methodology. The scripting and testing of a desktop application extends the sprint-based development (if followed) to more than fifteen or twenty days. Desktop application testing will also require a tester to learn about the system-level calls made by the application along with the knowledge of each operating system which takes its fair share of time as well.

Costly

Desktop applications are expensive. While you may find most of the technologies in web app development and hosting as free, desktop application technologies will be GNU-licensed (if you are lucky) with limited features. These technologies take time to be built and hence are often paid to use. Moreover, there is an additional cost of the time spent by developers and testers in performing their job on the application which is higher than average.

These limitations that come with desktop applications and their testing cannot be tackled, ignored, avoided, or implemented using other methods. This is something that the testers and developers have to deal with by often investing more time and money into it. Therefore, it becomes a greater responsibility of the developers and testers that the application is published without any bugs as the customer acquisition costs are high and each of them is important for the business.

Desktop Testing fundamentals

Before starting the actual desktop application testing process, it is important to know the fundamentals in which this process is divided.

These are as follows:

Gathering requirements.
Planning the test cycle.
Scripting the test cases.
Setting environment and execution of tests.
Stabilization.
Report generation.
Report analysis.
Closure of test cycle.

Gathering the requirements

The first step is an easy step to gather the requirements of the project from the stakeholders and the development-specific requirements from the developers. These two points will help explore two different areas of application:

Why have we built this application and what does it do – Stakeholders.
How do things work in the most detailed form including exceptions – Developers.

The requirements need to be documented to refer to them when test scripts are created. They act as the centerpiece of everything that the team does from this point onwards.

Planning the test cycle

The next step is to plan the test cycle so that from this point whatever we do is not only what we have planned but we also know the consequences of our steps. In this phase, we develop a document called “Test Plan” that contains all the comprehensive details about every little step and then proceed towards test case-specific information. These may include:

Test objectives – Objective of that test case/scenario/suite and the area it focuses on.

Test scope – The impact of the test on the overall application lifecycle and areas.

Timings and schedules – What are the deadlines and schedules expected from each test suite/case/scenario.

Resource allocation: Specifies the resource allocation to each section of the testing cycle. This includes assigning teams and testers the part which they have to test.

Environment: The environment details including tools to use, the target devices, libraries, accessibility criteria, etc.

Defect analysis: Outlines the criteria for managing defects in the software. This generally refers to the step a tester needs to take once a bug is found. For instance, where to upload the bug, where to create tickets, what data to include with the bug such as screenshots and log files from the test system, and when the bug is expected to be fixed.

Risk analysis: Analyze the risk associated with the application without testing and after testing is concluded. After testing risks include hanging of applications due to multiple desktop applications sharing a resource, etc.

Once all these points are documented, the test plan is ready to be executed and referred to in the next phases.

Scripting the test cases

The next fundamental in desktop application testing is to start scripting the test cases. The direction to this step is given by the test planning phase where scenarios and areas to cover are defined. The test cases should be written as many as possible targeting a high coverage number with most functionalities covered.

Setting environment and execution of tests

An environment is everything that helps the test cases execute on the application. Tools we use, the version of that tool, IDE, libraries, everything comes inside the environment. The good thing is that environment setting is done only once and until the project is completed, we work on the same environment except for the usual upgrades.

Environment settings are important as they sync with the environment of the user where our application will run. Hence, this should be done perfectly as described in the test plan. The hardware settings, which are part of the environment setup as well, should also be similar to the desktop setting of the end user.

Stabilization

The stabilization phase is associated with the risk management side of the application. In this step, the testers make sure that the application is stable and the old code is not disturbed by the new one. This means that the functionalities that were already released to the user should not start raising bugs in the latest version. Instead, with each release, the application should get more stable.

The most popular way to achieve stabilization is by implementing large suites of regression tests that work as a wall before a new functionality even reaches the testers for new test cases. However, this is not the only way. Teams can implement their own methods along with regression testing to add more layers of checks.

Report generation

Reports are always seen as fundamental in desktop application testing because of the central role they play in analyzing the tests and overall setup (including the environment). Majorly, the report generation phase helps in the following areas:

Identifying the performance of the tests.
Identifying failures across all the suites.
Identifying performance of the infrastructure (a delay in execution of all the tests means our infrastructure is not letting the tests run quickly. – an example)
Identifying weak points in the infrastructure and fixing them up.
Helping stakeholders get a summary of the functionality performance and test execution.
Helping stakeholders make their decisions about the next steps in the process.
Keeping reference for the future to reflect back on past processes.

Report generation is powerful and can be enhanced with additional modules that will facilitate all the above processes. For instance, having graphs for every statistic makes report reading quick and easier than numbers.

Report analysis

The actual process of analyzing the reports is “report analysis”. In this process, the reports are analyzed and key observations are documented to work on them. For instance, if there are failures in threshold values associated with API calls, we can raise this issue to look into the API system and figure out why this is happening. Report analysis is generally done by the testing team at the first level and then by the stakeholders at the next level.

Closure of the test cycle

Test cycle closure is the final phase of desktop testing fundamentals where the testing phase of the application is closed with comments from the testing team and stakeholders. The comments generally include issues observed in this cycle, things to note for future cycles, anomalies if any that need fixing, and finally, whether this testing phase is enough to give a green signal for release. Otherwise, testing is conducted again after implementing the comments until the application is deemed fit for release.

Desktop application testing fundamentals are basic and straightforward. The whole idea behind their existence is to make sure the result is high in quality and the team need not retrace their steps at any point to avoid time and money losses.

What Approaches can a Tester take for Desktop Application Testing?

The theoretical explanations of the components involved in desktop application testing can make us ponder about the approaches there are to start the process. While there are a couple of paths to take, unlike other testing types, these are not alternatives to each other.

Desktop application testing is complex and targeting 100% automation can prove dangerous and ironically, more time-consuming. Hence, consider these approaches as two separate phases of testing a desktop application.

The first approach is to perform the testing manually. This includes repeatedly performing certain actions without running any scripts to ensure that the application is behaving as expected. The tester might wonder why we are doing this when scripts can be used to perform those actions automatically. However, there are a few reasons behind considering manual testing for desktop applications:

Desktop applications are too complex to write automation tests for everything.
Desktop applications contain a lot of modules that should always be tested manually such as sound graphs in audio recording platforms.
Targeting 100% automation is too time-consuming with fewer returns on investments.
There are several areas where automation fails to observe the bugs and a “human” perspective is required.

Manual testing is required in desktop application testing but only in certain areas. It is time-consuming and error prone due to which the team cannot rely on it for all the modules all the time.

Automation testing is the second approach a tester takes while performing desktop application testing. In this approach, the tester writes test cases that are converted to actions and executed on the application automatically. To accomplish this, tools and frameworks are required that can understand the script and perform actions eventually. In addition, testers should know the programming language which is supported by the tools. Once everything is completed, the same tests can be used in each sprint thereby significantly bringing down the costs with time.

Testers are always recommended to consider a mix of both these approaches to perform desktop application testing in the most optimal strategy.

Why Automate Tests for a Desktop Application?

Automation helps create tests that can be run automatically and repeatedly in the future without any manual intervention. Incorporating this into the infrastructure has its own advantages that only automation can provide.

Increased test coverage: Automation tests are scripted only once and they can be run as many times in any version of the software. Hence, once they are written in one release, the tester has spare time in another release to write fresh test cases. Therefore, they keep increasing the coverage with new cases which helps keep a check on the maximum code of the application.

Helps cope with scalability: With time the desktop application will scale up continuously. While test case creation can be managed by limiting the number of features in each release (which is not a good idea anyway) the management of these tests keeps getting worse. With automation in desktop application testing, the maintenance is eased out significantly with minimum changes.

Saves time and costs: If we are not spending time on something, we are saving the time of resources that are charged for the time they invest in the application. When we multiply this by the number of resources that do not waste time on refactoring and maintaining tests, the cost savings are significant.

Shorter test cycles: Automation testing wraps up in a shorter time than manual testing. Hence, it helps quickly finish the testing cycle which ultimately helps release the software on the finalized release date.

Faster feedback loops: If the testing cycles are short and completed quickly, the defects can be conveyed to the developers speedily. This will in turn shorten the time to fix and run the tests again to verify the functionality. A faster feedback loop is essential in keeping the deadlines up and making sure the customer receives the updates in the expected time.

Increased productivity: Manual tests cannot be reused. If two tests have 100 steps each but 80 of the steps are common in both of them, still the tester has to execute all 80 steps twice. With automation, since it is based on functions, we can reuse a single function and refer to it on both sides. It increases reusability (a strong pillar of software development) and enhances the productivity of the team.

Integrations: Incorporating automation testing in desktop application testing helps integrate third-party tools directly into the test cases. With these integrations, the data can be transferred and populated into other tools without any manual interventions. For instance, Jenkins can be integrated to trigger the pipeline automatically after a certain test suite is run. Another popular integration is JIRA or any other bug-raising platform to raise the bug with a description directly from where the test failed.

The benefits achieved by including automation testing are invaluable, especially in desktop application testing where manual testing takes much more time compared to web and mobile app testing. It is extremely important to include automation testing in the test plan and cover as much as possible through it.

How to Perform Desktop Test Automation with Testsigma?

While automation testing comes with its own benefits, it does contain limitations that often restrict the team members and the organizations to perform testing optimally. For instance, automation testing requires that the tester must know a programming language. This can lead to the rejection of good testers who have good testing skills but prefer other languages. Another limitation is that the language known by most of the team members is chosen for testing as it requires minimum effort and training. However, this means we are restricted to using only those tools that support that programming language. What about the costs of training and putting effort in this case?

Such limitations that always circle around the use of programming language can only be eliminated by choosing a tool that is equally efficient in testing but does not require any specific language for test scripting. Testsigma fits this description perfectly with its codeless test automation strategy in which tests can be written in plain English texts and the rest is taken care of by the platform.

Testsigma comes with a long list of features. Some of the most popular ones are:

AI-enabled: Testsigma integrates natural language processing (NLP) and self-healing into the platform to understand the English tests and rectify tests according to the change in UI automatically.

Tests written in English can be used to write automation scripts

Applied to large domains: The platform provides testing support for all domains such as API testing, regression testing, mobile app testing, desktop app testing, etc.

Faster in execution: Using Testsigma in place of conventional automation tools can enhance your testing speed by up to 10 times. This will ultimately bring down the software delivery time and shorten the feedback cycles.

Reporting: Testsigma comes with in-built reporting tools to accumulate all the testing information and present it in graphical form with percentages and statistics.

Real devices: The platform comes with real devices for testing desktop applications. Therefore the parameter values for various metrics noticed here would be exactly similar to what the end-user will see. It helps cover all the areas related to cross-browser testing.

Integrations: Testsigma provides a ton of integrations, similar to a conventional scripted automation tool (even more than that) to streamline the complete flow of testing with multiple software.

All these things are available with just a free sign-up on the official platform. Once done, access to a powerful platform is unlocked that can not only automate desktop apps but mobile, web, and hybrid applications with high efficiency. Its unique features make it popular among all the desktop automation testing tools out there.

Best Practices for Desktop Application Testing

All our fundamentals and principles will eventually take us to the end goal if not today then tomorrow. They are meant to be in place so that whatever we do, we do it the right way. However, when we are walking in the right way, we can never be sure whether it is the most efficient path or not. The only method to find the answer to that question is, to follow the best practices that are devised from the experiences of hundreds and thousands of developers working in the field of desktop application testing.

A test plan is the go-to document

A test plan can sometimes be seen as a useless process because nothing tangible comes out of it as it is seen in test case scripting and execution. But in reality, a test plan is the only source of truth for every team member to understand what they are doing and what they need to do after each step. The team can brainstorm and devise strategies, challenges, risks, etc., and note them down for future reference. A test plan provides a peek into the future, the most powerful effect of which is to rectify the mistakes before they happen in reality.

Include usability testing

Usability testing is not always kept as an option and testers rely upon their testing skills to suffice for the same. However, in practice, how a user will behave with a desktop application can only be identified by observing an actual end-user. This is especially true because of the high complexity and modules involved in the application. A good practice in desktop application testing, therefore, is to include usability testing as part of the testing cycle and take feedback from the users who view the application through a non-technical angle.

Select the most appropriate tool

Good testing is done with the most appropriate tool, not the “best” tool according to some survey or community. Each team is different and each member in these teams is different with different skills. Therefore, it is only logical to understand that different teams will have different requirements which will be satisfied by different tools. The correct way to go is to include the requirements in the test plan and choose the most suitable tools according to the skills of the testers. Also, involve codeless testing tools in the options. They are equally efficient and bring their own benefits to the table.

Focus more on functionality

A user perceives different types of applications differently. A web application is largely dependent on the user interface while a mobile application on user experience. Both of these might not stand true for desktop applications. A desktop application is always downloaded and used with a strong purpose which is fulfilled by the functionalities it offers, not the user interface. While user interface and experience can be complementary add-ons, they should not be the preference of the developers and the testers.

Do not follow mobile or web app testing strategy

Throughout this post, we defined how desktop applications are different from mobile and web applications. Due to this reason, it is not a good idea to follow strategies applied to other types of testing to a desktop application. Such a path has a high chance to be followed by retracting back several steps wasting precious time and money for the organization.

Hardware is as important as software

Finally, remember that desktops host a lot of heavy applications all of which demand high resources. Along with it, there is a lot of diversity among desktops in terms of hardware configurations. Due to this, many points in the application execution can blow out and crash unexpectedly. A good practice to follow in desktop application testing is to always have tests that focus on hardware with all types of configurations. This can be achieved either by procuring the devices manually or using a cloud-based tool such as Testsigma that provides access to real devices from a browser.

These best practices yield fruitful results and provide a path laid down by the experiences of many testers over the years.

Conclusion

Desktop application testing is an adventurous journey that all the testers who work on desktop applications take part in. But it is not a smooth ride. The involvement of complex features and careful synchronization between the hardware and software brings out its own challenges and makes us deviate from the well-thought path multiple times. These challenges can sometimes make us stand at a point where it is impossible to move forward and ultimately increase costs to the company.

This post is designed with calculated sections to help a tester navigate through desktop application testing with ease. With elements ranging from challenges to approaches to methods to follow, we hope this serves as a one-stop solution for a tester starting their desktop application testing expedition and for those who have already gotten their hands dirty.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a desktop application and web application?

Desktop applications are built for running on a desktop while web applications run on a browser through the internet. Apart from their difference in hosts, they both work on completely different architectures with different development and testing methodologies. The principles of one cannot be applied to another which showcases how they both are not only developed differently but also work differently.

Check here – Web Application Testing

Can we do API testing in desktop applications?

Definitely. APIs are the backbone of desktop, mobile, and web applications. They help in data flow without burdening the application with extra code. For instance, desktop applications like Postman require the user to sign in to their account to fetch their personal testing data. This is done through API calls and therefore, many such scenarios that include APIs for development will also require API testing for verification.

Which tool is best for desktop testing?

The best tool for desktop testing is the most suitable tool that fits your requirements and helps you conduct testing quickly. For instance, if there is no common language for scripted test automation among the team members, it is better to settle for a codeless test automation tool than to select a scripted automation tool and spend money on training and learning. Check here – Desktop Automation Testing Tools