IoT Testing: Process, Challenges, and Best Practices

Cybersecurity breaches, system glitches, devices that won’t connect… Sounds familiar? If any of these issues are holding your projects back, IoT testing might just be the lifesaver you need.

And you’re not alone — according to McKinsey, 32% of businesses see cybersecurity vulnerabilities as a major barrier to IoT adoption. Another 26% struggle with interoperability. These challenges are significant, but QA testing for IoT goes beyond fixing them.

Our team at WebbyLab has seen how testing helps make smart energy solutions more performant — as in our SmartHeat project — or refine connected home technologies — like in our 2Smart Standalone solution — before scaling to wider markets.

Today, we’ll look at QA for IoT from all angles. You’ll learn about our team’s cross-functional testing approach, proven strategies, common pitfalls, and real-world examples of how the right testing practices can make your IoT systems secure, scalable, and reliable.

Highlights:

• IoT testing is more than basic checks — it’s an approach that mimics real-world conditions.
• Test every layer of your system — hardware, software, firmware, and beyond — to make sure everything works as planned.
• Don’t be afraid to get creative. We’ve used heaters and kettles to simulate electric cars in testing!

Bridges in a 2Smart Standalone platform

Basics of IoT Testing & Our Approach

IoT testing is a process that ensures that all components in an IoT ecosystem — devices, software, firmware, and networks — work perfectly well together. It aims to find bugs and vulnerabilities in your system to fix them before launch.

Why is the IoT testing process important? A few reasons you might be looking into include:

• Maintain device reliability
• Protect user data
• Optimize system performance
• Integrate multiple devices and systems seamlessly
• Ensure effortless system scaling
• Deliver a smooth user experience

If any of the above goals resonate with your case, several types of Internet of Things testing can help you achieve them:

When delivering IoT development and testing services, we strike a 90% software and 10% firmware testing balance. This allows us to cover firmware behavior and its interactions with apps and cloud systems and, ultimately, improve the overall quality of software testing.

Besides that, we don’t segment our testers by specialty. Instead, every tester on our team is cross-trained to handle all aspects of IoT testing. So, whether it’s firmware, custom IoT software, or network — our specialists can take on any task.

Perhaps, the most notable part of our IoT testing framework is that our testers don’t just test. They understand the product as a whole, often taking on the business analyst role. They know how the product solves specific business needs and how new features might impact the system. That’s how they ensure the final product delivers real value.

Our testers often perform R&D ahead of developers when it comes to system integration, which requires a solid technical background.

Yehor Fedorov

IoT Project Team Lead at WebbyLab

Key Practices in IoT QA

To make sure your solution delivers the desired quality, you may apply plenty of IoT QA strategies. From testing IoT products in real-world settings to handling multi-level testing, let’s explore the practices you can try out.

In-Depth Product Onboarding

The true value of a product lies not in the product itself but in the insights and actions it enables. That’s why WebbyLab experts emphasize product onboarding so much. You should understand your solution’s purpose, value, and technical specs to test it effectively.

R&D and Various Equipment Testing

IoT testers work with a wide range of equipment — sensors, controllers, gateways, mobile devices, and beyond — each with a set of unique specifications, capabilities, and limitations.

Because of this diversity, testers must be able to perform R&D tasks and experiment with hardware and software from third-party manufacturers.

IoT testing offers a broad scope for QA specialists to experiment and develop. It’s where creativity meets precision.

Kostiantyn Oliynyk

Head of IoT at Webbylab

Testing in Real-World Environments

Unlike traditional software, IoT devices work in various environments, from extreme temperatures to high humidity or dusty conditions. All these factors can affect device performance significantly. Therefore, the IoT testing process must consider the possible external conditions under which the device will operate.

Connection Stability and Reliability Checks

Devices usually connect to IoT networks via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and other, sometimes unstable, protocols (check our IoT protocols overview for more details). QA engineers must test how devices work in different network conditions — say weak signals, delays, connection losses, and interruptions.

Here, creativity in testing isn’t limited. Testers can simulate unusual and challenging scenarios, like blackouts, network interference, or sudden disconnections, to evaluate how well devices maintain IoT connectivity and stability.

Security and Privacy Testing

Given the huge amount of data IoT devices generate and collect, security and privacy issues are becoming critical. QA engineers must ensure data protection, test authentication mechanisms, implement encryption, and also verify device resistance to hacking attempts.

Endurance Testing

IoT devices often work continuously for extended periods. QA specialists must check how devices behave after prolonged use, ensuring they don’t experience overheating, crashes, memory errors, or excessive battery drain. While a simple reboot might temporarily resolve issues, testing under realistic conditions is still a must.

Firmware Updates and Remote Management

Firmware updates are essential for maintaining IoT systems. QA engineers must test the update process, ensuring no data or settings are lost along the way. They should also check whether rollback mechanisms work in case of failure.

Multi-Level Testing

A simple IoT ecosystem includes several levels — device, network, cloud platform, and user interface. QA engineers must handle IoT automation testing to ensure all these levels operate stably and synchronously, processing data and commands correctly.

WebbyLab goes above and beyond in this case, as we build and test more complex IoT solutions that consist of:

• Devices or sensors
• Firmware
• Mobile and web applications security testing
• Admin panels
• Cloud backend
• Monitoring systems

Within our IoT testing framework, we focus on checking the proper interaction of one module with another.

The Main Challenges in IoT Testing

Of course, testing IoT devices isn’t always straightforward. There’s a set of challenges you should know about. Let’s look at the key ones and why they matter:

Device Diversity

As we said, IoT ecosystems combine a plethora of devices — from tiny sensors and controllers to complex gateways. Each device has unique hardware configurations and uses different protocols to communicate. Testers must account for these variations to ensure compatibility.

Network Instability

IoT devices often work in unpredictable network conditions — high latency, low bandwidth, intermittent connectivity, you name it. Testing under these conditions isn’t just about checking performance. It’s about making sure your devices can recover connections gracefully.

QA engineers need to creatively push boundaries to simulate real-world scenarios, ensuring every edge case is covered.

Yehor Fedorov

IoT Project Team Lead at WebbyLab

Security Vulnerabilities

Unauthorized access, data leaks, and compromised devices are just some of the serious threats in IoT. That’s why IoT security testing, penetration testing, and vulnerability assessments must be on your to-do list.

Find more solutions for IoT security risks in our recent post.

Comprehensive Test Coverage

A decent IoT testing framework must cover every part of your system: hardware, firmware, software, and network. Skipping any of these components puts you at risk of ending up with a system that doesn’t work as intended.

Ensuring that each level works perfectly on its own — and in harmony with the others — requires comprehensive IoT testing equipment and strategies.

More IoT Testing Use Cases and Case Studies

In our experience, IoT testing is all about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. We often go beyond traditional methods to develop unique testing solutions. Here are several successful cases:

Testing 2Smart Standalone Through Employee Home Installations

One of our most interesting and impactful testing scenarios came with 2Smart Standalone, an IoT platform for smart home automation.

To evaluate its performance, we took an uncommon approach — testing through employee home installations. Employees who volunteered to participate customized their homes as best as they could, giving us a diverse range of real-world environments to check the solution.

Managing smart home devices through 2Smart Standalone

Using 2Smart Cloud for Creative Project Initiatives

2Smart Cloud was another initiative where our specialists came up with distinctive IoT device testing solutions. This platform is, in fact, a launchpad for IoT projects, which lets users connect, manage, and test their products before deployment.

As part of the testing, our team brainstormed various ideas. One such experiment turned into a commercial product — a table lamp initially built as a PoC device. As a result, what started as an idea from a tester grew into a fully-fledged product.

A full-fledged product launched with the help of 2Smart Cloud

Using Robots with Arduino for High-Traffic Simulations

Before launching the first commercial instances of our access control system Propuskator, we wanted to ensure its stability under high load.

To do just that, our testers developed a solution using Arduino-based robots. These robots simulated the passage of people through the ACS system by triggering a tag reader. With multiple robots in action, we subjected the system to high-traffic conditions for weeks, ensuring it could perform reliably under stress.

A mobile app of the Propuskator ACS delivered by WebbyLab

Automated Load Testing for SmartHeat

In our heat pump enhancement project, SmartHeat, load testing was critical to understanding how the pumps would behave under various conditions. We used automated testing scripts developed within 2Smart Standalone to simulate different loads and monitor the pump’s performance.

A mobile app for monitoring heat pump performance

Long-Term Testing of A/C Drain Line Cleaner

Our smart automated A/C drain line cleaner runs on batteries and operates in the energy-efficient mode for extended periods.

To test its long-term reliability, we set up a demo stand that connected multiple devices, monitoring their behavior over time. Regular checks allowed us to track performance and ensure that the product lived up to its promises, even under the long intervals between cleaning cycles.

A demo stand for testing A/C cleaners

Simulating Electric Car Charging with Household Devices

Testing charging stations for electric cars usually requires access to an actual electric car. However, when one isn’t available, we get creative. 

For our MyBox project, we simulated the electric car’s power consumption using household heaters and kettles. While it may sound unusual, this method allowed us to test new functionality and perform regression testing.

Deployed charging station example

Developing Prototypes for Testing

For our Intellect smart lamp project, we didn’t have a ready-made device to test, so we took matters into our own hands. Our specialists developed prototypes using dev boards to simulate the product’s functionality. Building an IoT testing framework and product prototypes allowed us to run tests and identify potential issues early.

Smart lamp prototype built by WebbyLab

Our testers go beyond conventional methods to develop practical solutions that replicate real-world usage.

Kostiantyn Oliynyk

Head of IoT at Webbylab

Best Practices in IoT Testing

While we mentioned the main IoT QA strategies at the beginning of our guide, there are several more best practices for IoT testing you can follow. Let’s quickly go through them:

• Ensure cross-platform compatibility. IoT devices are rarely standalone. They often integrate with mobile apps, web interfaces, cloud platforms, and so on. That’s why your testing process should cover compatibility and correct operation on different operating systems and platforms.
• Use advanced tools. To go beyond basic IoT software testing, leverage advanced tools and services like MQTT Explorer, Grafana, HomeBridge, HomeAssistant, OpenHub, and ETS. These help monitor, manage, and test the entire IoT system.
• Consider energy efficiency. Many IoT devices, especially those designed for continuous operation, rely on batteries. Therefore, test how real batteries perform under different conditions.

Testing IoT devices isn’t just about functionality; it’s about ensuring the whole ecosystem interacts seamlessly.

Yehor Fedorov

IoT Project Team Lead at WebbyLab

Read also: IoT Apps Development Guide

Last Thoughts

Tackling security issues, performance hiccups, or connectivity problems within your system starts with IoT testing. And a skilled, versatile QA team to back it up.

As you’ve seen in this article, testing IoT products successfully goes far beyond checking basic functionality. It requires real-world simulation, creative thinking, and experts who’ll gladly guide you throughout. Only then can you achieve reliability, scalability, and, most importantly, user trust.

Innovative testing is at the heart of stable IoT solutions. It’s where thoroughness meets ingenuity.

Kostiantyn Oliynyk

Head of IoT at Webbylab

If you’re not settling for basic QA testing for IoT, count on our team at WebbyLab. We always go beyond the standard — one that’s driven by creativity and precision. Contact us!