Addressing Mobile App Testing Challenges (Part 2)

Notes from webinar by Lee Barnes

hosted by QAI onFebruary 13th 2013

This presentation by Maira Bay de Souza is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Before we begin ...

Items in this font are the notes I took from what the presenter said

Items in this font are my own comments

Testing needs

Location-specific apps need to find a way to simulate location change. Otherwise you would have to actually move the device around the world!

The same applies for moving the device around different mobile carrier networks.

Mobile websites

Existing applications that help in testing: There are some mobile browser simulators There are also markup checkers

Essential things to know

What are the most popular browsers? What are the devices that exist now? What are the languages used to program these

devices? What is the OS model (closed or open source?)

Keep up with what's important for you!

Common mobile issues

Like in desktop testing, with experience testers will know what issues are common in certain environments

Interrupt response: how does the app behave when there is an incoming call, alarm from calendar, etc

What happens when the app is “backgrounded” for extended periods of time?

Common mobile issues (contd.)

Memory/performance. Developers are not used to programming economically (for low power/memory/etc usage)

Usability Sometimes users cannot tell if an image is a button

or just an image Sometimes users cannot tell if there is a list/combo

box or not

Test Automation

Success criteria for mobile test automation is the same as the criteria for desktop test automation:

Reliable (can we leave it unattended?) Maintainable Scalable (can we expand the test coverage

efficiently?)

It's interesting how mobile testing is similar to desktop testing in so many ways.

Mobile testing goals Ideal goal: use a single set of test cases for all

devices Realistic goal: this is a rapidly evolving space with

many providers and many approaches. Suggestions:

Research carefully and look beyond the demo What can be automated vs. cost to automate

I like his approach of having realistic goals.Good suggestions too!

Automation tools

Tool categories: Native (from devices, companies): exist but are

different for each device Multi-platform:

Visual-based: text and image recognition may require jailbreaking are more reliable

Object-based: interacts with UI objects itself requires instrumentation in the application interacts with the entire device

Automation questions

How to reduce automation? Build a layer that's independent of the device

Can I create an automation framework to test the desktop and the mobile environment?

It's possible theoretically. But realistically it's hard, because objects, websites, etc are different .

Wow, I learned a lot from the webinar! And I hope you learned a lot from my presentation!

Disclaimer

The notes presented here are what I understood from what the presenter communicated. They might not be 100% accurate, as I was taking notes and listening to the presentation at the same time.

All the information I am quoting from the presenter is their intellectual property. I am reproducing it here under the fair use policy, for quoting purposes only.