Tricentis just published its State of Mobile Application Quality Report 2024, where it found that 48% of testing professionals said that AI is already part of their mobile testing strategy. A further 21% plan to implement testing tools over the course of the next six months.

The company estimates that AI can save testers an average of 40 hours per month and save 76-100% of a company’s budget per year. 

According to Tricentis, companies that don’t incorporate AI into their mobile testing strategy may face challenges like lack of talent, resources, and upskilling. 

In addition to helping testers work faster, AI can help them get more done. For example, the company found that those who use AI as part of their strategy have more of their company’s information and services accessible on mobile than those that don’t. 

“For organizations looking to implement artificial intelligence to boost their business objectives, testing is a fantastic place to start,” said David Colwell, vice president of AI and ML at Tricentis. “Mobile application testing is a great use case for AI because not only does it have multiple benefits – including significant time and cost savings, as well as quality improvement and risk reduction – but also its impact can be accurately measured.” 

Despite the adoption of AI, the report found that about half of respondents are still using manual testing, though 38% believe that they would save about 51-75% of their company budget by fully automating their testing practice.

Another finding was that only 27% of respondents believe that their company’s test strategy exceeds expectations. 

And finally, a majority of respondents (90%) believe that they lose up to $2.49 million in lost revenue every year due to mobile quality issues. 

For the report, Tricentis surveyed 1,028 senior IT leaders from small and medium-sized businesses and enterprises in December 2023.

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Released in Beta in 2022, Kotlin Multiplatform allows developers to create applications for, and efficiently reuse code across, various platforms while retaining the benefits of native programming. Now stable, the framework delivers a fully-stabilized API, simplified project configuration, and better interoperability with Objective-C and Swift, as well as faster build times and other performance improvements.

“Where other technologies abstract away or completely replace platform-specific app development, Kotlin Multiplatform is complementary to existing platform-specific technologies and is geared toward replacing platform-agnostic business logic. It’s a new tool in the toolbox as opposed to replacing the toolbox,” said David Henry and Mel Yahya, Developers at Netflix.

The main benefit of Kotlin Multiplatform is its flexibility. Developers can share only part of their app’s logic and write native code if they want to interact with platform-specific APIs or build native UIs. When combining Kotlin Multiplatform with Compose Multiplatform, a declarative framework for sharing UIs across multiple platforms, developers gain even more freedom and can share up to 100% of their codebase – all in Kotlin. Compose Multiplatform is currently stable for Android and desktop, experimental for web, and in Alpha for iOS.

JetBrains continues to enhance Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, as well as the tooling around them, aiming to make this combination of technologies the ultimate choice for sharing code between platforms.

“Now that Kotlin Multiplatform is stable, developers can feel much more confident about adopting it for their production projects, as JetBrains will be evolving Kotlin Multiplatform according to the strictest backward compatibility rules. Now is a great time to start using Kotlin Multiplatform for sharing code and to explore Compose Multiplatform’s capabilities for sharing UIs. We will continue improving the core technology, the libraries, and the tooling to provide the best multiplatform development experience to all,” said Ekaterina Petrova, Product Marketing Manager of Kotlin Multiplatform at JetBrains.

In addition to the improved Kotlin Multiplatform tooling, future updates will enhance the experience of iOS developers by delivering direct Kotlin-to-Swift interoperability and SwiftPM support. The next milestone for Compose Multiplatform is to deliver a Beta version for iOS in 2024. JetBrains is also actively developing Kotlin/Wasm to facilitate modern web development with Kotlin Multiplatform.

About JetBrains

JetBrains creates intelligent software development tools used by over 16 million professionals and 90 Fortune Global Top 100 companies. Its lineup of more than 30 products includes IDEs for most programming languages and technologies, such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and others, as well as products for team collaboration, like YouTrack and Datalore. JetBrains is also known for creating Kotlin, a concise cross-platform language used for development on different platforms by more than 5 million developers worldwide yearly and recommended by Google as the preferred language for Android development. The company is headquartered in Prague, Czechia, and has offices around the world. For more information, please visit https://www.jetbrains.com/.

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“We have been relentlessly committed to addressing all the pain points for mobile testing in a simplified, seamless way,” said Mav Turner, Chief Technology Officer of DevOps, Tricentis. “And we believe Tricentis Mobile makes it easier to test in a complete and comprehensive way previously not possible.”

Tricentis Mobile enables teams to test apps on thousands of real and virtual devices from Apple, Samsung, Google, smartphones to tablets, mobile browsers and more. Together with Tricentis Device Cloud, the Virtual Mobile Grid provides Tricentis Mobile greater flexibility and coverage of mobile applications. Teams can author mobile tests faster and more easily, run using real devices or virtual devices, and gain essential insights across all stages of the development cycle—all from within a single platform.

Tricentis Mobile brings together Tricentis Testim Mobile, Tricentis Tosca Mobile, and the Tricentis Device Cloud as part of a single platform. The Virtual Mobile Grid was developed using technology acquired from Waldo and is now available in Testim Mobile with plans to add to Tosca Mobile in a future release.

“Organizations today face immense pressure to release high-quality mobile apps faster to stay competitive. If the user experience suffers, organizations stand to lose money, reputation, and revenue. Tricentis Mobile meets this challenge by enabling businesses to provide optimal mobile experiences from anywhere, and on any device. Removing manual processes, reducing maintenance costs, and achieving better test coverage improves overall application quality,” Turner said.

Tricentis Mobile’s advanced capabilities include:

• The ability to seamlessly test on real and virtual devices in the cloud: Organizations can now test end to end at every layer (desktop, web, API and mobile) across thousands of iOS and Android devices to ensure consistency across business processes.
• AI-enabled analytics to pinpoint mobile failures rapidly: Neural network technology provides the ability to intuitively see and understand mobile interfaces (objects, images, video, audio) to detect critical mobile failures while also optimizing for native features, performance, and platform-specific UX.
• End-to-end mobile testing solution for accelerated app delivery: Teams can now build and run no-code tests to identify and resolve critical UX and performance issues through real-time tracking of 130+ KPIs related to network, location, response time, CPU, and more.
• Codeless, SaaS-based test automation for accelerated high-quality releases: Author and execute mobile tests faster using a wide range of iOS simulators and Android emulators to increase user satisfaction and application performance.

Additional Resources

• Webinar: Tricentis introduces Virtual Mobile Grid for integrated mobile test execution at scale on October 18, 2023
• Blog: Tricentis Mobile: An all-in-one solution for high-quality, high-performing mobile apps
• Press release: Tricentis Adds Tricentis Device Cloud to its Growing Mobile Testing Portfolio
• Press release: Tricentis Acquires Codeless Mobile Test Automation Platform Waldo

About Tricentis

Tricentis is a global leader in continuous testing and quality engineering. The Tricentis AI-based, continuous testing portfolio of products provide a new and fundamentally different way to perform software testing. An approach that’s totally automated, fully codeless, and intelligently driven by AI. It addresses both agile development and complex enterprise apps, enabling enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation by dramatically increasing software release speed, reducing costs, and improving software quality. Widely credited for reinventing software testing for DevOps, cloud, and enterprise applications, Tricentis has been recognized as a leader by all major industry analysts, including Forrester, Gartner, and IDC. Tricentis has more than 3,000 customers, including the largest brands in the world, such as McKesson, Allianz, Telstra, Dolby, and Vodafone. To learn more, visit https://www.tricentis.com.

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Impeller renderer on iOS optimizations have led to reduced latency, eliminating shader compilation issues and resulting in smoother performance. Additionally, some benchmarks show that Impeller now has improved average throughput, surpassing previous benchmarks. The average frame rasterization time in the flutter/gallery transitions performance benchmark has been halved compared to the Skia renderer.

In 3.10, Flutter announced that wide gamut colors were available under a flag when using Impeller. After hearing and addressing feedback from users, wide gamut colors are now the default on iOS when using Impeller.

Progress is being made on developing the Vulkan backend for Impeller, but it hasn’t reached a quality level suitable for an official preview, according to Flutter in a blog post that contains additional details. The goal is to ensure a high-quality initial experience with Impeller on Android, which is not yet achieved. 

Plans are to potentially launch a preview period for Impeller on Android in a stable release later this year. Despite the lack of an Android preview, optimizations benefiting both OpenGL and Vulkan backends have been implemented in Impeller’s Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) over the past year. Notably, average frame rasterization times on Android have improved significantly in the flutter/gallery transitions performance benchmark. Ongoing work is dedicated to further enhancing the Android preview’s quality.

Also, Impeller for macOS is available in preview and users can test Impeller and enable it in their app by following the guidance on the Impeller page.

Flutter added a new API to retrieve various properties of a display. The new getter FlutterView.display returns a Display object. The Display object reports the physical size, the device pixel ratio, and the refresh rate of the display.

Also, when using TextField on iOS, users will automatically see an option to use the device camera to recognize characters and insert them into the field. 

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With this addition, organizations can effectively manage, create, execute, and analyze applications on physical mobile devices from various manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, and Google throughout the development process. 

This eliminates the need to maintain costly and unreliable in-house devices. By identifying crucial mobile failures and performance problems, development teams can swiftly address defects and expedite high-quality releases through their CI/CD pipelines.

“We believe all the pain points for mobile testing are not yet solved, and we’re on a mission to address them in a simplified, seamless way,” said Mav Turner, CTO of DevOps at Tricentis. “Tricentis Device Cloud is another key piece of technology supporting our commitment to helping organizations innovate on high-quality mobile apps faster so they can deliver seamless digital experiences, increase customer engagement and satisfaction, and generate more revenue.”

The Mobile AI engine utilizes machine learning to analyze vast volumes of data and detect potential issues at an early stage. It monitors over 130 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), including audio-visual quality, network connectivity, and image changes, which enables application development teams to identify bottlenecks and address problems promptly.

Key features include single-tenant and multi-tenant global deployment, real device and cross-device testing, UI testing, and performance optimization focusing on front-end, single-user performance testing. 

Additional details are available here.

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But if you think that makes you a standout organization when it comes to mobile testing, think again. A fully developed mobile testing strategy includes more than just simple test automation and broad device coverage.

To me, the best way to explain what goes into the most effective mobile testing routines is to think in terms of a mobile testing maturity model. This article discusses what I see as the four maturity stages of mobile testing, and how organizations can advance their maturity by leveraging techniques that go above and beyond the basics.

The stages of mobile software testing

The approach that most businesses take today to mobile testing falls into one of the following four maturity stages.

Stage 1: No mobile testing plan

Some businesses have no systematic mobile testing strategy in place at all. They perform testing on an ad hoc basis, if ever.

Fortunately, most organizations today have evolved beyond this stage because they realize that having some kind of testing regime is critical for identifying problems that can undercut the user experience in mobile apps. That said, organizations that have only recently begun to develop mobile apps, or that don’t frequently update their apps, may not have a systematic approach for testing them.

Stage 2: Manual testing and low device coverage

Businesses at a slightly higher maturity stage of mobile testing perform tests on a routine basis, but they rely heavily on manual tests. They aren’t automating tests, which means the tests are inefficient to repeat. They also struggle to test across a wide range of mobile device, operating system and browser types because they lack the resources to run tests manually on many different types of environments.

Stage 3: Automated testing and high device coverage

When organizations advance to automated mobile testing using frameworks like Appium, they’re also to run tests across a wider variety of mobile environment configurations. That leads to better test coverage and a lower risk that users will run into problems on their particular devices that the business didn’t test for.

However, just because you’re testing across a wide variety of environments doesn’t mean you’re testing everything you should test. You might be running tests for only a subset of all available application functionality, for example. Or you might be ignoring certain categories of testing, like accessibility testing. These considerations may be overlooked because your business lacks the time or resources necessary to implement automated tests for every test priority.

A second pitfall that some businesses sometimes encounter when they automate mobile testing, but not in a mature way, is that they struggle to interpret test results. When a test fails, they can’t quickly determine which change in their application triggered the failure. Nor can they efficiently pull out data from their tests in order to assess things like exactly how long a page inside an app took to load or exactly when a crash occurred.

Stage 4: Testing for everything, everywhere

Businesses that overcome these challenges advance to the highest level of mobile maturity testing. They gain the ability to test every aspect of application functionality, perform every relevant category of test and run tests for every environment configuration that their users might encounter.

On top of that, they draw on automations not just to run tests, but also to help interpret test results. Rather than manually examining failed tests or parsing files to identify the timing of different events, they collect relevant information automatically, which saves time and helps them to scale even further.

Evolving your mobile test maturity level

Another way of framing mobile maturity testing is to say that the more your testers are leveraging automation, the more advanced their testing strategy is.

But to be clear, I’m not talking here just about automated testing frameworks. Those only get you to the third maturity level.

Instead, businesses should take advantage of automation tools that can do things like generate test scripts, which makes it easier to support more test cases, or automatically repeat tests from on other devices in order to maximize coverage without requiring manual deployment of every test.

When you automate all aspects of mobile testing – not just the execution of the tests themselves, but also the process of creating tests, deploying tests and interpreting test results – your mobile testing strategy becomes as efficient, scalable and mature as it can be. That’s ultimately what separates the best from the rest when it comes to mobile testing, and it’s what every business should strive for if it wants to delight users while also keeping testing operations efficient.

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The most important thing in getting started with mobile app testing is ensuring quality by defining a profile of the end users to select the required mobile devices for testing, according to Nadya Knysh, the managing director at a1qa, North America in a recent What the Dev? podcast episode. A1qa is a company that provides full-cycle QA and quality engineering and ensures high software quality.

Then there are other factors to consider: geographical location, application types, user interface, battery life, internationalization, and many others. 

“The problem is that a test strategy in each case will be a little specific. For example, when it comes to testing native apps, it’s important to concentrate on either iOS or Android-specific functionality and behavior. In the case of a hybrid app, it’s both platforms that are supported with a specific focus on the two most prevalent aspects here. The first one is UI navigation, like UI graphics, visual quality, and so on. And the second aspect is performance. Specifically, responsiveness, suspend / resume, retire, multitasking, app speed, and so on,” Knysh explained. 

Another important aspect is that in today’s day and age, there’s not much of a chance to correct first impressions once something is already out there, so it’s important to ensure quality the first time around. 

Many times, organizations rely on emulators and simulators for their mobile app testing, but there are some defects that cannot be discovered this way and need to be tested on real devices. 

“One of the best examples is when you have an app and you fill out some kind of questionnaire with a bunch of questions and then you get a call from someone. Will your data be safe for you to continue? Will the data disappear, and you will have to resubmit the answers again?” Knysh said. 

In general, companies are moving to be more mobile-first, whether that’s retail companies that moved from physical stores to primarily ecommerce due to the pandemic or even brand new startups that may not even have a website yet, and just have an idea of their future business. But they understand that they will have to be mobile right away, because that’s what users are expecting, according to Knysh.

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Testing for Android devices is more challenging than iOS, according to Shawn Wallace, principal architect at Centric Consulting, a business consulting and technology solutions firm providing full-service management consulting services.

Android sits at the top at 73% market share, and iOS is second at 26%, a report by statcounter.com showed. But, what makes testing for Android complex is that there are just so many more types of active devices that use it with various sizes and form factors — not to mention the many different versions of the Android operating system still in use.

Because of this sheer number of devices, buying out all of the devices to manually test them by rote is no longer a feasible option for most organizations, explained Joachim Herschmann, a senior director analyst at Gartner. 

Buying everything is no longer the option for testing mobile web applications that run on a browser, or natively on the phone. “Organizations no longer can afford to even, let’s say, buy the top 10 most relevant mobile devices. In the old days, if it’s an internal application for employees, they could then say, well, there are only two or three mobile devices that are admitted in our organization,” Herschmann said. “This will definitely not work if we’re talking about an application that’s rolled out to the public because you just don’t know what people are using.”

According to Centric’s Wallace, the drastic form factor changes are not the most difficult to test for; they can be the subtle changes between devices, such as a bezel taking up a little more space on one device than another. 

Sometimes, these subtle changes are the ones that can have a drastic effect on the crucial functionalities of the app. 

“The classic example is that some elements are partly off-screen like a button or something you could potentially still hit it, or maybe not. But the point is that that is not a good user experience, and in an extreme case, it could prevent you from actually interacting with it. I actually had this yesterday with an app I installed where one of their buttons would settle low at the bottom. But every time I tried to hit it with my finger, I basically hit the return on an Android device,” Herschmann said. 

One way around this is to develop flexible layouts in apps, and cross-browser testing on laptops and computers can help avoid compatibility and sizing issues during the testing process, according to Artem Minaev, the co-founder of the digital startup platform FirstSiteGuide, a service that provides tools and tutorials for bloggers, webmasters, online entrepreneurs, and more. 

Adding to the already crowded device market, IoT devices also factor into conversations around mobile testing. “There’s a reason why we see so much news about not only security issues, but simply just bugs, because there is very little thought given about what’s happening on that device,” Gartner’s Herschmann said.

Smart devices expanding

With the expansion of smart devices, mobile testing even encompasses testing your car as a mobile device. 

“You could even consider the Tesla car itself as a mobile device because, at the end of the day, it’s at the end of this connectivity because it’s connected to the internet. You can set updates to your Tesla, so if you think about it that way, it becomes clear to ask yourself how are we testing the software on the Tesla,” Herschmann said.

Another major challenge with mobile app testing is how a mobile app renders while using specific telecom providers and whether that’s through 5G, 4G or 3G.

“I mean …  if you have an iOS phone, how many times do you use Safari and it stops responding per week? It probably does it three or four times a week. Well, let’s do this at scale. Let’s run 10,000 tests or 5,000 tests. How many times is our app going to fail? Not because the app is broken too, because Safari just fails for whatever random reason,” Wallace said.

The sizable mobile app testing providers offer the ability to, for example, access a device in the U.K. through 4G, or access it through an Indian operator with 3G, or to access the same device in the United States through AT&T using 5G, Herschmann explained.  

 “So technically, three times I’m accessing exactly the same phone, but the difference is how I access it. And I bet you will see differences in the test results because latency is different; the apps may react differently to the kind of network connectivity with latency, jitter and that kind of stuff,” Herschmann said. 

Another tricky aspect of testing is how an application behaves when switching between different providers, a situation prevalent in Europe due to its numerous providers in various countries. 

Other things to consider are when signal strength goes down or if the user goes into a room with thick walls. 

These scenarios are where crowdsourcing providers, in which people run software on their mobile phones to inspect for failures, come into play. Their input is then vital for regression testing, feature testing, usability testing, user story testing, cross-browser testing, accessibility testing, performance testing, routine sanity testing and more. 

Solutions to device sprawl

While manual testing is necessary for certain aspects, the difficulty with testing manually is that the number of tests needed to test the codebases increases exponentially whenever a feature is added. “If you’re adding a new feature, you need to test all of the old parts as well, which can slow you down,” Centric’s Wallace explained. 

“Two years ago, we were talking about ruthless automation, just automating everything. Now, it’s about let’s just automate what we need to automate,” said Diego Lo Giudice, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. “You don’t want to automate something that just needs to run once. You want to automate things that are repetitive, but if you’re building Agile and DevOps, anything you build in sprint one becomes kind of a regression test in sprint two. And so if you don’t want to manually rerun those tests, you’re better off automating them.”

The goal is to minimize the number of tests that have to be run on the user interface on the mobile application and isolate some of the business logic into the APIs or server-side code where there are great patterns for testing at scale and testing in a continuous integration environment, according to Centric’s Wallace.

Giudice said that automation tooling for mobile has reached the same level of maturity as it has for browsers.

For browsers, the standard has been Selenium. Now, the standards that have grown around mobile testing include Appium, Cypress, and the ones maintained by Google and Apple for their applications on Android or iOS. 

Still, highly skilled test automation engineers are required to “write code” for automation test scripts, which has opened the need for low-code tooling for testing and new advancements in AI.

The future of AI in mobile testing can help teams know which tests to run in a complex environment and do it for them; however, this technology is still in its early stages, according to Herschmann.

“The message I always give clients today is look, this AI stuff is not fully worked out, it’s the early days, but start looking at it today because you will take some time to understand and really comprehend it. And so you can’t just sit back for another year or two and wait until someone else has figured that out; by that time you’re lagging.” Herschmann said.

While organizations should try to automate as much testing as possible, there is still no way to get away from manual testing completely.

“I know of cases where literally, they have manual users that are in a car and they drive from Germany to the Netherlands, and they have to switch from their German network to their Dutch network as they’re driving and testing, how does my application react to this? So as you can imagine, that’s not something a developer could test locally on their machine. You would actually have to do something like this,” Herschmann said. 

Another major trend around simplifying mobile testing is consolidating around a framework so that tests don’t need to be completely rewritten when dealing with new operating systems or devices. 

It can get quite expensive when an organization has to make the decision between native development or using a platform such as React Native. Testing can be much more simplified when using one of the major frameworks by doing a lot of the testing before getting to the device because testing on the device is what’s painful, Centric’s Wallace explained. 

Another way to do manual testing is by buying virtual machines, putting the emulator on them, and letting testers use a VM rather than using a device. This is effective for testing offshore with people in other countries in instances where they’re not allowed to install the app on their device or can’t have the data in their network. Still, they can connect to a VM because there’s no data transfer, Wallace explained. 

“The paradigms of how I build an application have changed. There’s still native-app development, native in the sense that I write specifically with the widgets or elements that exist on iOS and those that exist on Android, but this becomes less frequent,” Gartner’s Herschmann said. “The more frequent approach is now to use one of the common frameworks that would take what you write in one abstract framework layer that gets sort of translated and compiled into the core platform that it’s actually rendered on.”

Also, the shift to using a public device cloud, which contains a couple of thousand devices for anyone to test on, is pervasive now. Whenever the next person wants to run their test, the devices are basically reset so that there’s no interference with any data. 

To a much lesser extent, some organizations work within a private device cloud. Here the provisioning and administration mechanisms work the same way as in a public cloud, but the devices are still reserved for that organization. 

The third and rarest option by far are the cases where there’s a device rack somewhere in a server room, but the way it’s accessed is also through the cloud, according to Gartner’s Herschmann.

“Over the years, it has shifted to the public cloud because the private option was a lot more popular a couple of years back when people didn’t trust the cloud so much,” Herschmann said. “Let’s just say if you’re a consumer application or maybe a retail website. Well, you want to put it out in the open anyhow. So there is no reason why you would want to do it in your closet and not go out.”

Cloud device providers often have contracts with various device and telecom providers to have day-one availability or even give developers access to the technology sometime before to run tests before launch day. 

Simulators and emulators can also be used for more operating system features, such as Google’s new API for COVID, which isn’t very hardware hungry. On the other hand, for non-standard uses of the camera, LiDAR, or other features specific to the hardware, you have to test on the device itself.

Mobile testing is vital in a mobile-first world

Mobile app development has been integrated into mainstream development, which has increased the importance of diligent mobile testing. Now, the same testing scripts can basically be used for desktop or mobile, which has also prompted the need for consolidated testing. 

“We’ve gone from a world where people thought we were going to be mobile-first or mobile-only 5 or 6 years ago, but it ended up being mobile-first because mobile-only is not a reality,” Forrester’s Lo Giudice said. 

So mobile has to be integrated into a broader omnichannel strategy because these applications that run on mobile also have to run on a desktop or a tablet. 

The progress to mobile-only was mostly stifled by the pandemic, since people worked in front of their computers at home. Before, companies tried to push as much as possible onto mobile phones.

“I think the assumption that everything would go onto a mobile phone was just wrong,” Lo Giudice said. “I mean, the web is still well and healthy, but what changed is that if I have to design an application, I will think that design for the mobile phone, for the smaller screens and then scale it eventually to the bigger ones, rather than five years ago, the apps were thought for a large screen. And then we had to squeeze them onto the mobile phones.”

This mobile-first approach has led organizations to hire out specialists that can test for omnichannel applications. 

Organizations are no longer just looking to hire specialists that only write tests for the current iOS version, for example, but that write tests against a standard so that new versions don’t require them to change the test code beyond some compatibility issues, Centric’s Wallace explained. 

“I think a lot about what the person that’s going to maintain this, what their experience is going to be like, and what the shelf life of these tests are going to be because you maintain an app for a much longer time than you spend building it,” Wallace said.

“When we don’t run tests, it means our clients test our software. Software is always tested. We just like to test it closer to when the code was written,” Wallace added. 

When establishing a testing strategy, organizations first have to think about the tech stack that they’ll be testing for and who will be doing the testing, whether that’s the developer, the technical side or the business side. There are solutions out there now that can tailor to each type of tester, according to Gartner’s Herschmann.

“It’s no longer that hard to write a mobile app. Anybody can do it basically with no-code tools, but building the right app is all about building an app that is useful for potential consumers,” said Herschmann. “So you have to have a very compelling value proposition to even get people interested. And then don’t screw it by bringing up a choppy version of that app, because that will kill it immediately. I mean, that’s why I think testing quality is so important because honestly, you’ve only got one chance today.”

Popular open-source testing frameworks for mobile

This partial listing of popular open-source testing frameworks for mobile was taken from a compilation by SmartBear, which also included commercial products. SmartBear is a provider of tools for application performance monitoring (APM), software development, software testing, API testing and API management.

1. Appium is an open-source test automation framework for use with native, hybrid and mobile web apps. It drives iOS, Android, and Windows apps using the WebDriver protocol. It supports cross-platform testing and code reuse, writing tests with multiple programming languages and offers many integrations. 
2. Espresso is a native open-source testing framework for Android to write UI tests. The tool is a part of the Android SDK and is easy to use for native mobile development. It offers automatic synchronization of UI elements and test actions.
3. XCUITest is an open-source testing framework for iOS apps that is developed and maintained by Apple and is ideal for iOS-specific U.I. test automation. XCUITest enables developers or QA engineers to test the user interface of native iOS apps using the Swift or Objective C programming languages.
4. Robot Framework is a generic open-source automation framework that can be used for test automation and robotic process automation (RPA). It has easy syntax, utilizing human-readable keywords. Its capabilities can be extended by libraries implemented with Python or Java. The framework was initially developed at Nokia Networks and open-sourced in 2008.

Real users for real testing results

While automation is a vital tool in many aspects of mobile testing, it has to be coupled with manual testing when it comes to applications that rely heavily on location, as in the case of Bloc, a social events app that rewards people for attending venues.

“We suggest venues that are local to someone and a lot of the functionality of the app relies on people being in the same area. This makes it extremely difficult to outsource the testing to a third party because their testers will be dotted around the world,” said Josh Wood, the founder and CEO of Bloc. 

The company at first set up simulators and faked people’s location but it still wasn’t a comprehensive enough strategy. Then, Bloc had to find and onboard its own testers, which became difficult when trying to scale to thousands of users, according to Wood. 

Now, the company relies on internal tests from real users who don’t necessarily know they’re testing the app. 

“The best feedback and log files we’ve got are from real users using it in real time and that’s how we’ve created a pretty decent app today that works well,” Wood added. 

The post Mobile testing: So many devices, so many variables appeared first on SD Times.

The 5.0 version now includes Lens Spaces, which integrates with the Lens IDE and lets developers create collaborative spaces for all of their cloud-native development needs. 

Lens 5 also includes Hotbar, a new function that allows users to build their own workflows and automations within the desktop application. 

Additional details on Lens 5 are available here.

Perforce launches Android and iOS virtual devices

Perforce announced the availability of Android emulators and iOS simulators as part of the device lab available in Perfecto’s Intelligent Test Automation platform. 

With these new virtual devices, mobile app developers and testers can perform manual and Appium-based test automation in parallel, in the cloud and across different geographies, according to the company. 

“By strategically testing on virtual devices, organizations give developers faster feedback, so they can catch and fix issues quickly without interrupting their workflows,” said Eran Kinsbruner, a DevOps evangelist at Perforce. “Virtual devices complement real device testing later in the cycle to deliver a powerful, comprehensive combination for getting feedback quickly without compromising application quality.”

SmartBear testing now supports Apache Kafka

SmartBear’s ReadyAPI now supports API testing for real-time event-driven architecture with Apache Kafka event streaming services.

Apache Kafka enables teams to capture data in real-time from databases, sensors, mobile devices, cloud services and software applications in a scalable, reliable and secure way.

“Organizations are shifting from centralized, complex data lakes to a renewed focus on the data pipeline – or data in-flight. Event-driven architectures and services are a key enabler of this shift. The challenge now is ensuring all processes and data flow behave as designed,” said Alianna Inzana, the senior director of product management at SmartBear. “With ReadyAPI’s testing support for Kafka, organizations can now deliver quality at speed into their event-driven architecture, rolling out higher quality applications faster.” 

The post SD Times news digest: Mirantis updates Kubernetes IDE, Perforce launches Android and iOS virtual devices, and SmartBear adds testing support for Apache Kafka appeared first on SD Times.

“We saw a huge opportunity to improve the testing experience for our customers even further, especially with the maturity of AI and machine learning,” said Dan McFall, CEO of Mobile Labs. “The combined Mobile Labs and Kobiton platform will deliver on that vision on-premises, in the cloud or as a hybrid solution for the most demanding organizations in the world.”

Kobiton aims to catch cross-platform issues before checking in code and tests on real devices directly within a developer’s IDE with support for manual testing, automated testing, and a scriptless automation solution. Users can integrate continuous testing right in their DevOps CI/CD processes. 

Meanwhile, Mobile Labs’ GigaFox solution features scheduling, collaboration, user management, security, mobile DevOps, and continuous automated testing for mobility teams spread across the globe, and can connect cloud devices to an industry-leading number of third-party tools such as XCode, Android Studio, and many commercial test automation tools.

“Mobile Labs perfectly helps Kobiton deliver on our vision of what a mobile experience platform should be,” said Kevin Lee, the CEO of Kobiton. “Leveraging our flexible deployment model along with our leading AI testing technology, coupled with Mobile Labs’ industry leading on-premises device deployment, leads to the most comprehensive mobile testing solution on the market today.”

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