Mobile is driving customer engagement and also your company's top line growth. In retail approx 50% of eCommerce is being conducted on Mobile and in developing countries mobile is even more important as there are many companies which have embraced not only mobile first but really "mobile only".
So its not a surprise that your company has a mobile initiative, and that after weeks of development involving mainly business teams and outside boutique development firm that testing may have been overlooked.
Do you have the tools, skills, and knowledge for this challenge? Well here are some ways to get you started on the right foot.
Begin with the user and the experience in mind. Is this a App Store app? An internal Employee app or an App for partners/agents?
Look at the intended users and their personas, this may help you understand the usage pattern of the app i.e. Transient usage - such as looking up the weather; which is done a few times a day for less than a minute,or is this a Presence/Persistent application; where the user is expected to interact over longer periods of their day with other activities taking place during that usage - unplanned things like phone calls, texts, or meeting reminders.
Finally does the application push notifications to users when running in the background or does the application leverage native device capabilities?
These explorations will help guide your strategies and approaches to testing the mobile application. This will adjust the value of long running tests, as well as performance validations of API and Service tiers. This will help refine the data sets created or leveraged by virtual services will need to be examined and ensured to meet each of the desired validation scenarios. Additionally the environment your users will be engaging in should inform your testing strategy, this includes the network(s), other applications running on the device, as well as the constraints and capabilities of each by potential user device. This may drive your validations to examine performance in a narrow or wide range of configurations including not only a handful of OS versions but also up to 100's of device configurations.
This as the breadth of validations required increases the following will be required:
- You must have tests which are resilient to changes delivered by Development - Re writing tests due to change will force changes to slow and validation cycle times will increase and validation cycle counts will suffer.
- You must be able to validate your application in functional depth as well as target device breadth matching your user populations expectations.
- You must be able to automate these validations and run them on demand and within the desired scope of devices/networks/configurations.
Each of these requirements present challenges that we have overcome in CA Application Test - Mobile.
- CA Application Test unifies testing assets and frameworks - Mobile, API, Web Service, and Database testing can be done from this single platform.
- CA Application Test extends the ability to leverage service virtualization into the mobile space - This enables testing to isolate the Mobile application as well as test earlier in the software delivery lifecycle.
- CA Application Test connects devices, emulators, simulators and 100’s of device combinations to ensure complete test coverage - providing the breadth of devices required to meet your users experiences.
We will be highlighting how we resolve these issues in our Pre-Conference Education Session on November 8th Session is titled: "How do I test these new mobile applications and how does CA Application Test for Mobile save me?"
Looking forward to digging in deeper at !