Friday 13 September 2013

Mobile : APP Testing


Accelerating your mobile application testing effort

MichaelDocDeady 





You’re probably asking yourself “Why doesn’t Michael write me nooo more?” I haven’t been blogging much because HP Professional Services has assigned big guys dressed in black and sunglasses to stand guard at
my doorway every morning to keep me busy. However, I’ve made a commitment to myself to be more diligent about writing technical articles to help you fall asleep faster. =)



Predictably most testing organizations will attempt to retrofit current testing strategies and processes and force them into a high-velocity, lean development process in an attempt to salvage some semblance of order and standards. Terms like “continuous integrated testing” are being thrown around and testing methods similar to exploratory testing are also being tried. The desire for order is even leading organizations to try tools and strategies such as mobile testing accelerator or business process testing. These tactics may play a bigger role in defining your lean testing strategy than simply attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole. No matter what your testing strategy for mobile development is you cannot ignore or simply rely on unit testing for mobile testing.



Companies that are successful in implementing mobile technology on legacy systems look at testing as two unique but parallel testing efforts. This approach of thinking of front and backend testing as two unique testing efforts gives testing groups the ability for independent validation with a twist. I am referring to the testing of the user interface or presentation layer and APIs testing, integration testing, and system validation. But, for the purposes of this blog I will refer to it as “behind the presentation layer testing”. This technique gives teams of testers the ability to test the same functionality from two totally different perspectives. It most closely resembles how most development groups develop mobile applications—they divide development into two distinctive development teams: the mobile development group and backend system integration typically referred to as API development.



Keep pace with mobile




Operating systems and mobile devices change so rapidly, it is vital to have an automation approach to functional testing to keep pace with them. Without a solid automation strategy, testing mobile devices will quickly overwhelm a QA team. If you are currently developing mobile apps in an agile environment and you haven’t at least dedicated one sprint to the five pillars of mobile testing (unit, functional, integration, performance, and security) I would recommend developing a plan that includes the words rollback, take off-line, and shut down. When developing a testing strategy for applications (especially for a mobile environment) the concept of continuous integration (CI) has been proven to drive up quality up and lower costs down.





One of the things that we have done here at HP Professional Services is the concept of a Mobile Testing Accelerator (MTA). I’ve been deeply involved in this project and it was with was developed to help you, your organization, and clients build a foundation for your mobile testing efforts. The MTA includes the key ingredients of sound test automation strategy coupled with the idea of rapid test script development and it uses keyword concepts, layered on top of solid tools and processes.



The engine that drives our mobile functional testing solution (MTA) is layer between HP Unified Functional testing suite and ALM. Through our industry leading automation capabilities, customers are able to develop and automate tests against a wide range of technologies. This effectively accelerates their testing process and allows them to reduce the cost of testing, while also improving the quality of their applications. The word “accelerator” is often used to over exaggerate the capabilities of tools. However, in the case of MTA it’s no exaggeration when you take a look at the features that will be released in version 2.0:
  • Full support for agile lifecycle within HP-ALM
  • Traceability down to device level
  • Built on the concept of continuous test integration using tools such as Jenkins
  • Highly Re-useable Keyword-based automation
  • Support Multi-lingual Test
  • Supports testing across a broad range of technologies
  • Accelerate testing cycles
  • The ability to validate new functionality as soon as the new code is compiled
  • Reduce per unit cost of testing
  • Platform agnostic – MTA has the ability to execute automated testing scripts against any of the popular mobile testing tools by simply changing one environment variable.
  • Pre-built Component Library and extensible test checklist. This is the ability screen rotate or call interrupt to any given automated script without having to modify a single line of code. In this case it can be done right before test set execution within test lab.
  • MTA can either be incorporated into ALM as an enhancement or standalone

Video demonstrating version 1.0 at HP Discover.










If you are currently developing a plan or strategy for mobile testing or you are still struggling to get your mobile testing off the ground, just know you’re with the majority and not the minority. If you’re interested in seeing the demo of the mobile testing accelerator please feel free to contact me (please note that I’m being held against my will) or simply head to the HP Professional Services website for more information. In any case I hope this will spark a sharing of information, stories and most of all solutions that we can share with each other.


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