The Mobile Tester – Your Place On the Team

[Stephen]

Being a tester on a mobile team is not easy. As well as a multitude of devices and OS versions to test, you find yourself being a part of extremely fast paced projects, where the need to ship an application is often seen as most important. Frequently you are the only tester in the team. In this webinar, I will explain some strategies to help you adapt and excel in the challenging world of mobile development.

Key Takeaways:

• Why mobile development is different
• The testers place in a mobile team
• How you can adapt and excel

So, do you work in a mobile team at the moment? What challenges do you face and how do you cope with them? What hints and tips do you have for testers who are moving onto mobile teams?

Webinar slides and recording are available here

[Paul]

Thanks Stephen, interesting webinar! I’m wondering with the number of mobile devices that now exist, are there shortcuts that can be taken to speed up testing e.g. “based on experience, we assume if it works on Device A, it tends to work on Device B” – or does testing across devices have to be more rigorous every time?

[Stephen]

HI Paul,

On iOS then there’s less of an issue and so I would tend to look at differences between screen sizes and processor versions only. For Android the problem get’s pretty big and it’s mainly due to the number of manufacturers and the carriers who modify the software.

My two tips would be:

1) Use all the data you can get about an apps you already have in live and then base your device selection on these. Use industry generalised data is nothing specific is available.
2) Draw up a device matrix, listing the different devices, vs the features that they offer (i.e. screen size, processor speed, OS version, etc) and use that to cross reference and pick a selection. One good technique is to regression test one releases on a particular set of devices, then pick a different selection for the next release.

[Stephen]

HI all,

I hope you found the webinar useful. Here’s some useful links that you can use to understand the user and the mobile landscape better:

Google: http://think.withgoogle.com/mobileplanet/en/
Android: https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.htm l
Gartner: http://www.gartner.com/technology/home.jsp
Statcounter – http://gs.statcounter.com/
Mixpanel – https://mixpanel.com/
Strategic Analytics – http://www.strategyanalytics.com/default.aspx?mod=pressreleaseviewer&a0=5559&src=rss
Open Signal – http://opensignal.com

[Björn]

Hi,

would be interested in Stephens response to your question as well.
We have the approach that we use analytics to see what devices are used by our customers and aim for a coverage of about 60-70 percent. This number can be reached with about 20 devices on the ANDR platform. Any additional device would increase device coverage by less than 1%.
Additionally we add devices to our pool if get the information that a certain device is prone to device specific issues.
We accept the risk in this approach to have issues on devices that are not relevant today but will be in two weeks. With more than 20000 distinct Android devices complete coverage is not possible, so the risk is present regardless how many devices you have.
To my experience in the last view years testing mobiMle bugs specific to a certain device/OS are existing, but quite rare.

Best regards
Björn

[Björn]

HI Stephen,

thanks for the links. I suggest you add them to the slides where you used data from this sources. E.G. Add the link to open signal on the slide where you use their picture regarding screen sizes.

Best regards
Björn

[Stephen]

HI Bjorn,

That sounds like a great approach. I’ve seen quite a few iOS7 specific bugs recently, normally UI related and iOS8 is much buggier as an OS than iOS7. I think the whole Android fragmentation problem is often over-blown as you touch upon – taking a data driven, risk based approach is the way to go.

[Stephen]

Well spotted – looks like I missed that one. I’ll update and get the EuroSTAR team to update on the link.

[David]

Hi

It sounds interesting. Links are really useful, Some of Real time challenges for the mobile testing also includes;

1) Multitude Mobile Devices
2) Device Fragmentation
3) Different Mobile App Types

Here How to deal with it?

1) Get the most popular devices and test it physically.
2) Run your test on emulators.
3) Use cloud based services to test apps in web browser.
4) Use automated testing scripts and tools.

These can also be well explained in such a webinar. It would be helpful for any mobile tester. What you say Stephen??

PSTuners

[Stephen]

That sounds a lot like the last webinar I did for EuroSTAR 😛

Hopefully Ronan can paste the link in.

[Paul]

This one from the virtual conference last year: https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/resource/the-current-state-of-mobile-testing/

[Author]

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