Qualitest and TestPlant welcomed a number of IT decision makers from various organisations, including John Lewis, Governor Technology and Telenomics to TechUK for a captivating afternoon of discussing mobile testing automation. In recent years there has been an explosive growth in the usage of and power of smartphones, and in the availability of the tools to write apps for them. This market saturation has led to a changing trend in testing focus, simply providing a functioning app is no longer enough. Designs must be as sleek and simple as possible, experience must be seamless across the thousands of potential platforms or it’s all too easy for a user to find a competitor’s app, it’s a true consumer’s market. This has led to an increased focus on cross-platform functional, performance and user experience testing. Once treated as a testing after-thought, to be investigated once development was largely complete, there’s a new onus to test these features faster and earlier in development, with an increased priority on removing problems discovered as soon as possible. Therefore, QualiTest and TestPlant’s focus on the topic hit the mark with speakers aiming to give attendees the tools to develop a world-class mobile test automation strategy in order to retain existing customers and attract new ones.
We saw the delivery of a great session at the hands of people who’d realised that their mobile offerings were suffering with the lack of automation, identified their needs and invested the time and resources to build working automation frameworks designed to boost their mobile testing power whilst maintaining framework usability, code re-usability, and cross OS, platform and browser coverage.
Following lunch and networking, Antony Edwards, TestPlant’s CTO kicked off the day’s presentations with a detailed overview of the development of load and performance testing, from expectations of different stakeholders to technical challenges throughout the past 15 years. He gave a succinct portrayal of how performance testing is evolving from protocol-level load testing designed to target server-centric applications, to application-level load testing designed to test not only server performance, but client responsiveness and resilience in today’s thick-client architectures. Antony’s point of view was both interesting and eye-opening, especially around what are the areas that need to be tested – to ensure we can cover not only server resource, but also the end-users’ experience via their devices.
The afternoon progressed from Antony’s thoughts on load testing, to an insight into The Financial Times’ mobile testing journey and ultimately their success story. This was provided by Jay Sethi and Chris Bower, reviewing their challenges around mobile testing with particular focus on the fragmentation of iOS and Android devices. In their words, ‘As the boom in android devices started to kick off, we quickly found the need to support different types of devices’. The problems of fragmentation aren’t a new topic, but it was interesting to hear how for FT, with a mature product and established user-base delivered content onto mobile. Jay and Chris discussed the need to find a good cross-platform solution to maintain the quality of delivery their readership expects. They took us through their steps on choosing tools and designing their solution, continually improving until they met their goal of 80% of their manual tests now being automated across their most popular devices.
Last (but no means least!), QualiTest’s own consultant Chris Livett gave a valuable presentation around the challenges of agile working and automation in giffgaff. giffgaff is a cellular MVNO, which handles a large amount of often-repeated regression around web and mobile applications testing, and has met their challenges using the eggPlant functional platform. One of the most interesting points of Chris’s talk is that with careful planning of their implementation and resource profiles, they have been able to achieve increasing automation coverage with no noticeable loss to their delivery capability or sprint velocity during the transition away from manual testing.
The event was a success, providing attendees with a great chance to learn about the challenges around mobile test automation and to share best practice to ensure this vital IT requirement is undertaken effectively.
For more information contact Richard Willetts, VP of UK Sales.
