More Cloud Services – Test your Mobile Application

Posted: June 23rd, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Cloud Computing, Mobile, Technology, Technology Outsourcing |

As Jittr’s focus are Smartphone applications , primarily Android but eventually and soon iphone, we are caught in the dilemna of how to test on a cross section of the handset devices we are targeting.
Test Engineering is one of those technical areas that we wish to outsource to a team in a far away place where supply of engineers is high, competence equally high but costs are way low. India is one such place, though not the only one but since my principals and myself have years of experience with teams in India, that is the out-source geography we are most familiar and comfortable with.

So far so good but we are not talking about testing on an emulator running on Windows or Mac workstation. That is good for development testing. Real test engineering has to test on the actual devices running the actual variant of the Android OS possibly customized by the Wireless Carrier.

Device Anywhere to the rescue!
I just completed the live webinar on DeviceAnyWhere Test Center application. Quite impressive! As an aside, I signed up for a free open trial prior to signing up for and viewing the howTo seminars and put the product (both the Test Center and Test Automation Facility) through it’s paces but the Web based live walkthrough was still worth the hour of investment of my time. This is a profitable (or so they say) startup in Cloud Services with about 2,000 clients and their main claim to fame is making handsets available via the cloud to engineering teams that need to test their mobile applications on as well rounded set of different handsets as possible. They have multiple data centers including one in Europe, the USA of course and a new one opening in Brazil shortly. The data centers are centers where the actual physical devices are located. All testing is done on real handsets which a tester acquires via the Test Center/Automation application prior to running through the test cases.

All activity performed on the physical unit is streamed in a pixel perfect manor to the testers’ workstation which renders in an image which resembles the physical device.
Also, those pixels are captured to form a basis of screenshots that show the visual state of the device as the testing proceeds.

The Test Center also includes it’s own feature to define and manage test cases in a centralized manor. No more having to use Excel or something similar for the same purpose.
The probable use case would be for someone in Jittr, let’s assume myself for the moment, would define the testcases within the test center and then outsource the actual testing to a remote team in India. The Test Center makes this easier to accomplish. The Test Case Manager has the functionality to assign pass or fail to the test, attach screenshots of what was observed on the handset for each particular test

Another useful feature is the ability to share an acquired handset to someone to put the application through it’s paces.This feature I have not exercised yet so I am not sure if the invitee has to download the testcenter application to actually avail oneself of this feature. I find this a potentially useful way to let someone , say one of my principal none technical colleagues, someone like a Product Manager who is remote, run the current state of the application through a real device even if the real device is somewhere hidden out in the clouds. A lot simpler I hope and will confirm then having them install Eclipse and the Android development kit to have the use of an emulator to simulate the functioning of the Android Application.

Overall, appears quite impressive from my kicking the tires and the Webinars and as the world moves quickly in the mobile market, this company as well as others should form the bedrock of the way mobile testing is done except for the absolutely largest companies.
I am in the process of converting from a free trial account to a paid account. They have flexible plans for startups like Jittr where breaking the bank is not an option. I will come back to this post with information as I put it through it’s most important paces which is for real and with a virtual team using it as the foundation for test engineering.