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How To Get There
How do you get there? With mobile app testing, of course. But the development budget ran over, the schedules tight, and marketing has a trade show coming up. Who has time and money for testing? This is when someone floats a dangerous idea: a public beta test that's really a shakedown cruise before the inspection.There's a decent chance everyone's going to remember it as the boat that sank. At a minimum, it's a gamble that lost sales will be cheaper than paying testers.
Probably there's one assumption in the mix that's causing problems. That's the cost of a good run of in-house testing of your mobile app. You can do unit testing, code inspections, simulations, everything good developers do. Testing is more than that; it's where you catch the things that fall through the cracks.
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You find the OS "issues" you didn't hear about, device compatibility issues such as screen sizes, things like that. For this, you need people, sitting with devices and checklists and running the tests. Preferably, you need these people to reappear for regression testing. Who can afford it?
Nothing New
This is not a new problem, and the solution's not new. Mobile devices can be instrumented and controlled centrally just like Windows machines or web browsers. To a large degree, your regression and acceptance testing can be run "lights out" overnight while the developers and even the testing personnel sleep. In the morning, QA can sort through the bugs and bring them to the Scrum meeting when the developers get in.The issue at hand is a product which is heading towards the door, even labeled "beta," before it's ready to make a good impression. The cause is too much "practicality" in departments only indirectly responsible for quality. They're also responsible for other important factors such as getting the product media exposure and keeping budgets under control.
New Approach
The solution is a new approach, at least in the mobile market. It's likely to catch on as QA personnel realize that their roles can be upgraded. They can be strategists and planners with a bit less tedious "hands on" time except where truly needed. The app can come out for a true "public beta test" to rave reviews and maximum stars from users.
Eric Blair About the Guest Author:
Eric Blair writes about load testing tools and services like website performance testing from www.soasta.com.