Mobile Web Optimization

Testing mobile web applications lets you in on several challenges in the mobile web. Decision making is crucial when it comes to your testing options. It is necessary to explore all the challenges first, to understand them. This helps is explore our technology options and to manage each challenge in an effective way. We will need to measure positives and negatives of each challenge before we choose the combination of testing options that suits best. Mobile testing challenges include devices, network and scripting.

One of the biggest and the most obvious mobile testing challenges is when it comes to mobile devices as its used by customers. There are thousands of client devices that could be used on your mobile site, therefore all are to be considered while testing your mobile applications. If we try and reduce this number, we will be taking a chance that out application might not work on a few devices and that will lock out a number of potential customers.  To handle this challenge, we will need to test using real devices or use emulated devices.

The next challenge is a regional challenge, the Network. Considering about 400 mobile operators in the world some being GSM, some being CDMA and the remaining use local or less common networking standards. Since each network has a unique combination of network, it wouldn’t be possible to discuss a challenge without discussion location. Also travelling to each network would be expensive. There are several ways of dealing with network challenges. (More about Network challenges in separate post)

Call scripting being the last challenge is actually used to execute the test script. Script execution can be manual or automated where real devices require manual scripting while emulated devices can use automated scripting.  

We need to understand a lot more about these challenges on mobile web testing. To lay down a path, once we understand the above challenges, we would need to focus on how to utilize the information and what would be the testing strategy for mobile application testing.

Root Cause Analysis with Mobile Monitoring Solutions

The quality of the subscribers’ mobile experience can be ensured by monitoring, benchmarking performance and availability of services. Now, this needs to get down to every step of a transaction.

Mobile monitoring solutions provide real-time information for transactions involving root cause analysis, competitor benchmarking and alerts in case of service downtimes.

Let’s get into a few details regarding ‘Root cause analysis’.  In case you there is a service downtime or a degrading performance issue how do you determine the cause for the problem?   It could be the handset, the carrier network or your content portal.

Mobile monitoring solutions can quickly take you through an intuitive portal if the problem is resulting from a specific transaction; or if your service in every location is down; if the problem is local to one city. You can also drill down further into the components that make up that transaction to find out what exactly caused the issue.