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Monday, August 26, 2013

Challenges To Making The Enterprise Road-Ready

There’s a lot more to enterprise mobility than building apps and distributing them to the workforce. Security, functionality, performance, and connectivity are among the major challenges IT departments face.

Since the early days of mobility, IT departments kept their mobile workers locked down with closed systems and standardized, company-issued phones. It was largely a BlackBerry world, with only authorized apps allowed on the phone. This simplified the security challenge, with IT maintaining reasonable access control, as well as the ability to remotely wipe phones if these were compromised.

The smartphone revolution, though, first saw workers double-clutching — the company BlackBerry in one hand, their own iPhone in the other — and then demanding that IT enable their personal phones to access company data so they could ditch the BlackBerry entirely. It was the beginning of the new, Bring Your Own Device phenomenon. But mixing up company and personal data and apps on phones that aren’t in IT’s control, on unsecured networks, has opened up Pandora’s box for corporate data security. This remains one of the biggest challenges for enterprise mobilization.

Ensuring the performance of new mobile apps is another huge challenge. Building mobile apps is more complicated than desktop apps, typically involving up to four operating systems and various form factors. iOS and Android are musts. The BlackBerry is still in play in many enterprises. And some are anticipating that Windows Phone will get a boost with the rollout of Windows 8.

Testing enterprise mobile apps is an even more complicated issue. Even if development is restricted to the two leading operating systems, there are scores of screen sizes, resolutions, UI nuances and other variations to deal with, particularly on the Android side. Proving an app on one device (or even several) for an OS does not guarantee it will function properly on most or all devices running that OS. It’s a complex and critical development challenge.


Related Links

The March Towards Mobilization

Optimize End User Experience For Mobile Devices

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Characteristics of Web 2.0 Applications

The network as a platform
Applications are delivered entirely through a browser, or even a microbrowser that resides on a handheld device such as a PDA or mobile phone.

A collaborative environment
Whereas a traditional Web site publishes content, many Web 2 sites act as a hub for sharing content. Site users may supply,
even control, the published content.

Social networking
Many Web 2.0 applications include features that connect people with common interests

Hybrid applications (mashups)
Standard Web protocols and interfaces allow third-party applications to integrate both data and functions from existing ones.

Rich media interfaces
Compared to the original concept of the Web as a collection of HTML hypertext documents, user interfaces are now more dynamic and more
interactive, incorporating a variety of media including audio and video streams and voice interactions.


Related Links

1. Testing Web Applications
2. Web application monitoring

Monday, August 5, 2013

Mobile Cloud Testing Is ‘The New Norm’

With the deal of expensive and daunting task of setting up in-house mobile testing capabilities, more and more companies are turning to the cloud. Cloud service providers such as Keynote DeviceAnywhere provide immediate access to robust toolkits and, critically, a broad pool of real devices that can be tested live on carrier networks.

Currently, 28 percent of WQR respondents say they do their testing in the cloud; 39 percent report that they will be doing cloud testing by 2015. This rapid increase in adoption prompted the WQR authors to declare that “testing in the cloud is becoming the new norm.”-ibid. Device selection, speed, lower costs, and on-demand availability are some of the reasons companies are opting for cloud testing services instead of attempting to handle mobile testing in-house.


“It seems like just about everyone is interested in mobile testing services at this point,” Obstler says. “We see certain industries leading the way. Financial — look at how popular and powerful mobile check deposit has quickly become — and then healthcare, and insurance. Companies in these industries are focusing on both internal and external apps. It becomes very important, very quickly to have a process and platform in place to test these apps, or else it’s just overwhelming.”


Related Topics


1. Building a Mobile Automation Testing
2. Mobile Testing Challenges for Web Applications