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

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

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

US Analysts Predict a Rapid Migration to Mobile

Over the few years since 2007, There have been an explosion in mobile apps to make our lives convenient and more efficient. And it appears there is no letting up. Recently, Forrester Research noted that there are now 7.3 billion mobile devices in a world where there are only 7 billion people.


"Mobile applications in the Enterprise may be a future vision for many companies, but mobile is a vision that is being realized much quicker than many had expected.  What does the rise of mobile mean for the enterprise?

The global Enterprise Mobility (EM) market is expected to grow annually by 15 percent every year, eventually reaching $140 billion by 2020. By 2020 roughly 10-12 percent of the enterprise IT budgets will be spent on mobility, compared to less than 5 percent today. These numbers are based on a report by Nasscom in association with Deloitte.

Read the full blogpost on Keynote Mobility

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1. How do you plan to deliver content and services to your mobile audience in 2013?
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3. Mobile Applications Testing & Strategies

Continuous Testing of Mobile Applications

How you can ensure continuous testing while developing mobile applications How do you ensure that updates and upgrades work correctly answer is fingers and eyes! Many mobile devices and applications that can not be avoided for the fingers and the eyes of the method is the only way to test the application, at least in this situation.

Manual testing should be performed in the cycle before it begins and life after the release of the application. Despite the advantages smells, manual testing can also be disrupted by the following reasons: Drastically slow down the development process and it leaves a wide margin for error."

Hence, the need for automation. This provides the ability to remotely automate your test cases on  mobile devices, from anywhere in the world. This advanced "scripting" and "recording" technology finally provides the tools necessary for efficient mobile testing. Supplemented with manual testing on new devices, it can provide the perfect balance between efficiency and optimization to ensure the highest quality of any mobile app or website.

Know more about automating your mobile testing

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1. Optimize End User Experience For Mobile Devices 2. Mobile Device Emulation

Responsive Web Design and Mobile Performance

In this post, we will discuss about what will be possible in the future using responsive web design, and what still needs to be improved.

Like the quest for the Holy Grail, Web developers have been searching for a magical solution that will make every website shine on any and every device. It appears that, if not the actual Grail itself, they have come upon something that takes them leagues closer to that elusive goal. It’s Responsive Web Design, or RWD, and in the past year it has been picking up tremendous momentum as the go-to solution for getting content onto an ever-growing and ever-more-disparate pool of Web devices.

Through a combination of techniques, responsive web design promises to render content in a visually pleasing, highly usable format, true to the designer’s intentions, on virtually any device. Many websites are achieving that promise in large measure. But at the same time, questions arise as to whether mobile performance is taking a back seat to visual appeal and usability. The short answer is, it doesn’t have to. As with any development technique for mobile or desktop, performance depends on what’s being included and how it’s being included.


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1. Perform Website And Web App Testing
2. Racing Toward Responsive?
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The Case for Automated Mobile Testing

Automating your mobile testing has two main advantages, increasing efficiency and cost savings. With automated testing, imagine you are able to conduct manual tests with simple scripts and run it repeatedly. You save human resources and money. Automated testing helps QA teams quickly create and test scripts to capture, verify and replay user interactions.

Every second saved by forgoing continuous manual input adds up, thus relieving the stress and resources, enabling testing to be streamlined. Some companies are able to automate all of their mobile testing. Depending on the type of app you are testing, at least 80 percent of it can be automated, however, factoring app functionality on different devices and platforms, there is often a need to supplement it with ad hoc manual testing.

Leveraging the tools that help measure and evaluate the quality of your mobile app or website, you can use real device testing or automated scripting to assess the quality of services. This will help you to determine the user’s experience in the environment of the App or service once its launched.

Need more reasons to know why you should automate? Read this Why Test Automation