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.


Related Links
1. Perform Website And Web App Testing
2. Racing Toward Responsive?
3. Verify Mobile Content by Emulating Over 2,200 Devices

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

Easy Way to Record Mobile Testing Scripts!

Keynote Systems -  global leader in Internet and mobile, cloud testing & monitoring. Recently announced new, advanced scripting tool – ScriptObjects.

With DeviceAnywhere ScriptObjects, users can create object-level scripts for native, web, and hybrid applications within a real-device testing environment. Coupled with DeviceAnywhere’s existing image and text UI-based scripting capabilities, DeviceAnywhere ScriptOjects enables you to use the best testing and verification technique for your use case, with one script that seamlessly works across devices.

Object-level scripting for mobile web content acts on individual web elements at the code level.  This means that you can record a script on one device, and play the exact same script back on another device regardless of the screen-size, manufacturer or operating system. Object-level scripting for native apps does the same thing for devices of the same platform while acting on native objects. Your scripts will be more resilient through UI changes, lowering maintenance costs.

Request Mobile Automated Testing Free Demo 

Related Links

1. Mobile Application Testing
2. Mobile Browser Compatibility Testing

Building a Mobile Automation Testing

Desktop-based testing it’s a no-brainer: Use object-based scripting to maximize reuse across platforms/browsers.

In today’s mobile world it really isn’t that easy. There are many different platforms, OS versions, form factors and carrier/manufacturer customizations. Multiply that by mobile web, native app, or some hybrid in-between and you’ve got yourself a healthy testing matrix. A daunting task for even the most skilled Automation Engineer.

In order to tackle this problem, an Automation Engineer cannot simply look at it from a “one size fits all” perspective to create a set of objects and re-use them across all combinations of platforms. For example, there are fundamental differences in how an app behaves on iOS and Android, even with something as basic as a “back button” has its quirks.

In order to truly make your mobile testing easy, TCE automation is the right solution for the job. The solution combines the convenience and efficiency of test automation with the accuracy of live mobile interactions to generate reliable, reportable and actionable results.


Related Links

1. Mobile Device Testing
2. Mobile Web Readiness
3. Mobile Application Testing Strategies

A Quick Checklist To Ensure Site Uptime When Switching Web Hosts

There comes a time in every website's life when it must grow up and leave behind the infrastructure that got it to where it is. As traffic scales up, site uptime and speed become paramount; Web hosting companies are compared, and finally it is time to move house, i.e. to switch Web hosting companies. Moving sites without a glitch is important, even critical, and with some experimentation, I hit upon a checklist that should help anyone plotting a move. Follow these steps and your site will remain up throughout the move and your site visitors and online business teams will thank the IT department for its forethought.

1. Move When the Traffic is Low.
2. Switch Your Email Profile at Both Web Hosting Companies.
3. Create a Mirror Site and Monitor It.
4. Copy and Import Your Zone File.
5. Setup a Virtual Host at the Destination Server.
6. Start Your DNS Move.
7. Monitor the Move Using Website Performance Monitors.
8. Setup Availability Alerts to Fire If Content is Missing.
9. Conduct a Traceroute Test from All Over the World.
10. Tweet and Enlist Your Customers.

And that's all folks! You can read Keynote Recent Blog Post detailing these 10 steps to ensure that your website remains up and running during any change to its infrastructure. Follow them, and mimize or eliminate all downtime.

Related Links

Challenges of creating and managing robust applications 

Analyzing software applications and supporting infrastructures

Insights on DDoS Attacks Against Websites

Recently, Keynote Systems was asked to comment on a widely publicized attack against a company online. The attack, known as a distributed denial of service(DDoS), was targeted at a network of web servers primarily located in Europe. DDoS attacks against websites have occurred periodically for years. Unlike past incidents, the nature of this particular attack was characterized as severe enough to have caused broad disruption on the Internet. The suggestion made was that users like you and I may have found our email delayed and websites either slow or unavailable.

While many methods exist to understand the impact of web attacks like this, Keynote's web performance,  monitoring service and global network provide a unique perspective--the end users' perspective. Keynote  business is monitoring websites for their customers so that they have a consistent and accurate source of information about their site's performance. But they also use that same technology to monitor select sites across the Internet and make this data publicly available in the form of an index--actually, 43 indices. And they also use it to provide another free service called The Internet Health Report that shows what's happening across the major U.S. Internet Service Providers in real time.

Keynote periodically test a wide range of websites from their network of hundreds of monitoring agents connected to different ISPs all over the world. These agents pretend to be a site visitor and measure performance during their visit.

One of their indices monitors the U.S. banking sector. The financial services industry has been hit hard of late by DDoS attacks. You can read the Keynote blog post Understanding the Impact of Web Attacks - the User Perspective


Source: Keynote Systems

Optimize End User Experience For Mobile Devices

Today it’s all about CONTENT, being able to access it QUICKLY wherever you are and whenever you want…and iPhone does that well.

The first thing I did after getting my phone was not a phone call, but I went to Facebook and updated my status.

If I am a content provider, I would love to get the full insights for my website. Since my users could be coming from any device, I will need to understand how my site downloads and performs on different devices. This will help me improve the end users experience at least on popular devices, if not all of them. Optimizing it for one device is just not good enough!!!


Related Links

• Mobile Device Testing From End User's Perspective
• Website Availability Monitoring
• Mobile Application Testing - On Any Device, Any Network