Get Moving Toward Enterprise Mobility

The smartphone and tablet revolution has passed the tipping point in the enterprise, driven from every side. Businesses want increased productivity, efficiency, and agility.

Employees want flexibility to work anywhere using their preferred mobile device. And the major software providers and their partner ecosystems are scrambling to build the conduits and apps to connect enterprises with their workers, wherever those workers may be.

A device adoption strategy, security policy, app development process, and automated testing programs are the obvious overall steps toward enterprise mobility. Not so obvious are the myriad infrastructure and management requirements behind the scenes, such as readying the back-end for mobile, building the data conduits, and managing a large and heterogeneous device pool. It’s a complicated and multifaceted process, but one that can pay big rewards in terms of increased productivity and efficiency, cost savings, responsiveness, and employee satisfaction.

Related Links

1. The March Towards Mobilization

2. Challenges To Making The Enterprise Road-Ready

3. Making mobile testing manageable

4. Smartphone application testing

5. Mobile Software Testing

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

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

Related Links;

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

Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience

Few months back, Keynote announced that the Keynote Global Network was being updated with Internet Explorer 9. As a result, our real browser monitoring service, Transaction Perspective™, is now measuring the performance of Web applications and sites using Microsoft’s latest Web browser. This makes Keynote the first on-demand monitoring service built on IE 9, which is pretty cool. But what’s even cooler is the ability that IE 9 gives us to measure a new class of performance metrics we call user experience metrics.
IE is still the big kid on the block when it comes to browser usage. With the demise of IE 6 in the United States, and the rise of Firefox and Chrome, it’s clear that users are quickly leaving “old” browsers for “modern” ones like IE 9. With high performance and broad support for open Web standards, browsers like IE 9 make it easier for companies to create a rich and snappy experience for consumers. In response, 34% of the top Internet sites now use HTML 5, and the use of JavaScript continues to rise. Transaction Perspective built on IE 9 allows customers to get a more precise view of their site performance, especially those leveraging new Web standards.
Our new Live Beta preview of MyKeynote 11 with Transaction Perspective lets you see performance in very important ways Learn More

Speed and Tenacity: the Apple iPad Outage

We’ve heard a lot recently about the importance of speed and performance when it comes to online retail. The New York Times highlighted research from Microsoft claiming that 250 milliseconds—a mere eye blink—could make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer. And a popular infographic touts that Amazon would stand to lose $1.6 billion in sales per year from a 1 second web page delay. Our friends at Walmart.com have also shared some awesome research linking web performance to conversion.

These statistics are welcome news for the web performance community. But sometimes they don’t apply. With Apple, a lot of rules don’t apply.

To Apple’s credit, the Apple store normally runs very quickly—averaging well less than 2 seconds for total User Experience Time and less a second for Time to First Paint. (The Apple Store is a member of the Keynote Retail Performance Index, measured with Keynote Transaction Perspective.)

Your product/service is unique. And your customers are also unique. Keynote web load testing consultants dig into web analytics to model user behavior. They consider familiarity, tenacity, interaction speed and connection speed when developing virtual user profiles. It may be unrealistic for you to understand how different levels of performance impact your various customer types across all these variables. But if you can begin to understand them, you’ll be in a better position for setting ongoing performance goals and SLAs—especially around tolerances for outliers from your averages.

Source: Keynote Systems

Monitoring User Experience of the Cloud

In this blog, we are going to talk about metrics to build into service level agreements and learn how to track the quality of service users of SaaS and cloud applications actually experience.

Q&A With Vik Chaudhary, VP of Product Management and Corporate Development, Keynote Systems

Phil Waineright: I’m glad to have you with us because your — Keynote — is a SaaS provider itself, but you also actually work with SaaS and cloud companies who make use of your services, don’t you?

Vik Chaudhary: That’s right. In fact we do both. We started out as a cloud company and a SaaS company, well before those words were even invented, back 14 years ago. And today, we work with about 2800 different companies all over the world; SaaS companies are among them.

Phil Waineright: Right. So okay. So this part of the business is serving traditional enterprise businesses but part — a growing part I suppose of the business — is serving the cloud vendor community of one type or another.

Vik Chaudhary: As it turns out, the cloud vendor community is — especially in the SaaS world — is growing to include businesses that are using SaaS vendors very effectively. And because businesses typically care about their online performance and customer experience, they happen to look to us to help moderate the conversation between them and the SaaS providers so we can assure that performance and reliability of their applications are really top-notch.

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Mobile Web: Load Testing and Ongoing Performance Monitoring

Many retailers are making efforts to enable genuine mobile commerce, as opposed to trying to drive traffic from mobile to other channels to complete the transaction. And many are bringing their mobile development efforts in-house, after testing the waters with a third-party solution. Both of these scenarios involve significant risk, making it all the more imperative to perform robust load testing and ongoing performance monitoring.

The big challenge that mobile sites face that’s different than the desktop Web — in addition to the inherent slowness of over-the-air (OTA) signals — is the plethora of devices, operating systems, and carriers. A mobilesite or app has to be vetted in all the major configurations that ultimately control what is displayed in the user’s hands.

Any outage or excessive slowness during peak holiday periods can inflict serious pain on a retailer’s bottom line, whether the retailer is big or small, online-only or hybrid. The only way to make sure a website can handle an extraordinary rush of traffic is to thoroughly test it well in advance and every time changes are made. The most solid test regimens subject a site to traffic that’s multiples of the highest demand projected by the sales and marketing department.

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Testing Mobile Devices Cost Effectively

Although manual testing is a need with real devices and real networks, avoiding it whenever possible is always a good idea. Manual testing is expensive and slow, it also lacks the necessary instrumentation to isolate application problems of your product to ensure a quick delivery. Instead, how about considering a solution that combines some manual testing, some remote-manual testing, and a lot of testing using emulated devices.

Mobile testing with an emulator is cost effective as it can be done very quickly and efficiently. Diagnostics on the tool is a must have, this lets you isolate problems and ensures flexibility in network stacks you will need to test different network options. Ensure that your emulated device solution contains a high – level scripting solution to allow you to repay your test cases over and over. Also look for an emulated device that lets you change device profiles quickly.

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.

A Comprehensive Mobile Monitoring Solution

The demand for enhanced mobile applications, content and services is growing. Keynote Systems’ Mobile Application Perspective gives you a powerful test & measurement solution to keep up. As a real-time on-demand solution, the mobile application  testing and monitoring solution allows you to ensure quality before you push out dynamic content and mobile Web services to live environments.

The first step in mobile testing or monitoring content and mobile Web based services is to pick a desired handset model from over 1,600 available in the library. Mobile Application Perspective will then simulate transactions from the handset you choose across a live network. You can use the worldwide carrier profile to direct transactions across your mobile network of choice. Within minutes you can report on transaction details for any transaction, using any handset model, around the world. You can test mobile content by quickly switching handset models, or carrier networks. This way you can cover more devices and networks all from your desktop.

Read more on Mobile Monitoring & Analysis.