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

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

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

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

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

Don't let your site go dark this holiday season.

Keynote is helping retailers to get ready for the holiday shopping season with a free offer for website monitoring and mobile testing. Retailers, in particular, have no time to waste to prepare for this coming holiday shopping season. Mobile is expected to be responsible for retail site visits during this year's holiday season.

Keynote Web Performance Monitoring allows you to:

• Obtain accurate, real-time data about your site’s overall performance, speed and availability
• Measure rich Internet applications and track the performance of third party content on your site
• Know how your shoppers in New York City, San Francisco and any other city around the world may be experiencing you site

Be sure your site can handle the traffic on Black Friday, Cyber Monday or any other day of the week – 24 / 7/ 365.

Get your 7 days of free website monitoring – today.*


Related Articles:

1. Can your customer rely on your mobile site
2. Free Website monitoring
3. Is your mobile site up to speed for back to school shoppers?

Measuring site performance over an actual cellular network

As fundamental as it may seem, many site owners don’t alter their approach at all when tackling a mobile site project. Call it “desktop thinking,” or terrestrial, landline, wireline thinking — by any name, it ignores the fundamental reality of the cellular network, which as described above, is inherently slower and riddled with opportunities for performance degradation.

One common desktop tactic that causes issues in mobile is the URL redirect, which instructs the browser to follow a different URL than the one originally requested. There are a number of legitimate reasons to employ this technique — to direct users to your third-party site host; to offer nicknames that provide multiple paths to the main site; or to send users to a site designed specifically for the detected browser.

This is generally a fine practice in the desktop browser world, where redirects usually happen in the blink of an eye and are virtually undetectable to the user. Use the same technique on a mobile site, though, where the big “L” — latency — colors the entire experience, and you end up with users staring and staring at a screen where nothing’s happening.

Surprisingly, even some of the biggest retailers have mobile sites bogged down with URL redirects. The problems become apparent when measuring site performance over an actual cellular network (as opposed to a WiFi connection).

At what point does the user come to the conclusion that the site’s not working, or that it’s not worth the wait? If they’ve just navigated from a well-built mobile site that loaded quickly, there’s a good chance they’re not going to wait eight seconds. How likely is it that they’ll come back again? How likely they’ll tell their friends about the experience? Forget what that means in terms of a lost sale. What does it mean for retailer X’s brand image?

Read More

App, Website, Or Both?

There’s no silver bullet for getting content successfully onto three screens, no switch that can be thrown to make content fast and usable. On smartphones and now tablets, site owners are juggling some combination of Mobile site optimization, Web app and native app; except for those who are doing nothing at all, and effectively writing off what is soon to be online’s biggest audience.

Whatever the approach, any serious mobile strategy requires effort and investment. Native apps need to be developed separately for multiple platforms, at minimum iOS and Android, for both smartphone and tablet — that’s virtually four apps, for starters.

HTML5 Web apps theoretically simplify the development task, in as much as one app should function acceptably on multiple phones. But a big tweak is required for tablets, to take advantage of the format and deliver a native-like experience.

Still another approach is to build separate, mobile-optimized sites for smartphones and tablets, streamlined for fast loading and usability, but not offering the capability of offline viewing.

Read More

Internal Testing Program Using Real Devices

Creating an internal test program using real devices is a challenge. The devices have to be bought, carrier contracts have to be established, test scripts created, users trained, results compiled and analyzed — for each geographic market. And then the devices and contracts have to be dealt with after the testing is done, or maintained for ongoing monitoring.

This complexity is why so many enterprises use an outside test partner that offers an established infrastructure with hundreds or thousands of devices deployed over a broad geography. The test provider works with the client company to develop the necessary scripts, and then leases time to them on its network to run the tests. This is testing in the "public cloud," which means that many clients utilize the same devices and infrastructure to conduct their tests. It's an ideal solution for most companies — there's no upfront capital expenditure and tests can be quickly executed on demand, on a budget-friendly pay-per-use basis.

But when a company has particular security concerns and is reluctant to expose its data on a shared infrastructure, or if it has ongoing testing needs, a "private cloud"solution is in order. In this case, the test provider procures devices and contracts to create a private test network exclusively for the use of a particular client company.

In either case, the client team has ready online access to the entire process, from scripting to running the tests to reading results.

Cloud-based app testing is an automated process. There's no human being working the phones out in the field; rather, the devices are remotely operated by machine, performing the interactions specified in the test scripts and providing feedback on the devices' responses.

Read More at http://keynote.com/benchmark/mobile_wireless/article_mobile_app_performance.shtml

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.

Emulation Technologies and Mobile Device Monitoring

Many Websites and services require only a browser to render the page and do not depend on the operating system of the device (for example, SMS). To accurately monitor such services on a broad range of possible combinations in the mobile ecosystem, the mobile monitoring solution needs to be able to emulate the vast array of devices available. A diagnostic capability helps to quickly pinpoint the root causes of failures when something goes wrong. Emulation technologies must contain, along with a wide range of device profiles, an awareness of the multiple factors comprising the end-user experience.

Emulated mobile device monitoring can be performed by content owners in two separate modes:

● Over the air mobile monitoring for true end-user experience

This requires a measurement solution that truly emulates the entire technology behind mobile downloads—including the actions of the operator network that sits between the Web server and the end user’s device.

● Direct over the Internet monitoring to measure only the availability of content without the impact of operator networks

By using this method, you can quickly identify the root cause of failures experienced by end users.

Read More on Mobile Monitoring

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.

Mobile Testing Challenges

More than finding errors, the ideal goal of testing should be to understand the quality of offering. Its working, Does it function as planned? Will it meet the customers needs?, etc.

There are unique challenges when it comes to mobile application testing. The challenges of mobile testing will present you with tradeoffs that you will need to consider and choices that you need to make about the mix of different techniques and methods that you will use in testing. Each testing option you consider will have pros and cons associated with it, and you will probably find that no one testing option  will be completely satisfying. Rather, you will need to consider a testing strategy that combines different testing options that together provide you with the best overall testing result that balances the tradeoff between cost, quality, and time to market.

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Mobile Content — A Monitoring Challenge.

One of the most important differences between mobile and desktop-based Web content is the need for mobile content to be tailored for the various characteristics and capabilities of a particular device. This added level of complexity affects development of monitoring strategies, and it must be taken seriously in order to truly understand how the full spectrum of end users accessing mobile content will experience it.

Clearly this expansion of the scope of content monitoring is one of the major differentiators from a  desktop-based Web monitoring strategy. With literally hundreds of device types in circulation and more coming on the market each day, attempting to understand the end-user experience by manually testing content on each device is cost—and time—prohibitive; automated monitoring strategies are required.

Read More on Web Mobile Monitoring

Managing the mobile end-user experience with mobile monitoring

Measuring performance is not a new concept to mobile either. However, until recently performance in mobile has been synonymous with voice quality. When network coverage and dropped calls were the only metrics that mattered, it wasn’t surprising that mobile performance monitoring was mostly a concern for the mobile network operators. Data performance was less of a concern when mobile content, applications, and services took a backseat to voice. However, with the mass consumer popularity of advanced smartphones and SMS, the accurate delivery of content, applications, and service over mobile data networks has become increasingly important to content owners.

Companies with a more mature Web presence are now embracing mobile channels and making them a key part of their growth strategy. However, for companies making the move from Web to mobile it is important to understand that performance-monitoring solutions that worked on the Web cannot be simply applied to mobile. Managing the mobile end-user experience requires an understanding of how it’s different from the Web end-user experience

Read More on Mobile Monitoring