Devices For The Always-On-Workforce

Today’s mobile email, document shuffling, and occasional presentation are small potatoes compared to what’s coming. Off-the-shelf productivity apps? Yesterday’s news. Businesses mobilizing their core enterprise systems will give workforces anytime, anywhere access to company data, systems, and infrastructure. It’s not unreasonable to think that ultimately, anything that can be done on a company-networked computer will be able to be done on a smartphone or tablet. (And a significant number of those devices will be personally owned by the workers.) - 

Marketing managers will access corporate analytics on their phone while they’re in a meeting. Plant supervisors will order parts for their assembly line from an iPad. Field service reps will check the warehouse for repair parts while they’re at a customer site. And of course, the emails will continue to flow back and forth while workers are at the opera, with their kids at the playground, or on the road. 

Some companies are well on their way towards such uber-connectedness. And many more are taking their first steps in that direction.

Related Links
1. The March Towards Mobilization
2. Mobile Web Optimization
3. Mobile User Experience Trends

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

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?
2. New IDC Report: The Evolution of Mobile and Web Load Testing
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

Related Links;

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