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.

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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.

Competitive monitoring and analysis with precise and accurate data

Mobile network quality is often cited as the top reason in selecting a mobile carrier. Consequently vast resources are allocated to monitoring internal operations. But if that’s all that’s being done, you’re only getting half the picture.

Carriers and infrastructure providers looking to get a comprehensive view of the performance and end-user experience take the additional step of benchmarking against their competitors. It requires time, resources, and expertise to analyze data and make actionable decisions. This testing helps you understand industry standards and take the actions needed to stay ahead of the curve. After all, maintaining the highest standard in service performance is of paramount importance when it comes to retaining customer loyalty. An important step is improving the user experience for mobile content, services, and applications begins with mobile monitoring and collecting the right mix of performance data. 

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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.

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Cloud Computing Insights

In a private network world you would have to build and pay for a lot of stuff yourself: multiple data centers, double the hardware, internet access connections on opposite sides of the building, etc. Very quickly the cost of high availability gets prohibitive, locking out all but the deepest of pockets. 

With Cloud Computing,  having access to redundant data centers is just a matter of purchasing the right performance monitoring tools and the engineering time in programming your applications and operational systems to take full advantage of on demand resources. In the end you only pay for what you use of the infrastructure, not what you might need as is the case when doing it yourself. 

Cloud Computing is not outsourcing, this implies a transfer of risk and responsibility. Cloud Computing is a powerful tool to increase performance and availability many fold while reducing costs, if it’s used correctly.

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