This post is a reblog from the XING developer blog. In the last week we had our quarterly HackWeek at XING. During the week I was working with some colleagues on a project to setup a Android Smartphone Test Farm based on openstf.io.
Excerpt from the original version:
Mobile is becoming increasingly important for companies that build web applications, and that also includes XING. Over 50% of our platform traffic comes from mobile devices. This in turn leads a constant increase in the complexity and amount of testing work required on mobile devices.
Our challenge
At the beginning of 2015 XING launched a new internal initiative called “Unleashing Mobile”. The idea behind it is to upscale mobile development from a single mobile team to multiple teams within the company. The previous team setup was simply not able to keep pace with the development speed of the web platform and bring more and more features to the Android, iOS and Windows Phone mobile platforms. As things stand, we have 5 mobile feature teams developing features like profile, jobs, content or messages. Besides that, each platform has a central core team divided up into a platform and framework sub-team. The core platform team works on features that haven’t yet been passed on to the domain teams. As well as building its own app features, the core team has adopted more of a consulting role in helping to keep the whole app consistent and clean. Another key task of the central core teams is to integrate all of the code changes every two weeks to make sure that a stable app version can be released to our users.
The framework team works at an architectural level by providing other developers and software test engineers with the tools they need to carry out their duties, and by executing the bi-weekly releases.
The unleashing initiative also has a major impact when it comes to testing. Every team needs to have its own test devices or borrow some from the core teams. Handing out devices to the teams is quite hard as we a lot of devices are needed and have to be maintained. Moreover, the teams are split across several locations, which makes it difficult to lend and borrow devices. The next aspect is the fact that there are so many different mobile devices on the market (especially for Android), which makes it almost impossible to buy them all for every team. By now we have more than 40 different Android devices at XING that are representative of the devices most used by our users. This number is growing on a monthly basis as we buy new phones and tablets that show up in our usage statistics.
To simplify this process and to ensure smooth coordination between all of the teams, we took advantage of our internal HackWeek to research the Smartphone Test Farm for Android based on openstf.io.
Read the complete article here: https://devblog.xing.com/qa/android-smartphone-test-farm/
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