mobile app testing

Win a Mobile App Testing Book

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Mobile App Testing

It’s bin a long time since I wrote my last blog post. At the moment there is not so much time for me to write down all the posts I have in draft mode. Sorry for that! However, since christmas is almost there and the german edition of my book Hands-On Mobile App Testing is available since end of September with the title Mobile App Testing, I want to give all my german speaking blog readers/ lurkers 😉 the opportunity to win a signed copy of the german edition.

https://twitter.com/dnlkntt/status/780091988553129984

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How to Build Your Own Android Device Cloud

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How to Build Your Own Android Device Cloud - Adventures in QA

In this post I will describe how to build your own Android device cloud in the office. You may think this is expensive and will take lots of time and work, but I promise it isn’t. After installing the device cloud you are able to control the real Android devices from your web browser no matter how far you are away from the real device. For all iOS testers and developers out there, I must say sorry, this post is only handling Android devices until know the tool I will use is not supporting iOS. Before I get started with the installation and setup I list shortly the hardware and software I used to setup the whole system.

Hardware and Software

Lets start with the software that is managing the Android devices. The software is called openstf, where STF stands for Smartphone Test Farm. The software is open source and is maintained by Simo Kinnunen and Günther Brunner. STF offers a plethora of really cool features like

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10 Mobile App Testing Mistakes to Avoid

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Mobile App Testing Mistakes - Adventures in QA

This article will cover 10 common mobile app testing mistakes to avoid when you are a software tester working in a mobile app testing and development environment. The 10 points may help you to start your mobile testing activities if you are new to mobile testing or they may help you to recap your existing mobile testing approaches.

1. Miss the platform UI/ UX guidelines

No matter if you are testing an Android, iOS or Windows phone app you as tester must know the different platform guidelines. Those guidelines include the interaction and the design as well as common development patterns. If you don’t know them you can test your app against those requirements. However, every app must be aligned with the different platform guidelines.

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Mobile Test Pyramid

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Mobile Test Pyramid - Adventures in QA

Anyone who is involved in software testing and software test automation should know the test automation pyramid introduced by Mike Cohn (http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/).

This article contains excerpts from my book „Hands-On Mobile App Testing“ published with Pearson Education.

As you can see in the following image, the typical pyramid consists of three layers. At the bottom, there is the automated unit-testing layer, in the middle the automated integration testing layer and at the top there is the automated end-to-end testing layer (including the user interface tests). Each layer has a different size, indicating the number of tests that should be written within each stage. Manual testing is not part of the test pyramid, hence it is shown as a cloud for additional testing work.

Test Pyramid - Adventures in QA

But this pyramid is not applicable to mobile apps and mobile test automation. Mobile testing requires a totally different set of testing activities like movement, sensors, different devices and networks compared to other software like desktop or web applications. Lots of manual testing is required to be sure that a mobile app is working as expected in the different usage scenarios.

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Android M Testing with Doze and App Standby

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Adventures in QA - Android M Testing with Doze and App Standby

You probably all know that Google has started with the rollout of Android M (Marshmallow). Android app developers and testers must know the new features that are coming with the latest version of Android M. Next to the brand new permission system, Android M also introduces Doze and App standby to save battery.

If a user leaves a device unplugged and stationary for a period of time, with the screen off, the device enters Doze mode. In Doze mode, the system attempts to conserve battery by restricting apps’ access to network and CPU-intensive services. It also prevents apps from accessing the network and defers their jobs, syncs, and standard alarms.
Periodically, the system exits Doze for a brief time to let apps complete their deferred activities. During this maintenance window, the system runs all pending syncs, jobs, and alarms, and lets apps access the network. (Source: Google documentation)

In order to be sure that your app is able to handle Doze and app Standby, Google provided some documentation on that. Here are the steps to make sure your app handles Doze (instructions copied from the documentation):

Testing your app with Doze

You can test Doze mode by following these steps:

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