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Mobile Testing Skype Coaching

Maybe you have seen it already in my page navigation. Since this week, I offer a mobile testing skype coaching. I had this idea in my mind for a while and during my vacation I thought, why not. Give it a try.

Since 2010, I am working in the field of mobile testing. During this time, I gained lots of knowledge in mobile testing technique, mobile test automation, the whole app development lifecycle and how to release an app in different ways. At the end of 2013, I decided to write a book about mobile testing to share my knowledge. The book Hands-On Mobile App Testing was published in 2015. One year later the German edition Mobile App Testing was published, too.

Many people from all over the world approached me and gave me very positive feedback about the book. With my mobile testing skype coaching, I want to take the next step and to provide a direct 1:1 communication with companies or independent developers.

Mobile Testing Skype Coaching

The coaching is based up on individual challenges and needs. Therefore, the target group for this coaching is broad, from:

Independent mobile developers with no mobile testing skills.
Startups without any software testers.
Companies who want to establish a mobile testing department.
People who want to become a mobile tester.
Mobile tester who want to get new testing ideas.

If you are currently lost in mobile testing and need my help, take a look at the details and get in touch with me.

#HappyTesting

Featured Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/BbQLHCpVUqA

November 28, 2018

A Mobile App Launch Strategy

Releasing an app is not an easy process. Once an app is rolled out to the customers there is no way of rolling it back like on web platforms. Imagine a native mobile app as a good old burned CD that was shipped as a part of a magazine or hardware parts containing the drivers. Once it’s burned and shipped you can’t fix it. The same applies for native mobile apps. Therefore, a solid mobile app launch strategy is key to success for every company.

Before an app can be released it’s important to know all the technical information about the software development cycle. How many developers, testers (internal or external) are involved in the app development. How often will the app be released, what is the sprint cadence. Is there an internal or external beta testing community in place that can be used before rolling out the app to the customers? As a foundation for the release strategy this kind of information is important.

When the development cycle comes to an end it’s important to gather all the required release information from the product team. Every release should have meaningful release notes informing the user about the new release. The store descriptions must be updated as well images.

Before building the release candidate of the new app version, every team must execute the automated checks and see if they pass. Additionally, it’s recommended to perform a last exploratory testing session to see if all the critical parts and the new features are working as expected.

The last thing before going live is to check the release checklist. A checklist for a release must be in place to double check that nothing was missed out. Find out in my last blog post for applause what the release checklist is all about and what needs to be done in the post release monitoring.

Read the complete article here:

LINK APPLAUSE BLOG

https://www.applause.com/blog/essential-parts-of-mobile-app-launch-strategy

#HappyTesting

August 17, 2018

Mobile Testing Techniques to Know

“It works on my machine,” is probably the most frequent comment a software tester will hear from a developer once a bug has been reported. An expected reply from a tester would be, “Then back up your system. We need to deliver it to our customers, because our product is only working on your system.” We all know that software isn’t bug free and never will be. However, software testers should use their testing skills and techniques to find as many issue as possible. Especially with mobile testing, software testers need a variety of techniques to identify issues in different environments and scenarios before the customer will find them.

In my latest blog post for Applause, I described two important mobile testing techniques to know. The first one is interrupt testing and how to test for interrupts especially for push notification as well as system interrupts. The second described technique is input testing. Most of the mobile tester I have talked about this topic, they always mention the input testing via the touchscreen. True this is the most important input mechanism, but there is more to cover. Furthermore, I have mentioned more techniques that are worth to know.

Read the complete article here:

https://www.applause.com/blog/mobile-testing-techniques-every-qa-person-must-know/

#HappyTesting

July 16, 2018

Three Steps for a Successful Mobile Testing Strategy

Mobile devices and mobile apps are everywhere these days. Customers are using mobile devices and apps to play games, listen to music, and work from wherever they are. According to TechBeacon, more than half of mobile users will delete an app if it is crashing, freezing, or showing too many errors. As those who work in the field of mobile testing know, a mobile testing strategy is the key to success for a high-quality app. But defining a strong mobile testing strategy isn’t that easy. Mobile testers are facing many challenges to solve. There is device fragmentation, user mobility, high mobile user expectations, and device-specific hardware functions just to name of view.

And the challenges don’t stop there for mobile testers. More and more apps are now able to connect to wearable devices and other IoT devices.

Defining a Mobile Testing Strategy

With the rising complexity of mobile testing, a mobile development team needs to define a mobile testing strategy. With the help of a tailored test strategy, a mobile team can focus on the most important parts to deliver a great app to their users. It’s fairly easy to define a mobile testing strategy that will help downsize the amount of work needed during the development and testing phases. All you need to do is to gather user insights, define user scenarios, and specify your mobile testing approach. If you want to know how to define your own mobile testing strategy in three steps, read my last blog post at the Applause blog.

Read the complete article here:

https://www.applause.com/blog/how-to-create-a-mobile-testing-strategy-in-three-steps/

#HappyTesting

June 4, 2018

Testing App Bundles

With the introduction of Android App Bundles at Google i/o 2018, Android developers are now able to upload the Android app as a so called bundle to the Google Play Console. Based on the app bundle, the Google Play Console is now in charge to optimize, compile and sign an APK file for each specific mobile device configuration. With this new mechanism not all resources like images or text translations are part of the APK which leads to smaller APK sizes. Besides that, developers don’t have to compile APK files to specific Android versions or devices. Furthermore, developers are able to add dynamic features into the App Bundle. This dynamic features can be excluded from the initial download for the users to minimize the download time and size on the phone. Once the dynamic feature is needed, the app is downloading it as an extension to the app. This is called dynamic delivery.

To get the full picture about Android App Bundles and how it works, please read this article.

Testing App Bundles

But let’s get back to the testing part for App Bundles. The good thing is, that the “old” way of testing an APK file is still valid. But if the app is going to support App Bundles, there are a couple of new challenges mobile tester need to handle. Mobile testers need to test, that the App Bundles are delivered to the specific device configuration e.g. screen size, Android OS version or the used device language. Depending on the app complexity and the customer device usage, this will increase the amount of test scenarios significantly.

Google offers a new tool called bundletool to support the testing activities on the local machine. It will generate APKs from the App Bundles.

Using the command

bundletool build-apks --bundle=/APPUnderTest/test_app.aab --output=/APPUnderTest/test_app.apks

will compile a container with the ending *.apks which includes all the apk configurations your app supports. After the APKs have been compiled you can install them with the command

bundletool install-apks --apks=/APPUnderTest/test_app.apks

for the specific connected device.

Testing App Bundles Via the Play Console

Once the different APK configurations have been tested locally, a mobile tester must perform the same tests via the Google Play Console, to see if the Play Store delivers the right APK configuration to the different devices. Google introduced the internal test track to support the testing activities for App Bundles. Once the internal test track is setup with the test accounts, a mobile tester can use the Play Store app installed on the phone to check, that the right app configuration is installed on the device.

Last but not least, mobile tester must perform the app update testing with App Bundles, too.

#HappyTesting

Featured Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mom2sofia/8393131475

June 1, 2018

Mobile User Expectations

An average mobile user is checking his or her phone every six minutes and has around 40 apps installed. Checking the phone every six minutes means that an average user is looking more than 200 times a day at the mobile phone. If you have ever checked the mobile reviews in the biggest mobile app stores you can see that mobile users have a very high expectation. If an app needs more than two seconds to start, a mobile user is very likely to uninstall the app and leave a bad review and rating. The same goes for crashes during the startup, bad overall performance or a bad user experience.

The mobile user experience is key of success for a mobile app. A mobile app must have a really good design where all the logos, images and texts are optimized for a small screen. It’s important that an app is following the platform specific guidelines.
Furthermore, it’s important that an app is not consuming too much battery as well as mobile data.

If an app relies on images, it’s important to minimize the size to have faster loading times. An app should have a minimum amount of taps to solve a user problem. For example, provide the number keyboard for number input fields to avoid one unnecessary tap for a user.

To meet the high mobile user expectations, mobile testing is a crucial part in the development lifecycle and must performed by testing experts.

In one of my latest blog post, that I wrote for Applause, I outlined the importance of mobile user experience when it comes to the high mobile user expectation.

Read the complete article here:

https://www.applause.com/blog/what-mobile-users-expect-from-mobile-apps/