Blog Review 2015

Blog Review 2015 - Adventures in QASince 2011 it’s a tradition for me to post a blog review of my blog to give you as my readers some insights. The year 2015 was again a very exciting year for me and the blog. One thing was my absolute highlight this year. It was the release of my book “Hands-On Mobile App Testing” in the printed edition by Addison-Wesley. When I released the book in 2014 on leanpub, I never expected that a book publishing company will ever print my book and this makes me really proud :). But today is not about my book, it’s about my blog which helped me to shape my knowledge in the software testing industry and which led me to write a book at all.

Before I go into details, I want to say thank you to all of my readers. Thanks for checking my blog from time to time and to read the content that I am producing. The feedback I got in the last year was just great and feels really good. It made me proud to see that the numbers of unique users, page impressions and comments have increased also in 2015.

Blog Review

Today I want to share some numbers and highlights with you. While collecting all the numbers for this post I was kind of surprised by one number which is 104. During the year 2015, I wrote 104 blog posts which is amazing (I would have never guessed this number).
Most of my posts where dealing with mobile testing, people in testing and my reading recommendations.

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Whiteboard Testing

Whiteboard TestingWhile I was on vacation, Richard Bradshaw (@FriendlyTester) had a problem. He was looking for relevant software testing videos e.g. on YouTube to learn something new. However, he always had two problems either the content was bad or just to long. He was looking for great, not so lengthy, software testing videos that explain a certain topic in a couple of minutes to extend his knowledge. The fact that nothing like this was out there on the Internet made him thinking about a solution. In his blog post, Richard mentioned that he was starting to outline and mind map ideas on how to solve the problem on his whiteboard. While drawing and writing on his whiteboard he had the idea to record the drawings and to upload them to an own YouTube channel called “Whiteboard Testing“.

In the first video of the Whiteboard Testing channel, Richard is explaining the idea behind it. The goal is to create a collection of short software testing videos not longer than 10 minutes from various people who want to share their software testing knowledge with others. Have a look at the introduction video:

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My Interviews on Mobile Testing

My Interviews on Mobile Testing - Adventures in QA

Lately I was interviewed by Ryan Arsenault from Aberdeen Group on the blog TechProEssentials and by Srinivas Kadiyala for the Testing Circus magazine. Both interviews had a focus on mobile testing, my role as mobile tester, my current challenges at work, how I started my career in software testing and how I started my book about mobile testing. Maybe my interviews on mobile testing are interesting for you and will provide you with some new insights in my daily work life.

The following list is an excerpt from the questions I answered for the TechProEssentials:

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Mobile Test Pyramid

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

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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