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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Android Tool for Mac

Android Tool for Mac - Adventures in QA

If you are a mobile tester or a mobile developer you may not have the problem to create screenshots or videos from the current develop state of your app. You will probably use tools like adb for Android or QuickTime for iOS in order to capture a video. However, this is not the case for prodct owners, scrum master, mobile designer or any other non-technical colleague on the project. They may have not installed the mobile development tools like Android Studio or Xcode.

Thanks to my colleague, Daniel Guse, who pointed me to the tool Android Tool for Mac. With the help of this tool it is very easy to capture screenshots or videos from Android applications right from the desktop.

Features of Android Tool for Mac

The tool is offering the following features:

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[Reblog] Scaling Mobile at XING: Platform, Framework and Domain Teams

At XING, my current employer we had to handle some exciting challenges. We had to scale the whole mobile development as well as mobile testing from two small mobile teams (Android and iOS) to the whole software development department at XING. My colleague Alexey Krivitsky wrote a great blog post about “Scaling Mobile at XING: Platform, Framework and Domain Teams” at InfoQ. … Read more

Open Device Labs

Open Device Labs - Adventures in QA

I often see posts on twitter or software testing communities where people asking for help regarding mobile device fragmentation and how to handle all those different devices. Usually my answer to this is, that you don’t need to test on that many mobile devices.

There are several ways to go. One way to go, is to gather user information from tracking statistics of the released app version. If the app is not yet released, statistics from the Web page (if in place) can help to gather information about the target customers and the devices they are using. If this kind of information is available you can start thinking about how to get at least the top 10 – 15 devices of the customers.

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[Infographic] QA Mistakes and how they were solved

Udemy Infographic - Adventures in QA-header

The company Udemy, send me the following very interesting infographic about major QA fails and solutions from the last 25 years. It is pretty interesting to see what kind of bugs occur and how they were solved. The infographic contains bugs from companies such as AT&T, Pentium, US Navy, NASA, Airbus, Lookheed and many more. … Read more