Software Testing, Agile Development and Product Management by Daniel Knott
Time flies, my book Hands-On Mobile App Testing was published in the printed edition one year ago. Since then so many people wrote me via mail, twitter, facebook, XING or LinkedIn that they like the book and that they found it really useful. This kind of feedback feels really good and makes me happy.
In June last year I posted the following picture on twitter after I received a huge box of books :).
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.
If you are working as mobile tester in an Android development team you are probably familiar with adb commands (Android Debug Bridge). The tool offers plenty of useful commands that help you to pull logs from the Android device or emulator. Besides pulling log files from the test device there are plenty of other useful commands that every mobile tester in an Android environment must know. Before using adb make sure the Android SDK is installed, a device is connected to your computer or an Android emulator has been started. Note: In order to use the adb commands on your test devices make sure that on every device the developer options and USB debugging are enabled.
Both options are hidden by default. On Android 4.2 and higher you can enable them by tapping seven times the build number in the Settings > About phone section. Once the developer options are enabled open them and enable USB debugging.
Start/ Stop ADB server
If a device is connected start the adb server to be able to interact with the device.
adb start-server
adb kill-server
List connected devices
adb devices
Will list all connected devices.
If you are working as mobile tester in an Android team or you are an Android developer you know the pain of installing apk files to your test devices and you should have a look at ADB idea, which may solve your pain. Next to installing or uninstalling apk files from test devices, it is somethings necessary to kill your app, start it or even to clear the app data in order to have a fresh version of it. Usually you are using the known adb commands for that and execute them in the console or you open the device settings to clear the app data. However, this is time consuming if you are doing this several times a day.
If you are using Android Studio or Intellij IDEA you can use a very nice plugin called ADB idea to speed up your testing and development time. ADB idea is written by Philippe Breault and can be installed via the IDE plugin section, e.g. Preferences/ Settings -> Plugins -> Browse Repositories or you can download it manually from the JetBrains plugin page and install it via Preferences/ Settings -> Plugins -> Install Plugin from disk.
This post is not about mobile fragmentation (f-word) or any other technical challenges that we as mobile tester have to handle in our daily work life. No, this post is about health, our health while we are working all day long with mobile devices and this post should show you the drawbacks of that.
While testing mobile apps our neck and our eyes are under extreme burden. While looking down to the devices our neck is forced into an unnormal position which puts high pressure to our neckbones and may lead to a headache, neck pain or even more back problems.
There is even a term for that problem, it’s called ‘text neck’.