Smartwatch App Testing – Android Wear

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Android Wear Watch Lineup - Adventures in QA

This is the 4th and last post of my smartwatch app testing series. However, there will be one more post with lots of testing ideas coming next week, so stay tuned for that. In this post I will write about Android Wear and the important features to know about this platform. Android Wear, as the name already suggest is based on Android and is developed by Google. The platform was launched at the Google I/O 2014.

Android Wear is written in C, C++ and Java and is open source like Android. The latest version based on Android 5.1.1 aka Lollipop (Version 6.0.1 aka Marshmallow is currently in roll-out stage). Since Android Wear is open source many manufacturers already produced their own Wear based watches. Some of you might think, yet another fragmentation challenge is coming up, but this is not the case for Android Wear. Google build this platform in a way that the UI is not customizable like Android for smartphones. The main goal is to get a common look and feel as well as features on different watches, produced by various manufacturers. This is a great step for all people working with wearable apps based on Android Wear, because it downsizes the amount of work.

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[Reblog] Android Smartphone Test Farm

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This post is a reblog from the XING developer blog. In the last week we had our quarterly HackWeek at XING. During the week I was working with some colleagues on a project to setup a Android Smartphone Test Farm based on openstf.io.

Excerpt from the original version:

Mobile is becoming increasingly important for companies that build web applications, and that also includes XING. Over 50% of our platform traffic comes from mobile devices. This in turn leads a constant increase in the complexity and amount of testing work required on mobile devices.

Our challenge

At the beginning of 2015 XING launched a new internal initiative called “Unleashing Mobile”. The idea behind it is to upscale mobile development from a single mobile team to multiple teams within the company. The previous team setup was simply not able to keep pace with the development speed of the web platform and bring more and more features to the Android, iOS and Windows Phone mobile platforms. As things stand, we have 5 mobile feature teams developing features like profile, jobs, content or messages. Besides that, each platform has a central core team divided up into a platform and framework sub-team. The core platform team works on features that haven’t yet been passed on to the domain teams. As well as building its own app features, the core team has adopted more of a consulting role in helping to keep the whole app consistent and clean. Another key task of the central core teams is to integrate all of the code changes every two weeks to make sure that a stable app version can be released to our users.

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Reading Recommendations # 52

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Reading Recommendations - Adventures in QA

Welcome to the 52th edition of my reading recommendations! Since one year I am reading and collecting interesting posts about software testing, software development and sometimes posts that are not dealing with the main topics but may be of interest for you, too.

The anniversary edition contains 9 interesting blog posts with various topics that might be of interest for you and one youtube video which shows an awesome mobile automation robot. There are posts with the following headlines “Test Automation Sells”, “A bug that thaught that we’re implementing too much”, “Why We Struggle with Change”, “Testing Trapeze February Edition”, “Can we stop saying we break software”, “The new Testing Conference”, “How blogging can improve your testing”, “Do You Actually Know What Your Automated Test Is Doing?” and “The Importance of Acceptance Criteria”.

Enjoy reading the posts and send me new ones that are worth reading and I will mention you and link to your social links or blog.

Test Automation SellsTest Automation Sells | Hello Test World Somewhere I saw a statement that testing today is about 25% of IT budgets with a tendency to increase. Not sure if that’s true but even half of that is a lot of money. So of course managers and financial controllers are looking where they can eek out any spare $s. Because testing and quality…
Source: hellotestworld.com/2016/02/18/test-automation-sells/

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Smartwatch App Testing – Pebble OS

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Pebble OS title - Adventures in QA

This is the third post of my smartwatch app testing series and in this post I will write about Pebble OS. In the previous posts I wrote about Tizen OS and watch OS. I think we all know the Pebble watches from their success on the Kickstarter campaign in 2012. In this campaign the company Pebble Technology Corporation raised more than $10 million dollar which was the best Kickstarter project at that time. With the raised money the company was able to produce the first Pebble watch. Since then, Pebble launched different versions of their smartwatches and the concept is different compared to Tizen, watch OS or Android Wear. Pebble’s characteristic is the low power e-ink display with either 2 or 64 colors. Right after the start of the first Pebble and the Pebble OS, this platform has become more and more attractive in the smartwatch business and therefore it is important to know the platform details in order to develop or to test for this system.

As a first starting point I recommend to take a look at the Pebble developer page, where all required information like the development SDK, tutorials, developer guide and the SDK documentation is listed. Also worth looking at are the mobile app SDKs for Android and iOS. Pebble watch apps or watch faces can either be written in C, Java or JavaScript.

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Reading Recommendations # 51

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Reading Recommendations - Adventures in QA

The 51th edition of the reading recommendations contains 6 interesting blog posts with various topics that might be of interest for you. The first one is from Richard Bradshaw and is about “A Four Week Approach to Creating Abstracts”. The next post is from Robert Lambert with the topic “The Problems with Meetings”. Then there is a post with the topic “6 Questions To Ask Before Releasing Software”. Another very interesting article is about the current date bug in iOS which can brick your i-device when setting the date to 1st of January 1970.
Last week the Google engineers released EarlGrey a functional UI testing framework and the initial post is in this list, too. The last post for this week is from Simon Knight with the topic “Narrow Your Focus to Reach the Right People With Your Words”.

Enjoy reading the posts and send me new ones that are worth reading and I will mention you and link to your social links or blog.

A Four Week Approach to Creating AbstractsFriendly Tester: A Four Week Approach to Creating Abstracts
Source: www.thefriendlytester.co.uk/2016/02/a-four-week-approach-to-creating.html

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