People in Testing with Richard Bradshaw

Adventures in QA - Richard BradshawThis time in the “People in Testing” series, I had the chance to interview Richard Bradshaw aka the FriendlyTester.

Daniel: What is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Richard: Time! I am currently the sole tester on a project. Responsible for the testing of the apps, which include iOS, Android the a responsive website. Also until recently, this also included a windows phone app. It’s a lot to manage. So it becomes a real balancing act as to where I spend my time. Fortunately the team is aware of this and we stagger the releases. We tend to have iOS ready at least a week before Android. Then the web is more sporadic, mainly because we are able to release that instantly, so the risk is lower, due to the fact we can instantly rollback or push a fix if something was to go wrong, this isn’t as easy with the apps, especially iOS, due to the submission times. Another advantage of the way we work is that the platforms are aligned, meaning that we tend to be delivering the same functionality to all at the same time. This is advantageous to me as I can test across platforms at the same time, but also as with most projects, there is a lot of tacit knowledge, so testing all three while it’s still there helps.

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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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Rotation Tour in Mobile Testing

Rotation Tour in Mobile Testing - Adventures in QA

When I plan my mobile testing efforts and activities, I always plan to perform some special testing with the help of heuristics/ mnemonics. I use the heuristics to concentrate on a specific part of the app to find different behaviors and bugs. I hope you are all familiar with the touring heuristics within software testing. If not, here is a short overview of very known and popular heuristics/ mnemonics.

There is the touring heuristic FCC CUTS VIDS from Michael D. Kelly. Where FCC CUTS VIDS should remind you of several testing tours you can perform on your software. FCC CUTS VIDS stands for:

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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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Interview on TestTalks.com

Test Talks Logo - Adventures in QAA couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Joe Colantonio the founder of www.testtalks.com a weekly podcast about test automation. During the interview we spoke about my book and about mobile testing challenges in general. We spoke about the mobile test pyramid, which mobile test automation tools should be used and what makes mobile testing so special compared to other software like web- or desktop applications.

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