Mobile

Hands-On Mobile App Testing is available

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It’s done! My book “Hands-On Mobile App Testing” is available since today. Further information can be found here: http://www.handsonmobileapptesting.com/.

Why I wrote this Book

It all started in 2010 when I had the opportunity to work on my first mobile project. The mobile team I worked in was responsible for developing a mobile web app, a native Android app and a native iOS app. This was the company’s first mobile project and a completely new testing environment for the quality assurance department. Together with a colleague, I had the chance to build up a mobile testing strategy from scratch. We evaluated several test automation tools to see which one fits best in our software development lifecycle. At that time, mobile testing tools were few and far between, and at an very early development stage. We then tried several testing approaches and tools. Of course we failed with some of them, but in the end the whole team, the company and our customers were happy.

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Common Apple App Store Rejections

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Since a couple of days (at least I never saw that page before) Apple provided a page with the most common app store rejections. On the page several categroies are listed, providing information on how to prevent your app from being rejected. When testing and/or submitting an iOS app have the following points in mind. Crashes … Read more

uTest is starting “Tester of the Quarter”

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uTest announced a new theme similar to the uTester of the year, it is called Tester of the Quarter. They introduced the program to recognize and to award software testers who participate to the global testing community. If you are a uTester and want to nominate a tester that fits to one of the following categories, submit your nominations here. … Read more

KIFSU and the Mobile User Expectations

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The user expectations of a mobile app is one of the main speciality and main challenge for mobile teams. The fact that every user has unique expectations makes it so difficult to develop and deliver the “right” app to customers. As several reports and surveys show, mobile users have far higher expectations of mobile apps when compared to other software like browser applications. The majority of reports and surveys state that nearly 80% of users delete an app after using it for the first time! The top four reasons for deletion are always bad design and usability, loading time and crashes immediately after installation.
Nearly 60% of users will delete an app that requires registration, while more than half of users expect an app to launch in under two seconds. If the app needs more time it gets deleted. Again more than half of users experience crashes the very first time they start an app.

An average user checks his mobile device every six minutes and has around 40 apps installed. Based on those numbers you can deduce that mobile users have really high expectations when it comes to usability, performance and reliability. Those three points are by far the biggest complaints when mobile users were asked about their experience with mobile apps.

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Short Summary about the Software Testing World Cup 2014 – Europe Competition

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Yesterday (13. June 2014), the preliminary software testing world cup competition took place for Europe. To summarize it in one sentence, “It was awesome and a good experience for software testers“.

The software that should be tested was http://stwc.salestool-demo.appspot.com/. We had the goal to test this application on as many as possible mobile devices with different screen sizes for usability, functionality and design. Out of scope during the session was load and performance testing. Also security testing had a low priority.

I was part of a distributed team within Europe, one guy was sitting in Barcelona, one in Hamburg, one in Düsseldorf and in Wiesbaden. We organized us via Google Docs and a Google Hangout session during the competition. One person (me), was listening to the live youtube channel, where the judges were answering questions from the teams and to inform my team with important information. Each of us had a special test task, where to focus on. We focused on the usability, functionality, design and some security testing.

We tested the application on iPads (mini), iPhones and on different Android devices.

Test Setup

In total we filed 38 bugs in the provided defect management tool. 15 of the filed bugs where critical ones. As an example, we where able to access sensitive data of snapshots and account settings from one of my team member. Other than that, there where lots of cross site scripting problems in the application.
9 of the filed bugs had a high priority, e.g. it was very easy to create internal server errors on the application backend by entering special characters to the input fields. 11 bugs had the severity medium and 3 low. 

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