[Reblog] Android Smartphone Test Farm

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 # 41

Reading Recommendations - Adventures in QA

It seems to be that the average amount of recommended blog posts is often six. Maybe it is the amount of blog post I am able to read throughout the week. However, last week I was not able to publish the reading recommendations due to heavy workload but this week there is the latest issue number 41 again. And surprise, it contains again six interesting posts about software testing. There are posts about “The Laws of Sport and Automation”, “Do You Know How to Wow Mobile Users?”, “Why your phone battery is rubbish”, “Failing Doesn’t Make you a Failure”, “Notes from the Eurostar Mobile Deep Dive 2015” and “How to develop into a great speaker”.

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

Reading Recommendations Daniel KnottThe expected result was 42. Now what was the test?: The Laws of Sport and Automation

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My Interviews on Mobile Testing

My Interviews on Mobile Testing - Adventures in QA

Lately I was interviewed by Ryan Arsenault from Aberdeen Group on the blog TechProEssentials and by Srinivas Kadiyala for the Testing Circus magazine. Both interviews had a focus on mobile testing, my role as mobile tester, my current challenges at work, how I started my career in software testing and how I started my book about mobile testing. Maybe my interviews on mobile testing are interesting for you and will provide you with some new insights in my daily work life.

The following list is an excerpt from the questions I answered for the TechProEssentials:

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People in Testing with Viktor Johansson

Viktor Johansson - Adventures in QAThis time in the “People in Testing” series, I had the chance to interview Viktor Johansson. Viktor is currently working in New York City for a tech startup called Axial. Viktor is very passionate about mobile testing and likes to build devices labs with lego. If you have any kind of question to Viktor, you can contact via twitter.

Daniel: What is currently your biggest challenge at work?

Viktor: To keep up with our several, weekly releases. As an embedded tester in an agile team, there is a lot to test. New features are constantly being built. I need, together with the team, prioritize my testing and try to identify risk areas quickly. I am a strong believer in dogfooding. Everybody in an organization can test and bring value to a product. I have received good support from different stakeholders across the organization. Building those relationships, bridging channels of communication has been invaluable. It has not only helped increase the quality of our product, but has also given me a greater understanding of the business in order to be a better tester. Communication with the end users has also been essential.

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Mobile Test Pyramid

Mobile Test Pyramid - Adventures in QA

Anyone who is involved in software testing and software test automation should know the test automation pyramid introduced by Mike Cohn (http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/).

This article contains excerpts from my book „Hands-On Mobile App Testing“ published with Pearson Education.

As you can see in the following image, the typical pyramid consists of three layers. At the bottom, there is the automated unit-testing layer, in the middle the automated integration testing layer and at the top there is the automated end-to-end testing layer (including the user interface tests). Each layer has a different size, indicating the number of tests that should be written within each stage. Manual testing is not part of the test pyramid, hence it is shown as a cloud for additional testing work.

Test Pyramid - Adventures in QA

But this pyramid is not applicable to mobile apps and mobile test automation. Mobile testing requires a totally different set of testing activities like movement, sensors, different devices and networks compared to other software like desktop or web applications. Lots of manual testing is required to be sure that a mobile app is working as expected in the different usage scenarios.

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