As every year since 2012, the guys from OpenSignal release the Android fragmentation report. The latest report was just published and the results of it are amazing and at the same time really scary if you are an Android developer or Android tester. For the 2015 report, 682,000 devices were surveyed and 24,093 distinct Android devices are on the market. Last year in 2014 there were “only” 18,796 devices available. Within one year the Android device market grew by 5,297 more devices, which is amazing if you keep the new iOS devices in mind. Apple released in 2015 (well 2014) only 4 devices. The iPhone 6, iPhone 6+, the iPad Air 2 and the iPad mini 3.
Software Testing
Reading Recommendations # 28
The 28th issue of my software testing reading recommendations contains 6 blog posts. The first blog post is from Google announcing the new option for Android beta testing. I also wrote a post about this topic on Monday. Then there is a book review from Janet Gregory of the book “Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Tests”. There are two posts written live from #TestRetreat about “How Can We Interview Testers Better?” and “Bringing Energy Back to Testing”. Then there are two great posts about “On being and becoming a speaker at conferences” and “How I Survived My First Year of Testing”.
Enjoy reading the posts during the nice summer days and feel free to send me any kind of reading recommendations if you have a great article to share.
 | Iterate faster on Google Play with improved beta testing | Android Developers Blog |
| Source: android-developers.blogspot.com.es/2015/07/iterate-faster-on-google-play-with.html?linkId=15956071 | |
Beta Testing for Android Apps
Since a couple of years Google is offering beta testing for Android apps. With this feature companies or developers have the chance to release Android beta apps to mobile testers via the Google Play Store. This feature is integrated into the Google Play Developer Console and is very easy to use. All you have to do is to upload your beta apk file to the developer console and to publish the app to the known beta testers.
Mobile development teams are able to create their own beta testing community with the help of G+ communities or Google groups. Since last week, Google is offering two more options to improve the beta testing even further. With this update, mobile tester and developer are able to create a public beta tester group without the need of the G+ community or a Google group. All you have to do, is to enable this option in the developer console and to send the beta testing URL to possible testers.
The URL has the scheme: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.package.name. Whenever a tester is clicking this link he or she can become a beta tester of the app. After clicking the link, the beta tester will get an update of the app in the Google Play Store and is able to download the beta version.
Reading Recommendations # 27
The 27th issue of my software testing reading recommendations contains 7 blog posts. There are posts about the pyramid and the dog-bone revisited. The challenge in providing accessibility, habits for agile testing and a post about custom ViewMatchers in Espresso for Android test automation. Another post is about “Test Levels! Really?!”, “The Dos and dont’s of testing automation” and one post from Markus Gärtner is dealing with “Working in a distributed company”.
Enjoy reading the posts.
 | Seth Eliot’s Blog » Blog Archive » The pyramid and the dog-bone revisited |
| Source: www.setheliot.com/blog/2015/07/22/the-pyramid-and-the-dog-bone-revisited/ | |
Open Device Labs
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.