Software Testing

How to improve your mobile testing skills

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In the last couple of months I was asked by several people how I improve my mobile testing skills. The mobile world is changing quite fast and you have to keep the pace, if you want to be a good and up to date mobile tester.

I recommended to read lots of QA related blogs, read QA books, follow the right people on twitter, try new mobile testing tools at home or at work (if you have the time) to get a broader knowledge in the mobile area. Another thing I recommended was to do new things (be creative while testing), try new testing techniques or just try to break the app in a crazy way. Furthermore I recommended another way of improve the own skills. Use as many apps as possible from different categories to see how apps are developed and how they behave. Besides using them, the important thing is, check the update texts of the apps! Do not just install the latest version of the app, read before installing the app. Some app developers are really precise in what the new version of the app is all about. Which nasty bug was fixed, which new feature is developed and so on.
If there are bug fixes described, don’t install the new version, instead try to reproduce the bug and see how to get this bug to life!

Here are some examples of apps that descibed very well, what was fixed:

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How Google tests mobile apps

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Today I found a really interesting blog post by the Google+ team and how they test the Google+ app for iOS and Android. In this post Google describes their mobile testing strategy. The team created 5 general rules, which they follow during the development and testing the Google+ app.

The rules are:

  1. Understand the platform. Testing on Android is not the same as testing on iOS. […]

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It’s like 10000 knives when all you need is a Spoon

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Isn’t ironic that there are so many Android test automation tools and it took me half a year to stumble up on Spoon?
Spoon is an Android test automation tool that is able to run your written java tests on several devices at the same time WITHOUT rooting the device.
Spoon is developed by the company Square, the company already open sourced some really nice tools (see the Open Source Space).

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Latest updates from robotium

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Since my last robotium blog posts, robotium was improved in several areas. Since version 4.0 robotium supports webviews and with version 4.2 robotium provide a full support for hybrid apps. You can use methods like: typeTextInWebElement(By by, String text) waitForWebElement(By by) clickOnWebElement(WebElement webElement) clearTextInWebElement(By by) getWebElement(By by, int index) … Also a great improvement is … Read more

Given When Test

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Today I want to write about behavior driven development (BDD) with Cucumber and Capybara. All those things are not new, but since I changed my company I had the chance to learn new frameworks and tools. Before using the tools you need to install them :). For me the installation was kind of nasty because I am working with windows again and the installation is not so easy and comfortable as for linux or mac. The following stuff needs to be installed on your machine (windows):

If the installation is done you should install the following gems with ‘gem.bat install GEMNAME‘

builder, bundler, bundler-unload, capybara, capybara-screenshot, capybara-webkit, childprocess, cucumber, diff-lcs, ffi, gherkin, headless, json, mime-types, mini_portile, multi_json, nokogiri, rack, rack-test, rake, rspec, rspec-core, rspec-expectations, rspec-mocks, rubygems-bundler, rubyzip, rvm, selenium-webdriver, websocket, xpath

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