Mobile App Testing

How much do you hate that word? “Buffering.” For someone who has never mastered that virtue called patience, “buffering” is one of the most frustrating words ever. And it has only gotten worse as smartphones and other advanced technologies have given us more options to stream video while simultaneously spoiling us with increasingly instant gratification. Well, according a report from Skyfire, there’s no real need for slow loading, choppy videos. Check out this recap from IntoMobile:

Mobile video is about to explode in the upcoming year. According to Cisco, video accounts for 52 percent of all mobile data and will rise to 66 percent by 2013. With video conferencing, YouTube and Netflix, this figure isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that companies are doing remarkably little to help wireless carriers balance this consumption. Without some balance, this increase in data threatens to choke our mobile broadband connection in the upcoming years.

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For the twelfth bug of Christmas, my manager said to me:

1. Tell them it’s a feature
2. Say it’s not supported
3. Change the documentation
4. Blame it on the hardware
5. Find a way around it
6. Say they need an upgrade
7. Reinstall the software
8. Ask for a dump
9. Run with the debugger
10. Try to reproduce it
11. Ask them how they did it and
12. See if they can do it again.

- By Alam Saeed

For more testing humor, check out Computerjokes.net

And Happy Hanukkah too!

Michael Bolton has recently been spreading the gospel on everything that exploratory testing is not. Here’s what this top QA expert thinks about exploratory testing:

What Exploratory Testing Is Not (Part 3): Tool-Free Testing

People often make a distinction between “automated” and “exploratory” testing. This is like the distinction between “red” cars and “family” cars. That is, “red” (colour) and “family” (some notion of purpose) are in orthogonal categories. A car can be one colour or another irrespective of its purpose, and a car can be used for a particular purpose irrespective of its colour. Testing, whether exploratory or not, can make heavy or light use of tools. Testing, whether it entails the use of tools or not, can be highly scripted or highly exploratory.

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Giving leeway for the difficulty of a given project, you would more or less expect the quality of work done by a professional developer to be consistent – maybe even improve over the years as they gain more experience. Right? Well according to a study by application security company Veracode, apparently the quality of work also depends on the time of year. Check out this comment found on Slashdot:

“Data from application testing firm Veracode suggests that the quality of application code submitted for auditing is pretty much constant throughout the year — except for the months of October and November, when the average density of vulnerabilities in the code jumps considerably. But why? Is it the pressure of deadlines? The stress of developers’ lives (kids back to school, etc.)?”

The study was done by Veracode’s Director of Marketing, Fergal Glynn, who was curious to see if the density of security flaws in the applications they test were affected by yearly events (summer vacation? holiday stress? winter blues?). This is what he found (and how he found it):

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What a year it was in the world of mobile! Of course, you’d know that already if you’re a regular here at mobileapptesting.com. The real question is what were the year’s biggest stories and developments? Well, we’d have a hard time arguing against CNN.com. Here’s an abbreviated version of the their top 10 stories in mobile tech (many of which have a great deal to do with mobile app testing). Enjoy!

1. Goodbye (mostly) to unlimited data plans; hello throttling. The digital divide between those with high-speed Internet access and those without remains a huge problem in the United States and elsewhere, leading to significant inequities of opportunities and services.

2. Growth of mobile streaming media. It seemed to be the year when streaming media for mobile really took off. According to The Nielsen Company, 14% of U.S. mobile users (about 31 million people) now watch videos on their smartphones and feature phones, a 35% increase over last year. Also, 29% of U.S. smartphone users stream music or Internet radio to their phones, up 66% from 2010

3. 4G network rollouts. This year, all major U.S. carriers and several of the discount regional ones were busy rolling out their faster 4G networks. This label comprises three major technologies: long-term evolution (LTE, used by Sprint, Verizon and MetroPCS), HSPA+ (used by AT&T and T-Mobile), and WiMAX (provided by Clearwire and resold by Sprint in some cities). These technologies offer different speeds, strengths and weaknesses — so what the 4G experience means to consumers will vary widely by carrier and location.

4. BlackBerry outage and continuing RIM decline. For several years, even after the first iPhone launched, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry line of phones was the 800-pound gorilla of the U.S. smartphone market. This was driven mainly by business users, who were attracted to the phone’s advanced messaging and encryption features.

5. Android commands half the U.S. mobile market. According to ComScore, as of October 2011 the Android operating system was used on more than 46% of U.S. smartphones. If this growth continues, then by now Google’s open mobile platform may already be on about half of all U.S. smartphones in use. This leaves Apple’s iOS in second place with nearly a third of all smartphones, and all other platforms (Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, etc.) occupying far smaller market segments.

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George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, thinks so. Here’s a summary of George’s points (from Business Insider):

George’s Arguments

1. The web is dying and will be replaced by “the App Internet.” He says that since storage & processing are growing at a much more rapid rate than the network we’ll be at a point where not having apps on devices will greatly under utilize the power of the devices in our hands. In other words, our mobile devices are all powerful and the network that they connect into sucks.

2. Social networking is peaking. He cites that we have reaching a saturation of social networking in which nearly everybody is already using social networks (85+% in most developed countries and in urban environments in the developing world) and the amount of time dedicated to social activities already exceeds many other important tasks such as exercise and is even approaching the same amount of time we dedicate to child care. He argues for a world he calls POSO (post social) in which we will only use social applications which drastically cut down our time involvement and/or increase our productivity.

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So you’re a developer or a tester working on a new app. All the functions work properly, user data is secure, you’ve even changed a few things around to maximize user ease. You have a killer app that will be the first of its kind of in the market – you can’t fail! Your launch is successful and you get tons of downloads. Fast forward a few months and all of the sudden even your friends who loved the app when they first downloaded it admit they’ve since forgotten about it. The problem? They have so many apps on their phone (an average of 65 in fact) that it simply gets buried in the clutter and when they search their phone using keywords (because who can remember every apps’ name?) it doesn’t come up. But a copycat app that piggybacked on your success does – because they optimized their app title for on-phone search.

Read about it in TechCrunch:

There are over 500,000 applications for the iPhone and iPad, 300,000+ on Android and thousands more on other platforms. The average user has 65 apps installed on their phone (source: Flurry). Many of us have more.

Entire businesses have been built to solve the problem of “app discovery” – that is, a way to supplement the limited app search mechanisms built into the vendors’ own application stores. This is primarily to benefit mobile app developers, who can’t get their apps found. The end results of these products are pitched to consumers as tools to “find new, cool apps,” “find apps your friends like,” or “find the best apps that do X.”

While these efforts are appreciated by app developers and end users alike, they don’t solve what is increasingly becoming a real problem: finding the apps you already have installed on your phone. …

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The Android App Market is famously lax in vetting new app offerings, and as a result there has been a recent rash of malware apps and poorly produced legitimate apps. Instead of putting in place an Apple-esque review process, Android is turning to developer education in an attempt to up quality. Read about it on Engadget:

Dust off your Trapper Keeper and strap on those brand new sneakers, because Android school is now in session. Yesterday, the Android Developers team announced the launch of Android Training — a set of online classes designed to help users create better apps. The tutorials, available for free, provide aspiring devs with step-by-step instructions and tips on how to implement effective navigation tools, optimize battery life and solve other “common Android development problems.” At the moment, the program is divided into 11 sections with a total of 34 individual lessons, though the team plans to expand its offerings “over the coming months.”

The brilliant bloggers over at uTest (wink, wink) have posted a great interview with security expert Richard Stiennon. Of the many topics discussed was that of mobile security (or lack thereof). Here’s what Richard had to say regarding the biggest mobile threat.

uTest: You’ve said before that mobile will not require its own anti-virus systems. That said, it seems that mobile threats are multiplying by the hour. In your view, what’s the biggest security challenge in terms of mobile?

RS: Apps, apps, apps. VPNs, firewalls, and carrier filtering are going to impede network based attacks. Containing and vetting applications is the biggest security challenge for the platform vendors.

Read the entire interview here >>>

Nerd wars escalate:

It’s no coincidence that during a week when dozens of malicious Android apps have been pulled from the Android Market, Microsoft is offering five Android malware victims a free Windows Phone 7 phone. The catch? You need to share your rage against Android with the Twitterverse.

Microsoft evangelist Ben Rudolph (@BenThePCGuy) tweeted Monday that he is giving away five Windows Phone 7 devices to those who tweet @BenThePCGuy with the best – and by best, I mean worst – stories of Android malware infection. Include #droidrage in your post.

With around 5 percent of the U.S. mobile market versus Android’s 45 percent market share, Microsoft’s latest antic smacks of David picking at Goliath. They’ve also been giving away WP7 devices throughout the year: this summer WP7 director Brandon Watson famously bet Dilbert creator Scott Adams $1,000 that he’d love WP more than iOS or Android; a month later Watson also offered free Windows Phone development kits and devices to webOS developers. During last month’s BlackBerry outage, Rudolph also gave away 25 Windows Phone devices to disgruntled Bberry users.

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