Smartsoft Mobile has delivered mobile solutions that are today in the hands of hundreds of thousands of users. With a reach like that, you can see the importance of thorough quality assurance testing in the project.
Here’s a brief list of the areas to address in your mobile project QA:
- Develop test plans along side the functional specification and wireframe process.
- Don’t rely on an emulator to do all your testing; do you have a good representation of the devices your mobile audience will use?
- Test every connectivity state between the device and back office. What happens when the device’s battery dies? What happens when the device drops in and out of coverage? What happens when your CDMA device gets a phone call?
- Understand that the device will be doing other things at the same time your app is running – perform integrated testing with the device
- How will your app work across multiple devices on the same mobile OS – did you account for all the screen size variations of Android devices?; did you provide two sizes of iOS images for older and newer iPhones?
- Understand the various cross-platform devices your app will experience, if applicable – multiple device families may work differently, even on the same mobile OS.
- Universal “Off-Shore” will generally mean limited capabilities – test in the ecosystem it will be deployed – time zones, coverage, services, environment, etc.
Some of the best advice we can offer to you as you are building your QA plans is to remember that you “don’t know what you don’t know.” And normally, that’s where your biggest hurdle to a clean deployment is hiding. Here’s one of our favorite examples:
We were working an iPad project with a search box that filtered a list of values. The user would select a value and see the corresponding details. Turned out that the iPad was spell checking the search box field and changing the entered text on the next click. This next click was usually the user clicking on an item in the list. However, as the user clicked, the list quickly changed and the user ended up selecting a different item. Lesson learned, make sure you are testing in the user environment and understand how all the potential variations of settings on the user’s device could impact your app’s operation.
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