In a few short years, mobile
application downloads have skyrocketed from a relative 30 billion to an
estimated 200 billion in 2016. As we’ve noted in previous blogs, the mobile
industry has transformed not just our lives but the living market and business ecosystem
we work in every day. Multitasking is no longer a bonus; it’s a must. Just like consumers need to browse
the internet, make a phone call, and possibly pay their credit card bill at the
same time, we – as testers – have to be able to cater to multiple venues of our
profession. But, the “mobile explosion” hasn’t just affected developers and
testers. The strain of a fast-paced environment has greatly altered the way
other departments within development companies think and act. Marketing and
sales teams, in an attempt to hurriedly release the “new product”, want
everything done yesterday and this often leads them to bypass critical steps
from testing phases in order to meet their deadlines. They cut corners with
budgets for testing tools and sometimes leave developers at a large
disadvantage.
The most important concept that
these marketing and sales teams have to adopt is that developing a
revolutionary or popular app isn’t enough. Testing said app for errors and
glitches is a living, breathing, and essential part of the entire lifecycle.
Without it, no matter how great the product is, projects will have trouble
staying afloat. No consumer wants to use an app that crashes frequently or
loses their data. The key to success is functional and performance testing of
web-based and native mobile applications.
Functional testing can identify
trouble within devices themselves that may cause an app to fail. Making sure
the app works on all devices is necessary to ensure that the product reaches
the maximum number of consumers. This brings about the necessity for services
that allow developers to use their devices for mass testing both physically and
in the Cloud. This may seem like a tremendously difficult task, but it doesn’t
have to be when developers invest in the correct instruments to help them
multitask in a world that accepts nothing less.
Even more crucial is test automation to save time and
resources. Taking a drastic shortcut here is a mistake that many non-developers
(such as sales and marketing teams) make. Enough time must be allotted to
testing of an application to catch any and all bugs before their have a
negative effect on customer experience. Using the right tools at the right
stage in development will set any project on the right track and keep it there,
including setting an efficient pace that even non-developers can accept.
The most popular product for
application testing currently on the market is the HP ALM Suite. This product
is a well-rounded, advanced, tool for developers to use that helps identify
errors and malfunctions early on in the test phase. However, as advanced as HP
ALM is, it still lacks a few features that can be supplemented with solutions
like ZAP-fiX. ZPX plugs seamlessly into the HP ALM Suite and works side by side
with developers and testers from start to finish.
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