‘Indian companies have to look at testing differently’
What are the market opportunities offered by the mobile apps testing segment? Mobile phone I smartphone is completely transforming the way we communicate, work, and entertain. And mobility is accelerating at a supersonic speed. There is absolutely no dearth for opportunities in mobility testing as numbers and different types of devices are changing dramatically, consumerization of IT is driven by mobility and there is an ever increasing demand for enterprise applications. There are over 1,150 network operators, nearly 400 mobile software vendors, 11 operating systems, 49 manufacturers, 8,000 devices, and 585,000 apps. What is the revenue from testing mobility apps? Nearly 10% of our overall testing comes from testing mobility applications. What are the new challenges in testing of mobility applications? Since 2008, the proliferation of mobile devices, mobility devices, and platforms has thrown up newer kind of challenges to the testing fraternity. Challenges include di- versity in device management; application usage which is context sensitive; complex data entry process and high environmental input from camera and voice, etc; user interface design; network consideration; application and device security; and rapid application testing.
Devices have different application platforms, it has its own standards, application interface, programming languages, and applications ought to be tested on each platform. In fact, newer innovations in application platforms are also creating more complexities. Unlike the network landscape of PC environment, the network landscape of mobile device has different gateways; applications need to be tested for compatibility with PAP-enabled and HTTP-enabled devices. Application and device security risks can be hardly ignored. What is your testing strategy to handle complexities? At Calsoft Labs, we have a unique mobility testing strategy framework. Pe have adopted an automation process for datacentric apps and device capability based apps. Pe use a weighted device platform matrix method to identify the most critical hard ware I platform combination to test; check the end-to-end functional flow in all possible platforms at least once; conduct performance testing, GUI testing, and compatibility testing using actual devices, and measure performance only in realistic conditions of wireless traffic and user load. What are the concerns in testing mobility apps space in India? Availability of resources, attaining the scale, and lack of awareness are the key concerns. Indian companies have to look at testing differently and the introduction of testing-as-a-service or testing-on-demand can work wonders in this space.