With year-over-year mobile app market growth and ever-increasing complexity of mobile applications, enterprises are looking for efficient ways to support and test their mobile apps. Gartner recently reported that the number of overall mobile app downloads — both free and paid — will soar to 102 billion by the end of this year, up from 64 billion in 2012. By 2017, the number of app downloads should reach nearly 269 billion. More, It is becoming clear that Android and iOS are the new enterprise mobile platforms as seen in Figure 1 below.
Fig 1: Android and iOS are the new Enterprise Platforms
With that clear revolution, scaling your mobile testing to support multiple devices and operating systems is a challenge, which should be addressed using cloud-based mobile solutions. While some of these solutions also enable testing against various live networks; however that is not enough.
As new and innovative ways to engage with mobile applications become available, in some cases it becomes important to test your mobile apps while the device is located on-premise and accessible to the tester/developer.
One example would be new technologies related to mobile payments. In this scenario, which requires testing your mobile apps against a payment card and viewing the results locally, the end-user that conducts the payment transaction must connect the device to the payment card located near the device. Another popular use case would be mobile apps which use barcode scanners. While there are ways to use pre-loaded scans and images of the target product, it is highly advisable to test locally against real barcodes to properly and objectively test on numerous products.
Another emerging trend is the use of mobile devices for communicating with 3rd party equipment. Examples include printing or viewing a medical report while connected via Bluetooth/WiFi to a local printer in a hospital, conducting essential health checks using a mobile device (Fig 2), or receiving ultrasound reports on your smartphone (Fig 3).
Fig 2: Audio jack connection to a unique device to run low-power diagnostic (Source)
To support mobile application testing for the various scenarios mentioned above, as well as many other local use cases, a LAN-based cloud deployment is required. In many cases, such a deployment will complement an existing public or private cloud of devices used to support other applications that are not locally-dependent. Ideally, these deployments should be managed through a single framework or platform to enable efficient manual and automatic testing of your mobile app against a large range of devices.
Fig 3: FDA Approved ultrasound mobile application (Source)
By using a local mobile cloud for mobile app testing, your organization can gain the following benefits:
- Fast and easy deployment of mobile devices – Deploy anywhere inside the LAN with central management, allowing remote and secure access to the devices.
- Structured manual testing – Test on-board mobile features such as camera, GPS or connected hardware including audio.
- Real mobile devices – Record using video full test scenarios and flows, and also capture screenshots.
- Efficient automated testing – Enable comprehensive device-agnostic functional testing on real mobile devices.
- Test with tools you know – Pre-integrated with leading ALM environments including HP Unified Functional Testing (UFT), Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and IBM Rational Quality Manager (RQM).
- Meets security requirements – Inside-the-firewall deployment supports LDAP/Active Directory authentication and access control logs. 100% secure web interface eliminates drivers or client installation.
- Continuous unattended testing – Control the USB connectivity, power cycling and support for fast device charging to enable true 24×7 operations.
Bottom Line:
When planning to test your mobile app on various devices for local-accessuse cases, organizations should complement their public or private mobile cloud with a local cloud that enables manual and automatic testing for specific use cases, such as those mentioned above, in a secure, efficient and scalable manner.
For more information about Perfecto Mobile’s cloud deployment options, please refer to our web page (http://www.perfectomobile.com/articles/deployment-options), or contact us via info@perfectomobile.com