Last year, about the same time, I wrote about the probable impacts of tablet devices on testing. When I look back, I see the predictions were true, but reality has far exceeded my predictions. The tablets have become an integral part of the application space. It is reported that the sale of tablets have exceeded the sale of PCs and by 2015, tablets will exceed the PC population.
It is not very unusual for my blog to hibernate for long periods. But after reading several reports and stats on the growth of mobile devices and the predictions for the next few years, I thought it is time to update the old posts on testing tablet devices.
The northbound trend in the population of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets is is a very significant development that will have far reaching impact on application development and testing. Not only will more and more applications become mobile enabled, they will become an integral component in completing transactions. This will mean much more tan testing how the web pages will behave in different mobile browsers, but will mean testing complex hybrid applications.
Testing native or hybrid application needs a different strategy and approach than testing browser based applications on mobile devices. Right from the code base to the capabilities of the native hardware will have an influence on the testing outcome. Testers need to understand and develop suitable strategies to focus on functionalities as well as device and OS dependant features that need to be tested on each target device.
While the number of devices is showing a uniform growth trend, it is also increasing the diversity of the target devices that need to be included in testing. With several device manufacturers designing devices with all possible variations in form factor, processing power, interface standards and network capabilities, the hardware choices are numerous. So are the Operating System choices. With many different Android versions, and device manufacturers and telecom carriers modifying or adapting the operating systems to optimise in their networks increases the test combination many fold. Android currently has around 75% of the market followed by Apple with a share of 15% covering 90% of the market. However, the market is very dynamic and user base is not uniform across geographies.
In theory we have three broad categories of software for mobile; the native apps, mobile web and hybrid. The native apps reside in a hand held device whereas mobile web is accessing web content using a mobile browser. Hybrid applications on the other hand utilises a combination of both hybrid and web features. While there are several things that are common in them, there are many unique factors also.
When testing mobile web, the focus is primarily on the mobile browsers capability to interpret the code and deliver the content. Different browsers use different engines internally (Eg. Chrome uses WebKit while Microsoft uses Trident), and so, the way they render content is not universal, especially while handling evolving standards like HTML5. Native apps on the other hand, reside in the device and interact more closely with the host operating system and hardware and software resources of the device. This also means that devices running different operating systems will use different code base, the testing becomes extremely critical on different operating systems. Hybrid apps extends the challenges by combining both native and web characteristics into one.
These are in addition to the capabilities of the devices, capabilities dependent on carriers, usability, performance, security and interoperability that are other critical characteristics. In the next few posts we will discuss a few of them in details and also discuss about tools that help in accelerating/automating the tests on mobile.
I test. Therefore I am.
