Multi-day training class continues, click here for more details.
Multi-day training class begins, click here for more details.
If you are an experienced developer who is interested in the new Swift programming language, this hands-on workshop is for you. Daniel Steinberg introduces standalone Swift functions that are not part of a class or other Swift type. Then, he shows how to give or hide external names for parameters. Daniel shares examples of four fundamental Swift entities: String, Int, Dictionary, and Arrays. You’ll practice creating mutable and immutable arrays and explore different ways of iterating through them, changing values along the way. Learn to save the application’s state, and much more.
Learn Android development from the ground up. We'll start with the SDK and the Android Studio IDE, and build, test, and deploy applications on both emulators and physical devices. The basics of Android development will be discussed and implemented, from activities to resources to asynchronous communications.
Examples will be provides to show how to use the new Gradle build system for Android. We'll also use the embedded SQLite database to store data, and access a RESTful web service and parse the resulting JSON data to update the user interface.
Let’s build a mobile app quality and testing strategy together. Whether you have a web, hybrid, or native app, building a test and quality strategy means first understanding your customers and your competitors, and then testing your app under real-world conditions. Most importantly, it means having the data and tools to make quick, agile decisions on feature implementations and bug fixes. Jason Arbon guides you through the latest techniques, data, and tools to ensure you have an awesome mobile app test and quality strategy.
Full-day Tutorials continue, click here for more details.
If you are an experienced developer who is new to iOS development, join Daniel Steinberg as he facilitates this hands-on workshop to teach participants how to write great iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch apps. Daniel introduces Xcode 6 and Apple's suite of freely-available developer tools. He demonstrates how to use Xcode’s visual tools and storyboards to create your app’s GUI. Learn to use Outlets and Actions to connect the visual elements to code and interact with them. Examine the Swift code that implements your application’s Model and Controller layers.
With the burgeoning number of mobile OSs, browsers, and platform combinations, comprehensive mobile app testing can be a nightmare—but it doesn’t have to be! Max Saperstone demonstrates ways to leverage the open source Selenium (IDE) with cloud services to test mobile apps across multiple browsers and platforms. Through hands-on exercises, you will experience how Selenium interacts with web browsers below the GUI to test actions, inputs, and expected outcomes.
The critical steps that need to happen before coding starts are all-too-often brushed over or skipped entirely. Join Jaimee Newberry as she discusses how to identify and gain buy-in and involvement from all the right stakeholders. Because user experience (UX) will make or break every new app, you have to get it right the first time. Jaimee explores brand/product voice and personality questions that help teams quickly map out the direction that affects everything—product experience, visual design, and timing of animations and transitions.
The sensitive nature of personal information stored on smart devices makes security testing vital when building mobile applications. Alan Crouch explores the unique characteristics of mobile devices—how they store data, the fluid trust boundaries between applications, and the unique aspects of device security models. Learn about the many different threat types and use cases in the mobile arena that make security testing mobile applications so challenging. Alan offers hints and tips for comprehensive security testing of mobile applications during the development process.
Ionic is an open source, front-end framework for building hybrid mobile apps with HTML5. Using the Ionic framework, you can combine PhoneGap and AngularJS—the hottest web MVC framework around for building fast, testable web applications—to create cross-platform apps using standard web development tools like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Troy Miles introduces you to the Ionic framework and discusses how to use it with AngularJS. Participants will build a simple, full-featured application that offers a great overview of Ionic's key features.
Ever had a brainstorming session that failed to produce the quality results you’d hoped for? Think you already have good brainstorming sessions but know there’s room for improvement? Facilitating Super Rad Brainstorming sessions for eons now, Jaimee Newberry is an industry leader in improving brainstorming skills and surfacing incredible ideas. Work together as Jaimee facilitates a real time, hands-on brainstorming session that highlights tips and tricks for making your own brainstorming sessions more productive.
With the many versions of Android available today on hundreds, even thousands, of device types, just how do you build something that will look good on Android devices you’ve never seen? Is it possible to build an app that will look good on the newest devices and not look strange on your grandma’s phone from 2012? Luke Wallace clears a path through the jungle of Android-based hardware and takes on the fragmentation beast. See how his company, Bottle Rocket, one of the top mobile development companies, handles this challenge day-in-and day-out—without compromising the experience.
PhoneGap (aka Cordova) is a cross-platform framework for developing mobile apps using standard web development tools like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Join Troy Miles to learn how to create mobile apps with PhoneGap by building a simple but full-featured app during this hands-on class. Troy explores PhoneGap’s important capabilities, including GPS, camera, and audio recordings. Because JavaScript has a reputation as a somewhat difficult language, Troy teaches techniques for keeping your code robust and clean.
Kick off the conference with a welcome reception!Mingle with experts and colleagues while enjoying complimentary food and beverages.
Developers mostly focus on improving their creation skills—learning about programming languages and coding techniques; attending dev conferences; downloading and analyzing code; reading blogs, and listening to podcasts. However, they often become so focused on the delivery deadline that they forget they aren't just building an app for some arbitrary faceless customer. They are trying to help real people solve real problems. So, before the coding starts, there is lots of work to do to identify THAT customer. Narrow your scope.
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Personalized mobile user experience is a hot topic today because a smarter app will delight users, keep them coming back, and make your business stand out from the crowd. The extreme version of personalization is real-time contextual and social relevance. According to Jason Arbon, the contextual brain for your app is only a few API calls away. Based on lessons learned working on search relevance and personalization at Google, Bing, and a stealth mobile app startup, Jason describes the value, limitations, performance, and data-privacy of local and web services available today.
It could be on your wrist or your ankle. It may be embedded in your jacket, your shoe, your vest, or your hat. It may eventually be under your skin. It may help you walk or talk; find your way; or communicate with a friend, with your doctor, or your coach. It monitors your heart rate, the moisture on your skin, every breath you take, and every move you make. And it’s connected. And networked. Wearable devices are here to stay and are projected to be a $30 billion market by 2018.
Mobile app development and testing are hard. Mobile at scale is even harder. As you scale to the enterprise, automation is the only option. However, many organizations have barely started automating their mobile dev/test efforts. So, how do you actually automate the building, testing, and deploying of hundreds of mobile apps across multiple operating systems and different app stores? Josh Anderson explains that the mobile ecosystem is in its infancy compared to the tools supporting web application development, testing, and deployment.
• USB-tethering of devices for use by developers, QA, and support professionals diminishes team agility• Without devices securely under management as part of a highly available infrastructure, DevOps efficiencies can evaporate in mobility• The solution is a secure private cloud to gain agility and yet maintain data security
There are so many tools and tricks for developing Android apps, but which ones actually help when you're building apps day in and day out? Luke Wallace introduces the critical development tools you need and demonstrates how to use them to build real apps. Learn about the six critical tools every developer must have, find out about the key techniques that will help you build masterful Android apps, and discover at least one weird trick to speed up your app development.
Mobile testing presents a daunting challenge to software development shops and testers. QA/test teams must design test plans to account for multiple platforms, an enormous and ever-increasing number of devices, and frequent OS updates that often introduce dramatic changes. To add complexity, the increasingly consumer-centric demands of the field require new features and fixes—almost daily. Although test automation is often cited as the best—if not the only—possible solution for mobile, it has presented some big challenges.
With the interest in wearable technology exploding, UX practitioners and development teams need to focus on creating experiences that intuitively fit the rhythm and ecosystem of a user’s daily life. Unfortunately, much like what happened early on with mobile design, wearable UX designers seem to have unlearned many of the best practices and heuristics they employ on, for example, desktop design.
You or your company have a great idea for an app—and now you need to build it. So, what architecture do you use to support iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, and future operating systems? How can you deal with all these platforms and still re-use your skills as web developer? The answer is a hybrid app, which allows developers to use part native code and part web code to create cross-platform apps.
Development and test organizations face major challenges when building robust automated tests around their mobile applications. With limited testing resources and increasingly more complex projects, stakeholders worry about the risk and quality of mobile products. So how do you plan a mobile test automation project to prioritize testing resources and efforts? Tarun Bhatia used big data analytics to understand where customers spend most of their time on their apps out in the wild.
Wearables and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices are optimized for gathering data about a user and their environment. According to Cisco, this emerging industry will produce and deliver over 20 billion devices worldwide by 2020. Join Chris Beauchamp to learn about how to leverage mobile apps to develop a compelling user experience with one or several connected wearable or IoT devices. He’ll discuss the options for transmitting data from and to devices and how to ensure these connections are happening in real time once the app is live.
Attendees learn how to:
• Designing for Functionality and Speed• Anticipate the environment and mindset of where wearables will be used• Simple wearable’s means complex mobile
Apple and IBM forged a global partnership to transform enterprise mobility, which includes delivering 100 applications built exclusively for iOS devices. There are myriad challenges involved in producing that many mobile apps quickly—and with excellent user experience and quality. The team had to work smarter rather than simply throw more people at the project.
As organizations implement their mobile strategy, testing teams must support new technologies—while still maintaining existing systems. Melissa Tondi describes the major trends and innovations in mobile technology, usage patterns, tools, and test equipment that you should consider when transitioning existing test teams or starting new ones.
For better or for worse—like it or not—mobile wearables are already changing our lives. Mobile wearable devices form a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends do. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate? The challenge for developing wearable applications is incorporating the proper context to add value potential users haven’t considered—while being sensitive to their privacy.
Do the products you’re creating engage users on an emotional level? Do you deliberately design in the personality and tone of your product? Are you thinking comprehensively about every touchpoint your product has with a user? Jaimee Newberry has been helping Fortune 500 companies and startups with their digital products for more than seventeen years. Through years of refinement, Jaimee knows how to create products that engage and empathize with users. Her abilities evoke client responses such as “You’ve earned our trust,” “You understand who we are,” and “Thank you.
Mobile applications are fraught with risk. The unique, portable nature and multiple uses of mobile devices bring a wide variety of critical quality properties into play: reliability, usability, security, availability, and maintainability. Allocating the effort to identify and ensure these properties is a difficult challenge—and not for the faint of heart. New testing and validation approaches must be used if we are to meet quality goals for mission-critical and widely distributed mobile applications.
Control of complex machines by human thought has been a mainstay of science fiction writing and films for years. In the movie Firefox, Clint Eastwood steals a highly advanced Russian fighter jet that is controlled by the pilot’s thoughts. But real devices are now appearing that purport to use our brainwaves as input. Is this technology a reality today? If not, how far away is it? What sort of thought input is possible and where could it be used?
There are more than 1.4 billion smartphones in the world—one for every 4.5 people on earth. Over the next decade wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) will make those numbers look puny. In fact, mobile is transforming how people and things connect and dramatically changing software development, as we know it. With more than 189 million apps downloaded daily from app stores and new IoT devices being released daily to the public, developers and testers are already behind the curve.
In ten years, the applications we develop—mobile, embedded, wearable, and more—will be radically different from today’s apps. And so will be the testing and quality tools, methods, and solutions we employ. Extrapolated from his experiences at Google, Microsoft, and Applause (formerly uTest), Jason Arbon leads a thought-provoking look into the future. Our new world will be powered by nearly infinite—and almost free—computing power, storage, and networking. Standardized software stacks and centralized testing as a service will enable machine learning not possible today.
Prototyping wearable devices used to be something that required specialized skills in electrical engineering, embedded development, and mechanical engineering. Today, thanks to the maker revolution, we can combine our deep knowledge of programming with basic electronics, soldering skills, and access to a 3D printer to create useful devices. In this session, we’ll take a quick tour of some of the options and then do a deep dive into creating a wearable prototype using off the shelf boards.
Geolocation enhances the experience of many services and provides users with customized results based on their current location. Many people don’t realize what an important role geolocation can play in locating their favorite beer—and Untappd, a mobile application around beer discovery, can help! Greg Avola offers a case study on how Untappd is employing geolocation to enhance the experience for its users and how geolocation has helped Untappd grow its business. Adding location to Untapped personalized the app and provided data that shows users what is being consumed locally.
Do you know that 63 percent of your users would be less likely to do business with you if they experience problems with your mobile application? To ensure top-notch user experience, you need to conduct thorough testing on unpredictable network conditions—even if testing components are unavailable. Wayne Ariola describes an innovative strategy of using simulated test environments to bring the behavior of system dependencies and network conditions under your direct control.
The emergence of wearable devices like Google Glass, Apple Watch, and many others—combined with contactless technology such as near field communications—are being combined in new applications for payment processing, banking, and much more. Adopting wearables for contactless transactions will require technology shifts by both merchants and consumers. Using Google Glass as the wearable example, David Meyer demonstrates how users can see their account balance inside Google Glass to make purchase decisions, transmit the purchase authorizations, and transfer funds between their bank accounts.
• Hands-on with Xamarin tools to automatically test 1,000s of real devices• How to get reliable results with UI testing• How the most innovative companies are using UI testing
We live in a mobile bring-your-own-device kind of world with a proliferation of devices—smart phones, tablets, and UltraBooks running iOS, Android, and Windows. People are working in online and offline modes, and moving from device to device. How do you build applications that provide a consistent view of identity, data, and services so that your workforce can be productive wherever they are?
Mobile application development is now a mission-critical component of IT organizations and a big part of software industry’s landscape. Due to the security threats associated with mobile devices, it is critical we build our apps—from the ground up—to be secure and trustworthy. However, many application developers and testers do not understand how to build and test secure mobile applications. Jeffery Payne discusses the risks associated with mobile platforms/applications and describes proven practices for ensuring the safety of your mobile applications.
What is the Internet of Things (IoT)? What are the technologies that make it happen? Where do we see it today? Where will we see it tomorrow? What capabilities will it provide, and what do we need to know to take part in it? Jim McKeeth considers where IoT is taking us and discusses the hurdles we face today and in the future. With a focus on applications, Jim offers examples of IoT technology from the perspective of developers. Join Jim to learn about cross-platform development, cloud synchronization, app-to-app communication, Bluetooth, WiFi, security concerns, privacy issues, and more.
Building mobile apps in today’s highly dynamic environment comes with great uncertainty and risk. It’s imperative to make the right design choices early on. Poor architectural decisions can make or break an app. In this technical session, Shadi Saifan focuses on the architecture and design considerations critical for building a winning mobile application—regardless of the device, operating system, or language.
With more and more web traffic coming from mobile devices, performance on tablets and smartphones has a profound impact on user experience and, ultimately, your company’s bottom line. Dustin Whittle shares the latest performance testing tools and insights for web developers. Dustin explores performance considerations for backend APIs and helps you better understand mobile performance on devices. Learn how to evaluate performance and scalability on both the server- and the client-side with tools such as Siege, Bees with Machine Guns, Google PageSpeed, WBench, and more.
In the world of embedded systems, mission-critical mobile apps, and the Internet of Things (IoT), developers and testers must do more than just look for feature bugs. To find potential failures and serious security errors, their arsenal should include attack-based exploratory testing. In the tradition of James Whittaker’s How to Break Software books, Jon Hagar applies the “attack” concept to embedded, mobile, and IoT software. Jon examines common industry patterns of product failures and shares a set of his favorite software test attacks for native, web-based, and hybrid apps.
Attendees of the Mobile Innovation & Leadership Summit are invited to attend a welcome reception.
Click here for more information on the Mobile Innovation & Leadership Summit.
