Mobile Dev + Test 2017 - Concurrent Sessions

In the world of mobile app testing, data is your friend. So harness your data to your advantage to create an automation and testing strategy. Satyajit Malagu acknowledges that multiple devices, platforms, languages, crashes, bugs, and app stores make the scope of mobile app testing humongous. When you add in inherent human biases and team dynamics, the problems you face and prioritization challenges can be overwhelming. The data collected from analytics, bug trends, monitoring tools, test results, and other sources can help illuminate a clearer path. Join Satyajit as he provides an...

Everyone is drawn to the cool new ways to connect devices to the Internet and make life easier—and a little more futuristic. But, do you know that IoT has been around since the past century? Theresa Lanowitz is one of the early advocates of what is now IoT and is thrilled that the pace of acceptance is accelerating—rapidly. This level of acceptance and understanding of IoT was not always the case. Theresa shares the early ideas, vision, and concepts of the Sun Jini project, the pre-cursor to IoT, and offers advice for developers and testers on how to succeed with IoT. Whether you are part...

As mobile devices, tools, operating systems, and web technologies rapidly evolve, testers in this changing domain must quickly adapt their thinking. Testers often struggle to find critical vulnerabilities and bugs in mobile applications due to lack of guidance, experience, and the right resources. Raj Subramanian was a tester in that very situation. While working at Orbitz and now at CSG International, he started categorizing these bugs and came up with a mind map, which helps do a quick tour of your mobile application and find vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. The mind map...

The fact that 60 percent of all iPhone users worldwide are non-native English speakers is just one reason for supporting people from many countries and regions in your apps. Even if multi-language applications are not called for, localization features for single language apps will improve usability and acceptance from users across many cultures and geographic areas. Using an English-only iOS application from Nordstrom as an example, Shawn Larson shows you how with little effort you can add international support to your applications. He walks you through implementing code to take...

Better and more meaningful results always happen when your team has clarity of vision around why they're doing what they're doing. Jaimee Newberry says that the future is about getting technology out of the way of our everyday functions and actions while using it to enhance lives in every conceivable way. We must be thinking far beyond what’s next. The process is almost always about people, and most people need to ease into change. As software designers, we need to be thinking several futures down the road and breaking that vision into baby steps so people won’t freak out or think “too...

The new build mechanism replacing Ant for Android development is based on Gradle, the popular build tool from the Groovy ecosystem. Ken Kousen introduces you to Gradle for Android developers and shows how easy it is to integrate Gradle into Android projects. See the latest version of the Android Studio IDE to develop applications. Join Ken to discuss using the Android plugin for Gradle; adding dependencies and alternate repositories; creating custom tasks; implementing both unit and integration tests; using alternative build types, product flavors, and variants; and more. Leave with an...

The world is demanding more from cars. No longer merely a way to get around, modern vehicles have become authentic pieces of technological art—equipped with numerous sensors and capabilities that are gradually transforming the very meaning of the word ‘vehicle’. BMW wanted to get ahead of this changing landscape and continue to delight their customers whether inside or outside the car—but how? Jorge Coca faced this challenge when he joined the team in January 2016. He and his peers found the answer in BMW Connected, an application that seamlessly links customers’ cars with their digital...

Candy Crush Saga is one of the biggest mobile games today with more than 1000 levels of difficulty—and users continue to ask for more. When building new content, it is extremely important to ensure that the level of difficulty is balanced and that the user does not experience crashes or problems through some unforeseen level of play. Stefan Freyr shows you how King is training artificial intelligence (AI) programs (bots) to test its games by mimicking human interactions. Join Stefan as he discusses how King is taking testing to the next level by employing Monte Carlo Tree Search,...

With more than 1.4 billion Android and 475 million iOS combinations with active users, high quality mobile apps require high levels of test automation. Join experienced Node.js QA architect and nodeqa.io founder Stacy Kirk as she explains how to properly test mobile web apps for functionality, usability, and consistency—and why Node.js can make it easier. Stacy shares how to combine mobile automation best practices using Appium with the best Node.js frameworks to create powerful mobile front-end testing solutions. Mobile app testers can benefit from these tools and technologies to simplify...

From connected elevators to smart cars, the Internet of Things (IoT) is all around us, even in ways we're not aware of. The devices make our lives easier, encourage us to exercise, and save time and resources--but at what cost? With current computer and mobile technology, the main threat is to our data and our accounts, with phishing and ransomware topping the charts; however, the IoT introduces risk to our personal safety and compromises our privacy in ways we can't even yet imagine. Join Chris to...

Mobile application development is now a mission-critical component of IT organizations and a big part of the 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. Alan Crouch discusses the risks associated with mobile platforms/applications and describes proven practices for ensuring the safety of your mobile applications. Alan delves into the unique nuances...

Testing technology, tools, and methods are always playing catch up with the latest—and the next greatest—consumer and business applications and software-intensive products. Now with IoT, mobile, and the cloud, almost EVERY new product has a software testing aspect. Costa Avradopoulos explores the bewildering challenges and recent trends in testing IoT, mobile, and cloud applications. He outlines the necessary elements of test strategy for each of these technologies: building a test lab, test coverage, test data, test management, tools, and automation. Bringing it all together with a...

When you’re building the next killer mobile app, how can you ensure that your app is both stable and capable of near-instant data updates? The answer: Build a backend! Siva Katir says that there’s much more to building a backend than standing up a SQL server in your datacenter and calling it a day. Since different types of apps demand different backend services, how do you know what sort of backend you need? And, more importantly, how can you ensure that your backend scales so you can survive an explosion of users when you are featured in the app store? Siva discusses the common scenarios...

The very first time Alexander Andelkovic and his team entered an IoT hackathon, they were awarded second place for their IoT app due in large part to the early and continuous QA testing. Their IoT solution was based on combining different public data sources—such as a Minecraft map of Stockholm and real-time subway system data—to create a fun presentation of the IoT data. Join Alexander as he describes the preparation it took to get ready for the hackathon. He discusses the work that was done on the team composition, how they came up with an approach to add QA testing roles at the...

Mobile testing has moved forward in leaps and bounds in the past few years. With frameworks like Appium, it has never been easier to scale automated testing and integrate it with continuous integration. While new automation technologies proliferate with device and platform upgrades, Appium provides a singular, consistent automation protocol on top of the best automation technologies,. In the past year, the Appium open source community has added support for new kinds of automation, including XCUITest for iOS, UiAutomator 2 for Android, and even Windows apps. With demos and code...