Heard
about Social Local Mobile (SoLoMo) Apps :
These
are making the job of test manager a lot more interesting and
challenging. Let us see the challenges and the way to handle them.
We
are living in a smart phone era where people try to get in touch with
the online sites almost daily. Such technology based devices has made
lives of people more easy and at the same time interesting too. There
are apps which deal with customer location basically termed as SoLoMo
(Social Local Mobile) apps known for it's location-based services. It
depends completely upon location of those customers who interact with
these kind of apps. Adding location data lets organizations to
optimize connections further, such as sending targeted offers to your
customers' mobile devices. With so much critical and sensitive data
flowing to smart phones and other mobile devices, there is a high
need to ensure such SoLoMo apps are reliable, secure and usable.
Testing of these apps is a great challenge for testers. Here are few
listed challenges:
1)
It is not possible to test every browser/OS/device combination in a
single test cycle.
For
this the best approach is to first find out the device-market share
data based on which testing effort can be divided. After-wards
prepare a matrix that optimizes such data appropriately.
2)
System Integration is another challenge failure of which might lead
to integration failure issues such as GPS failure,person moving into
area with limited connectivity.
Standard
testing measures are not sufficient for Social Local Mobile (SoLoMo)
apps. So it’s a challenge for test managers to assure the quality
of these mobile applications that are location-aware and interacting
with social networks.
SoloMo applications require test managers to consider new kinds of failure
and also consider non-functional testing and perform more
beta-testing with users making it intresting and challenging.
Following
are the ways to handle new challenges in testing Social Local Mobile
applications.
Narrow
the near-infinite set of devices.
It
is difficult to figure out what devices to test, given that it's
virtually impossible to test every possible device.
Present
the customer with the points approach for SoLoMo apps.
Another
approach can be to test deep with only a few devices, or do something
in between. An useful strategy is to use market-share data to
determine what to test on.
Pay
attention to non-functional testing.
The
choice of customer for investment on the test organization's scarce
and expensive time is the key benefit.
For
SoLoMo apps, consider crowd source testing
Linus's
Law states, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
In many cases, test and operations managers launch the application
into production Friday night, get crowd sourced-tested all weekend,
then decide Sunday night whether to pull the release or not -- before
the business users get in.
Test
for integration failures.
Systems
integration is another challenge with SoLoMo apps. How do test
managers make sure that a status update is propagated to Facebook, or
the photo automatically goes to Twitter?
