September 2016 Summaries

Optimize Your Time to Market Process to Release Updates Faster` Are you struggling with long periods between mobile app releases? Long development cycles can be caused by inadequate agile processes or a lack of adoption. Adopting an agile approach, incorporating testing as part of the development process, and utilizing feature teams and collaboration tools can accelerate your time to market process, allowing for faster release of updates and improved user retention. By slowly introducing changes over time and prioritizing tasks based on customer needs, you can optimize your development cycle and deliver updates more efficiently.

The software testing tools market is vast, with various frameworks and tools available for different types of testing such as desktop, mobile, and browser testing. The industry standard for browser testing is Selenium WebDriver, but alignment with the application stack is recommended. Testing frameworks to know include Capybara/Cucumber, Protractor, NodeJS, Jasmine, Mocha, Android Espresso, iOS EarlGrey, Appium, KIF, and XCode. To get developers on board with GUI testing tools, technology alignment and demonstrating their value are key. Analytics tools used by the panelists include Jenkins, Datadog, CloudWatch, Capital One Hygieia, and New Relic Synthetic Monitoring. The goal is to seek technology alignment to ensure efficient testing strategy and better communication between QA and Development teams.

You want to automate your mobile app testing on multiple devices and improve the efficiency of your testing process. Start by choosing a suitable test automation framework, such as Appium, which supports parallel testing on various mobile devices. Next, decide on the specific devices you want to run your tests on, considering factors like target users and device variety. Finally, upload your app and test scripts, choose the desired devices, start the test runs, and wait for the comprehensive results, including logs, screenshots, and videos. With automated testing, you can significantly reduce testing time, as tests will be run in parallel on multiple devices simultaneously, allowing you to value your testing time more efficiently.

Building an effective team of quality assurance (QA) engineers is crucial for any organization's testing strategy and execution. With the increasing demand for QA professionals and the blurring of lines between developers and QA engineers, having a well-planned and executed approach to team building is essential. This includes fostering a culture of respect and ownership among team members, providing opportunities for growth and development, and integrating QA teams closely with the rest of the software engineering staff. Modern QA involves being involved in dev designs, participating in code reviews, and doing upfront testing, and organizations should encourage automation while allowing QA professionals to choose their own toolsets. Manual testing is still necessary, but its role has evolved with the rise of automation. The key to retaining engineers with strong technical and testing backgrounds is to unlock their potential and show them how their skills can be applied in testing, rather than viewing it as a lack of respect.

Appium is a tool that allows developers to write a single test script for automation testing on both Android and iOS platforms. By using PageObject setup and annotations such as `@AndroidFindBy` and `@iOSFindBy`, developers can reference UI elements in their tests without duplicating code, making maintenance easier and reducing headaches. This approach enables developers to write a single script that runs on two different platforms, simplifying the automation testing process for Android and iOS applications.

Making your app testable is crucial for determining the amount of time and resources you'll consume when writing test automation. To achieve this, consider how your app interacts with UI (and other) automation frameworks, setup scenarios, and make tests safe for concurrency. For web apps using Selenium, think ahead to identify important pieces of the DOM, using locator strategies like ID attributes or CSS selectors. In native mobile content using Appium, follow accessibility guidelines set forth by Apple and Google, such as using accessibilityIdentifier properties on UI elements. To simplify your scripts and increase reliability, consider building a test API for your application, especially when testing complex flows. When writing tests, avoid shared state and take measures to isolate tests from each other, considering bottlenecks and chokepoints that can be time-consuming to manage. By making these considerations, you'll create a highly testable application that makes writing automated tests a worthwhile experience.

While managing an Appium-based test automation project can be challenging, it's essential to keep maintenance overhead in mind, as it can make or break the success of the project. Rapid changes in the application under test, testing on multiple platforms, mobile operating system versions, devices, and the app itself are significant factors that increase maintenance overhead. To mitigate this, teams need to consider low-maintenance scenarios where information exchange is quick, cross-platform issues are minimal, and the app's evolution is slow. In contrast, high-maintenance overhead situations arise when dealing with complex applications, multiple platforms, frequent changes, and large teams, requiring careful planning, effective communication, and robust tools to manage complexity. By asking fundamental questions about project complexity early on and setting up a clear workflow, collaboration process, and toolset, teams can better navigate the challenges of Appium-based test automation projects.

To determine how often to parallel test, analyze your existing test regime, break it down into logical units, and reorganize it for fully automated parallel testing. Identify tests that can be done in parallel and those that cannot or should not be done in parallel, scheduling the latter as needed. Parallel testing is now the standard, replacing sequential testing and manual testing, offering significant advantages in terms of time, scope, and cost. It is essential to consider when parallel testing will be more productive and cost-effective than sequential testing, allowing you to optimize your test regime for maximum efficiency.

The cost of a reject can be substantial, with an average story or bug ticket taking around three hours to resolve after being rejected by QA, including additional time for revisiting steps and re-checking requirements. Most teams lack visibility into the impact of rejects on their Scrum team's capacity, but tracking these events can help identify areas where improvements are needed. To mitigate rejects, teams can improve communication between developers, QA, and designers/product/business owners, use Test Early and Often techniques like TDD/BDD, automate deployment processes, and strive for efficiency in tracking story and bug rejects. By implementing these strategies, teams can reduce the time spent on resolves and prevent rejects from becoming a recurring issue.