May 2017 Summaries

Should you use a public or private mobile cloud for your software project? A private cloud is like having your own personal data center with physical locks and full control over servers, databases, and devices. This provides maximum security and compliance with regulatory standards such as Sarbanes Oxley and HIPAA, making it ideal for regulated industries like healthcare and finance. However, building a private cloud requires expertise, time, and money. On the other hand, public clouds offer an out-of-the-box solution that allows anyone to log into a mobile device without the need for infrastructure management. But, they may compromise on security and compliance. Some companies might opt for a hybrid model that combines the benefits of both worlds, using private cloud resources during peak hours and rolling over to public cloud resources when needed. Ultimately, the choice between public and private mobile clouds depends on your team's skill level, the product's requirements, and your willingness to use a ready-made environment.

In a real-world scenario, testing everything is often not feasible due to large products and features. To address this challenge, teams can take a risk-based approach to testing by analyzing potential risks and prioritizing tests accordingly. The Risk Analysis Worksheet is a tool that guides this process, helping teams understand likelihood, impact, and risk priority to prioritize tests and reduce project risk. By identifying potential risks, evaluating their likelihood and impact, and deciding on how to test them, teams can focus on the most critical areas and allocate resources effectively. This approach enables teams to test smarter, not harder, by prioritizing tests based on risk exposure, rather than testing everything with equal vigor.

Robotium is an extension of the Android testing framework, designed specifically for mobile app testing, offering full support for native and hybrid Android apps. It provides a higher level of abstraction than Selendroid, recognizing UI elements by their internal application IDs, making test cases more robust and readable. Robotium also offers better support for activities, gestures, device manipulation, and Android IDE integration, making it a natural choice for developers with a background in native Android development. In contrast, Selendroid is based on Selenium, a framework designed for web browser testing, requiring adaptations to enable mobile testing using a Selenium-based framework. While both frameworks have their strengths, the choice between Robotium and Selendroid ultimately depends on the tester's skill set and experience.

Don't Leave QA Out of DevOps! The term DevOps overlooks Quality Assurance (QA), an essential component of software delivery. QA teams play a vital role in DevOps and continuous delivery workflows, shifting both left and right to enable collaboration between Dev and Ops teams. To achieve consistency across the development pipeline, QA teams need agile test infrastructure, which Docker and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes are solving today. By leveraging these technologies, QA teams can take flight in the new world of DevOps, enabling faster and higher-quality releases.

This article demonstrates how to set up and run a basic WebDriver test in Java using IntelliJ on OSx. To create the test, you'll need to install the necessary components, including the Java WebDriver bindings, JUnit, and the Gecko driver proxy for Firefox. You'll also need to configure your project structure and add the required dependencies. Once you've set up your environment, you can write a simple test using JUnit that starts a browser instance, executes a test, and closes the browser. The test is then run using the right-click context menu or by pressing Ctrl-Shift-R. This article provides a step-by-step guide to getting started with WebDriver in Java using IntelliJ on OSx.

The Sauce Labs Slack Integration simplifies collaboration among distributed teams by providing test data and metadata directly within Slack conversations. The integration allows users to share unique test URLs with collaborators, who can then access associated metadata such as status, owner, duration, and platform combination, as well as links to test assets. This new feature enhances the testing experience for Sauce Labs customers, making it easier to investigate issues and collaborate on tests.