Magic of 7 :

Your 7-Point App Testing Formula for a

Successful Enterprise Mobility

Programme

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 Contents:

 Summary

 A Road-map paved with challenges

 Bring your own device (BYOD) approach

 User Experience
 Speed of Releases
 App Complexity due to back-end integration
 Performance is a must
 Security and Compliance

 7 Best Practices for App Testing in Mobility Management Success

 Early to Test, Early to Rise

 Invest in Test Automation
 Test your app on adequate number of real devices
 Natural Power of Artificial Intelligence
 MDC - Let’s Go!
 Explore with a Crowd
 Testing never stops

 Top Tools & Frameworks

 Conclusion

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 SUMMARY

The world is going mobile, so are the enterprises. Mobility has become paramount
with the preeminence of smart devices at the workplace. From being perceived as a
security challenge by the CIO’s office, enterprise mobility has evolved into a must-
have technology with strategic business importance today. Enterprises across sectors
are adopting mobility to improve productivity and transform business operations.
According to data published by Strategy Analytics, the mobile enterprise business
applications market touched $63 billion by 2020. Another report, by Research and
Markets, predicts that the enterprise mobile app markets will reach $98.03 billion by
the end of 2021.

The Most Eye-Catching BYOD Stats for 2021 :

 67% of employees use personal devices at work.

 BYOD generates $350 of value each year per employee.
 87% of businesses are dependent on their employee’s ability to access
mobile business apps from their smartphone.
 BYOD market size is expected to reach $366.95 billion by 2022.
 59% of organizations adopt BYOD.

Source: Techjury.net

Enterprise mobile apps are reshaping the way companies conduct their business.
As enterprise mobile apps adoption sky-rockets, so do the associated challenges.The
apps that enterprises build must score well on all parameters ranging from
functionality, performance, user experience and adoption. Given this scenario,
mobile app testing has emerged as a business-critical function demanding special
attention.
This whitepaper examines the business challenges associated with mobile apps and
illustrates how a few app testing good practices can help tackle these with ease.

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 A Road-map paved with challenges

The mobile-first strategies are gaining momentum among CEOs to capitalize on its
advantages like robust availability, secure data, easy sharing, exquisite user
experience, so on and so forth.
New ways of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous
Deployment means daily updates or multiple times a day has become the norm. The
DevOps era has brought with it its own set of benefits and issues.This gives rise to
challenges such as resistance from users, pushing for cultural changes in companies,
building an automated code repository and maintaining the same, and more.

It is vital to focus on challenges as it is an age of technological advancements.

Without further ado, let’s quickly check out the enterprise mobility technology
challenges that will help you improve your organizational operations and stay
relevant in the market.

Bring your Own Device (BYOD) Approach

Organizations worldwide are adopting the BYOD model to improve adaptability, curb
expenses, increase productivity, and boost employee satisfaction. To effectively
embrace and execute the BYOD model, it is imperative to ensure that the
employees’ devices are configured adequately with security protocols and stick to
data protection norms and BYOD policy.

Do you know, MarketsandMarkets forecasts the BYOD and enterprise mobility

market to become USD 73.30 Billion by 2021?

Even so, the BYOD trend also comes with its fair share of challenges, caveats, and
concerns. Here are the top seven BYOD challenges enterprises should be aware of:

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 User Experience

“User Experience” (UX) is a trending buzzword in the app development industry. In

fact, there are over 5,000 books on the topic on Amazon alone, not to mention the
millions of hits when searched on Google.
Enterprises should consider user experience as a critical aspect of their mobile
strategy. The first step to driving a successful mobile transformation is to listen to
and collaborate with your end users.

It’s an established fact that a great user experience contributes substantially to the
adoption of a mobile app. Several aspects such as visual sequencing, finger-touch
sizes, navigation frameworks, and response times go into creating an intuitive user
experience. A simple, clutter-free, and user-friendly interface helps create a seamless
user experience for your apps.

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 Speed of Releases

“I feel the need – the need for speed.” Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s words in Top Gun
in 1986 rang true for fighter pilots and race car drivers back then.

In 2021, the words stand true for the dynamic product development world, where it
is becoming a necessity to deliver code faster, safer, and with better quality.

This factor needs to be examined from two angles with respect to mobility. From the
development perspective, the enterprises must be geared to introduce new mobile
apps, version upgrades, and updates very fast.
From a major version upgrade every year and quarterly releases traditionally,
organizations have to attune to weekly or even daily updates.

Leading organizations like Facebook, Google, and Amazon release several updates on
a daily basis, and the ones that cannot meet such frequent updates expectation may
be left behind. Organizations have to consider various aspects including agile
development methodology, continuous testing to stay in the race.

The success behind Candy Crush, one of the favorite games of 250 million
people (including me) since 2012, lies in its continuous
Do You Know updates as per the demands of their users.
King, the Swedish developer behind Candy Crush Saga, adds
new content to the game weekly and updates the back-end client at least every
fortnight.

App Complexity due to Back-end integration

Amidst the evolution of enterprise mobility, there is a greater need for mobile apps
to seamlessly integrate with back-end systems such as core banking, payment
platforms, ERP, SCM, CRM, insurance policy administration systems, securities
trading platforms, sales force automation, and distribution management suites.
Also, companies also look at integrating their mobile apps with other advanced
technology systems cloud, IoT, analytics and machine learning.

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Any legacy modernization or application integration issues including latencies may
instantly result in a dip in user experience, and correspondingly, customer
disgruntlement. Following a few good practices in app testing may help nip these
issues in the bud.

Performance is a must

“We’re lighter, we’re faster, and if that don’t work, we’re nastier.”
- Carroll Shelby (Ford vs Ferrari)

Is your application fast and light enough to prompt the user to use your app?
Higher the latency, higher are the chances that the customer will close or worse,
uninstall the app. By focusing on mobile application access speed, organizations can
ensure that they do not lose their customers to competitors.
Performance testing is just but a process that helps identify a developed
application’s stability to a range of performance dimensions. Here, performance
dimensions refer to the app’s ability to withstand a high load, unexpected demands,
the highest number of users, etc. Scalability, reliability, and interoperability are the
key ideas that drive most technical experts into testing.

Security and Compliance

As mobility waves are getting intense, transactions in businesses over mobiles have
also increased. However, compliance, safety, and regulations should never get
compromised in the entire process. With regulations like GDPR and CCPA, security is
a significant concern for everyone.

Enterprises need to ensure that their apps follow strict information protection
guidelines. The issue has become highly sensitive due to a proliferation of mobile
wallets, insurance apps, trading apps, and m-commerce. Same is true with mobile
apps meant for healthcare, communication, and entertainment that collect users’
personally identifiable information (PII).

Enterprise mobility can take care of data encryption,

Do You Know authentication with multi-factor authentication, and biometric
systems.

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 7 Best Practices for App Testing

Most organizations acknowledge the business-

critical nature of mobile application testing.
Restricting employee functioning to a desktop
unit limits their efficiency. Further, lack of a
robust mobility strategy can lead to poor
adoption rates, lower engagement, higher
hidden costs and failure to achieve the desired
ROI. Mobilizing the operations not only increases
their productivity but also gives employees and
customers faster and efficient access to back-end
systems.

Adherence to a few best practices may help IT

leaders ensure that their mobility programs
deliver the desired outcomes without
compromising on predefined timelines. Let’s
explore these practices a little more in detail.

1. Early to Test, Early to Rise

The industry leaders who have worked on

application testing projects may be aware that
some of the issues that tests throw up pertain to
the software design phase itself. This happens
when, due to deadline-pressures, the project
team is rushed into mobile app development
without adequate planning.

It adversely impacts the quality and performance of the app since the planning-level
issues are fundamental to an app’s purpose or feasibility.

Enterprises need to adopt shift left testing wherein testing starts right at the
beginning of software development. This approach stresses on culling out probable
issues that could develop and averting them then and there. It puts quality
assurance into place at the roots, ensuring time, efforts and energies are not wasted
in making mistakes and then doing damage control.

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 2. Invest in Test Automation

Much like the traditional software testing, even mobile app testing has two
components: tasks that are repetitive and ones that require custom-coding. It makes
sense to automate the mundane, repetitive tasks while running manual tests for the
rest.
Automated tests can provide faster feedback than a manual test, reducing rework
and long feedback cycles. Thus, if ROI is producing high-quality software iteratively,
then yes, you see a nice return on your automation.

Business value
 Better software quality
 Avoiding operational
problems
 Decrease cost of fixing
bugs

Tech value
 Simplifies routine tasks
 Run more tests
simultaneously
 Increase the scope of
coverage

Automation may prove to be a boon in the context of m-banking or m-commerce

where a minor bug can have a disastrous effect on a company’s revenues and
reputation.
Automated tests can help detect issues with greater efficiency and speed so that
fixes can be issued without delay.

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 3. Test your app on adequate number of real devices

The core objective of testing a mobile app is to check its behaviour across various
devices. In the light of the various limitations that simulators may have, many testing
teams believe that testing on real mobile devices is much more effective. Simulators
can be effective in the initial phase of testing, but testing on real devices is a much
more foolproof idea.
In May 2021, Google announced that it had more than 3 billion active devices on
Android. Such announcements provide insights into the potential size of the installed
base of smartphones.
Given the vastness of the smartphone user-universe, it’s a no-brainer that 7 8
simulators and emulators may not be adequate to test mobile apps thoroughly.
Arguably, it’s impossible to invest in every unique device available. However, a
detailed analysis of the total number of unique devices used by your target audience
should help determine the adequate number of real devices to run the tests on.

Let’s say a few words about MDM in the BYOD world.

What is MDM?
MDM stands for Mobile-Device-Management. It is a combination of apps, corporate
policies (If any), and certificates. It makes managing end-user devices simple and
effective. An enterprise usually has so many devices that it needs MDM to manage
the incoming data.
Companies with a BYOD policy especially benefit from an effective MDM solution.
The MDM market will reach $7.96 billion by 2023.

(Source : Businesswire)

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 4. Natural Power of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not only a topic of discussion for the innovators in the
science field but also a topic of exploration and expansion in the business industry,
specifically the mobile app industry. And it is worth noting that AI is not just limited
to Google’s Assistant or Apple’s Siri anymore, it is growing much more than that.

Today, most app development companies consider AI as an integral part of app

development. These developers program apps that display learning, reasoning, and
planning traits. Other traits of these apps are knowledge, perception, and ability to
manipulate data. Thus, this creates a seamless experience for app users leading to
enhanced satisfaction.

Artificial Intelligence which uses in Mobile Apps

 One of the popular technologies used in interactive voice control systems and
mobile applications is Speech Recognition Technology. This technology, for
example, the Siri or Cortana system, allows decoding and transforming human
speech into a format that is understandable to a computer. NICE, Nuance
Communications, OpenText and Verint Systems are among the companies that
offer such services.
 If you plan to have a business application that has to be able to interact with
people online, to contain feedback from the user or the online community, in
other words, to use chatbots or voice managers, then you will be assisted by
Virtual Agents. Amazon, Apple, Artificial Solutions, Assist AI, Creative Virtual,
Google, IBM, IPsoft, Microsoft and Satisfied offer the use of such technologies.
 Suppose your application is corporate, and also used for forecasting and
classification, you should implement Machine Learning platforms based on
Machine Learning (ML). Companies associated with the sale of this type of ML
technology are Amazon, Fractal Analytics, Google, H2O.ai, Microsoft, SAS, and
Skytree. These tech giants propose a wide selection of software and tools with
AI for developers.
 Biometrics is a technology that allows you to identify, measure and analyze
human behavior and physical aspects of structure and shape of the body
through work with images, sensory recognition, voice and gesture control. It is
used mainly in marketing research (3VR, Affectiva, Agnitio, FaceFirst, Sensory,
Synqera, Tahzoo).

 Another interesting technology that allows the software to read emotions from
the human face with the help of advanced image processing or audio data
is Emotion Recognition, so human senses are captured through subtle speech

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 signals and voice intonation. This tool is widely popular among start-ups like
Beyond Verbal, nViso, Emotion AI and Affectiva.
 And, finally, in your mobile application, you can successfully use Image
Recognition technology based on the process of identifying and detecting an
object/function in a digital image or a video. IR technology can be used to detect
license plates, to diagnose diseases, to analyze clients, to verify users by their
faces. Companies that use IR include Clarifai, which provides image recognition
systems for customers; SenseTime, which develops the technology of face
recognition, that can be applied to the analysis of payments and images for
checking bank cards.

5. MDC Let’s Go !

Modern enterprises, have a business footprint at multiple locations (nation-wide or

global). As a result, they face a few unique challenges when it comes to mobile app
testing. Not only are their development and testing teams based in distant regions,
but so do their target users.
Since team members have to share the devices for testing, it affects efficiency and
speed of test operations.
The multi-location nature may also open up DevOps and collaboration challenges.
Mobile device cloud (MDC) can be a highly useful approach in such a scenario.
MDC eliminates wait times by automatically provisioning devices to specific team
members for specific time duration. MDC may be the answer to cost, security and
compliance issues companies face in their mobile app testing environment. It can
help perform manual or automated testing on real devices, facilitate scheduling and
DevOps capabilities, among other things.

6. Explore with a crowd

Forward-looking organizations like Amazon, Microsoft and Google use crowd

sourcing for development and testing. Using a crowd-testing platform to invite real
users to test your app can be of immense advantage to e-commerce ventures given
the millions of customers they target.
As a huge pool of qualified testing professionals from across geographies tests your
product, they bring with them a rich local market understanding, besides the
benefits of speed and efficiency obtained through parallel, round-the clock testing.

7. Testing Never Stops !!

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It’s a common mistake committed by organizations to cut down their testing budgets
once an app is launched. In reality, a mobile app’s performance gets truly tested only
after it goes live.
The task of the testing team is to continuously monitor the app’s performance in the
real world and find issues. An enterprise mobile app needs to succeed on parameters
such as functional excellence, intuitive user interface, and a compelling business
need even after going live.

Typically, when an app fails on any one of these parameters post-launch, the user
interest in the app wanes resulting in uninstall. Testing, therefore, must be
considered as an inseparable part of app maintenance to ensure the app continues
to deliver business benefits throughout the life-cycle.

Continuous Testing plays a crucial role in Continuous Delivery. It implicates usage of

methods and concepts of agile development for the testing and QA process, offering
more efficient testing process. Continuous Testing needs automated end-to-end
testing solutions that integrate existing development processes while excluding
errors and enabling continuity throughout SDLC.

As DevOps encourages a high level of coordination among various teams in the

development value chain, at times, it erases the boundaries of various roles. It
requires everyone to contribute across the value chain as and when needed.
Therefore, a developer can configure deployments, QA engineers can configure
automation test cases, and deployment engineers can add test cases to the QA
repository. Together, all of them are responsible for the quality, and must adhere to
the timelines of all deliverables.

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 Top Tools & Frameworks

OpKey: OpKey is an Automation framework which allows users to create Automation

scripts in a script-less way. Seamless integration with OpKey can help create and run
automation scripts for Mobile Apps.

Appium: Appium is the preferred choice for Mobile App Automation. When using
Appium, select a platform that allows for all kinds of Appium scripts to be run
effortlessly. The platform should also facilitate concurrent unlimited parallel runs of
Appium scripts on multiple devices.

Selenium: Run your Selenium scripts for cross-browser testing on Mobile Web.

Espresso: Run Espresso scripts on multiple Android devices in parallel. For Espresso
to deliver amazing results, get a platform you can either upload the scripts to or look
for solutions that offer a built-in feature to run scripts.

Calabash: Run Calabash scripts on both IOS and Android Devices.

Robotium: Run Robotium scripts on Android Devices.

Jenkins: We has released a plugin for Jenkins which provides you access to the
platform for performing automation testing of mobile apps from within Jenkins on
real devices.

Android Studio: We has a plugin for Android Studio which provides you access to the
devices for performing manual and automation testing of mobile apps from within
Android Studio IDE.

Eclipse: We has released a plugin for Android Studio which provides you access to
the platform for performing manual and automation testing of mobile apps from
within Android Studio IDE.

JIRA: We has introduced a new feature in its latest update 4.6 where testers can
directly log bugs on JIRA while testing the app on We. You can attach relevant
screenshots, video links or bugs by a single click.

JMeter: We has recently launched a plugin for JMeter to bring you an insight into the
Performance Testing of your app.

Rest API: We has an exhaustive set of Rest APIs to control devices, access We
features. You can use the APIs from your choice of tool/language or framework.

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 CONCLUSION

Mobile is no longer an option for your company; it has become a business

imperative. It provides you with a long-term strategic vision and empowers you with
flexibility to adapt to changes that come with shifts in the business environment.

It’s not just about having an app but about driving value within your company. A
robust enterprise mobile strategy can help you optimize results and maximize ROI by
simply integrating processes, functions and people. Further, you can utilize data
infrastructure to attract new customers and offer more value to existing ones.

Alright folks, if nothing else at least by now we know what is “bring your own
device”.

I’m a BYOD employee, at least occasionally and it works fine for me. Of
course, some people want to draw a thick line between personal and work life,
and that’s perfectly understandable as well.

So, Until next time, wishing you all a smooth mobility in your apps and life
management as well :)

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