Mobile Device Cloud: Redefining mobile testing paradigm for modern enterprises. A Joint Whitepaper by

Transcription

1 Mobile Device Cloud: Redefining mobile testing paradigm for modern enterprises A by

2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Challenges faced by a modern enterprise What's the solution? Mobile Device Cloud (MDC) Mobile Device Cloud models Benefits of MDC to organizations Case Study

3 Introduction Mobile app testing eco-space has experienced a paradigm shift as organizations are rapidly moving from 'mobile first' to 'mobile everything'. Although mobility has eased the experience for the end users, enterprises face huge challenges brought forth by increasing device fragmentation and demand for faster delivery to market. Testing has been majorly impacted because of this change in mobile ecosystem as the growing adoption of mobility has also resulted in a corresponding rise in demand for mobile app testing. While there are various mobile app testing options available there is a new approach that is drawing a lot of attention. Mobile Device Cloud (MDC) for app testing has been gaining high popularity due to the real business benefits it assures. This whitepaper focuses on the pain areas for enterprises in mobility testing and the need for Mobile Cloud testing in a modern enterprise. The application testing services market was valued at USD Billion in 2016 and is projected to reach USD Billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 13.5% from 2017 to 2022 as per a study done. (Source: Markets and Markets). Challenges faced by a modern enterprise With the mobile ecosystem expanding at a lightning speed, enterprises are struggling to form a comprehensive mobile app test strategy that can reduce the cost and enhance the quality of the app with an accelerated time to market. Let us have a look at the major challenges faced by enterprises while testing their mobile apps: a) Increasing device fragmentation : The universe of Android and ios is very complex. With every new launch or upgrade, comes different versions, varied screen sizes and a huge number of compatibility issues. Testing teams are struggling to keep up with the proliferation of device fragmentation and to decide the optimum number of devices for their test coverage.

4 Challenges faced by a modern enterprise Image 1: Device Fragmentation since 2011 (Source: Scientia Mobile) b) Vast diversity in mobile platforms and Operating system : The uncontrollable diversity in mobile platforms and Operating Systems is creating numerous hurdles for the testers. Not only are there many different OSs with their own limitations available in the market, but also a great variety of (older or recent) versions of the same OS. Image 2: Global Smartphone OS versions

5 Challenges faced by a modern enterprise In the current scenario, more than 1 billion of Android devices are running an outdated version of Android out of two billion monthly active devices. Identifying the right segment of devices and testing apps on them becomes a gigantic challenge for the testers. c) Huge number of mobile network operators: Another challenge in testing mobile application is tackling the huge number of Mobile Network Operators. Currently there are more than 670 Mobile Network Operators in the world, using different network standards and different kinds of network infrastructure. Testing an app manually on such a huge number of mobile network operators is not feasible for a tester. d) Requirement of Real life field testing: Another significant problem that testers face is the requirement of field testing of mobile apps. There can be several test scenarios for which testers have to do real life field testing. The mobility of users while using apps should not affect the functionality of the apps due to poor internet connection or difficulty in fetching the data. Let s take an example of a music streaming app like Spotify that streams music on the go. Testing this app inside office premises with the best possible infrastructure is not enough. In some locations, users may not have access to a specific network, while others may have dead spots where the connection is cut off completely and a few others may have multiple 2G and 3G towers within a small distance, expecting mobile devices and apps to handle network switching between towers on their own. e) Data Security: Users share a lot of their personal information with mobile apps so they are very particular about ensuring that their personal information is neither shared nor can be accessed by any third parties. All this information and data needs to be secured and kept safe from hacking attempts. f) Need of real devices at each stage of mobile app development lifecycle: To make an app successful, real devices must be involved at all stages of lifecycle, from creating the concept analyzing requirements, creating test specifications, testing early versions of the app, releasing the finished product, to the post-development review process. This can help to reduce cycle times and improve application deployment, while minimizing problems and providing users with an enhanced testing experience.

6 Challenges faced by a modern enterprise Image 3: Use of real devices at each stage of app development lifecycle g) Optimization of test infrastructure for geographically dispersed teams : Large enterprises have their teams spread across multiple locations. In such a scenario, a mobile app testing exercise is generally carried out by using in-house labs with physical devices provided to testing teams at multiple locations. This brings up the problem of cost redundancy, time loss in device sharing and delay in delivery of the app. Image 4: Test Infrastructure optimized for geographically dispersed teams

7 Challenges faced by a modern enterprise h) Continuous testing for faster release: To disrupt a market, enterprise must release an app at an ever-quickening pace. Continuous testing is the solution to it. In the absence of right devices, right tools for quick automation creation and parallel test execution the CI/CD pipeline breaks. Image 5: Extending CI to app development g) Optimization of test infrastructure for geographically dispersed teams : Large enterprises have their teams spread across multiple locations. In such a scenario, a mobile app testing exercise is generally carried out by using in-house labs with physical devices provided to testing teams at multiple locations. This brings up the problem of cost redundancy, time loss in device sharing and delay in delivery of the app.

8 What s the solution? There are three key elements to the right strategy: Testing on real devices from early stage of project lifecycle A cloud mobile lab Infrastructure (internal or external) for collaboration among teams Investment on Test Automation An ideal scenario for organizations to aim for is Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery by constantly integrating changes to an app at all stages of the delivery chain as shown in the image below. Image 6: Integrating changes at each stage through Continuous Integration But, the scenario shown above can t be achieved without a Mobile Device Cloud. Mobile Device cloud can serve as a single point solution for Mobile Teams.

9 Mobile Device Cloud (MDC) Testing on real devices over cloud helps to streamline the test processes to keep pace with the market and technology trends and stay competitive by getting high quality mobile apps into user hands faster. Image 7: Advantages of Mobile Device Cloud

10 Mobile Device Cloud Models Mobile Device Cloud offers immense flexibility to organizations as it can be available in public, private as well as on-premise cloud models. Large organizations can pick and choose the suitable cloud model to carry out their app testing tasks across global office locations leveraging the suitable MDC option. Current solutions include: Public device cloud Devices are available and shared with everyone. It provides online capabilities to test your App across a range of mobile devices hosted on cloud. Choose the package suitable for your needs and get started. According to Gartner, by 2019, 'cloud' will be a ubiquitous term like 'network' as business solutions assume use of public cloud as a common asset. These are privately hosted cloud instance at set data centers with dedicated mobile devices. Enterprises provide the list of devices they need and it will be hosted and managed dedicatedly. On-premise device cloud Private device cloud It is generally a mobile digital lab solution in a plug and play setup that can be deployed within your premise. It s a day zero setup so you can have your Mobile Test Lab accessible to your geographical distributed user.

11 Benefits of MDC to Organizations In addition to multiple cloud options to choose from, MDC offers several business benefits. As seen earlier in this whitepaper, organizations with global footprints have a series of challenges to overcome. MDC model squarely addresses these issues and delivers true business advantages that other models are unable to. Device configurations simplified: The project manager or the app testers and developers can easily select and configure the devices based on their specific test usage needs. For instance, a project head can select device configurations based on aspects such as available RAM, OS flavor and version, pre-built applications running or otherwise. Testers can specify different configurations for different devices to ensure adequate diversity of environment essential for app testing success. It also gives the benefit of cross platform testing with the growing number of handsets and platforms to make testing comprehensive and faster.

12 Benefits of MDC to Organizations Speedy deployment: With MDC, device provisioning and availability cease to be the issues. As devices can be easily provisioned, the teams spread across geographies can test the modules they develop with minimal wait times. This way, the testing speeds improve phenomenally, expediting the product release. There are huge number of latest device models available on different varieties of operating systems. Testers can run unlimited parallel scripts at the same time. Watertight security: With MDC, device provisioning and data is user-specific and protected by access control policies. A device assigned to one user is not visible to other testers or developers. The MDC traffic is protected by VPN, fortifying the security provisions further. The watertight security does not leave any loop for the hacker to prey on. Cost savings: The time saved on testing and app development results in immense cost-savings for the organization. Moreover, as the organization can get a centralized view of all devices, the wastages arising out of device redundancies can be plugged successfully. Testing performance issues over different local networks. It s possible that a 3-year-old android phone can work more efficiently than an iphone X. How? If an application is running on a slow network in Ooty it doesn t matter if it s on the latest smartphone. Cloud helps to run tests on real SIM networks on different scenarios

13 Case Study One of the world s leading institution which manages and processes commercial fuel cards and workforce payment products and services. Operating across 6 networks in North America, Canada and 9 internal networks which includes United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil and East European. Business Challenge: They faced considerable challenges testing their business-critical customer facing applications across multiple OS, mobile devices and form factors. They were finding it tough to test on latest mobile devices and to keep pace with the ever-changing device market. Our Solution: With all the challenges around, the customer decided to go for a pcloudy hosted private cloud. In this model, the customer selected the devices of their choice and was made available over cloud, setup in a dedicated data center by pcloudy. This enabled their teams spread across geography to access devices over cloud seamlessly. They were also given an option to swap the mobile devices of their choice depending on their licensing model. This model saved them considerable amount of time (devices made available immediately) and money (physical device procurement cost) and gave them lot of flexibility of accessing latest devices by testing teams across the globe. Conclusion Mobile device cloud has transformed the app testing and can help large enterprises to reduce cycle times, improve the quality of apps and get the mobile app testing framework in order. With different models suitably created to meet organizational needs, it encourages collaboration and improves DevOps efficiencies for continuous integration and makes it easy to test on a wide variety of devices.

14 pcloudy pcloudy, the key product of Smart Software Testing Solutions is revolutionizing the testing environment in mobile space. pcloudy offers multiple cloud based mobile app testing solutions from small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) to large enterprises. It offers on-demand public cloud based mobile testing over more than 500 Android and ios devices and private cloud and on-premise setup offerings for enterprises. pcloudy has also been recognized by top industry analysts including Gartner that included the products in latest report on mobile testing tool landscape. Hexaware Technologies Hexaware is a leading global provider of IT, Application, Infrastructure, BPO and Digital services. Our business philosophy of Shrink IT, Grow Digital allows customers to significantly shrink commodity IT spend while partnering with them to embrace digitalization. The Company focuses on key domains such as Banking, Financial Services, Professional Services, Capital Market, Healthcare, Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, Education, Telecom, Travel, Transportation and Logistics. Hexaware is committed to deliver business results and leverage technology solutions by specializing in Application Development & Maintenance, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Quality Assurance and Testing Services, Infrastructure Management Services, Business Process Services and Enterprise Solutions. Founded in 1990, Hexaware has a well-established global delivery model armed with proprietary tools and methodologies, skilled human capital and SEI CMMI-Level 5 certification. Authors: Shivani Sinha is the Senior Technical Writer with pcloudy.com. She has over 8 years of experience in writing technical and digital content. Having worked in diverse industries, she has an ability to conceptualize and implement value added brand building and market development strategies through content. She had an opportunity to lead and work on multiple brand building initiatives to enable numerous product launches. Naresh Padmanabhan (Paddy) is the Practice Manager for Multi-Channel testing at Hexaware Technologies. He has over 13 years of experience in various stages of software development life cycle and over 8 years with Mobile Test Automation with leading MNC s. Mr. Naresh holds a Master s degree in Computer Applications from a reputed Indian University.