Test idea generation for mobile apps

I received yesterday a reminder by email from the Agile Vancouver group about this year's conference.

They have my email address from the 2011 conference when I attended two tutorials on agile test automation.

So, I checked this year's agenda to see what's going on and noticed a 1 day hands-on training given by Jonathan Kohl.

The name sounded very familiar but could not say from where.

My suspicion was that he had articles published in the Better Software magazine but again, I was not sure.

The next thing was checking a bit of background on Jonathan Kohl to find out more on his mobile apps testing experience.

His website has a section with his publications which showed that I was right, he did publish a lot on Better Software.

One of the articles had an interesting title: Test Mobile Applications with I Sliced Up Fun.

The article is about all different ways of testing any mobile app and with details on how to explore them.

It covers everything important as follows:

I: Inputs into the device

S: Store (requirements for submitting the app to the mobile app store; this is mostly important for IOS apps where there are guides that the IOS developers should follow)

L: Location (test at home using wifi, test at home using 3g, test in a bus using 3g, etc)

I: Interactions/Interruptions(calendar reminders, using the contact list, switching to a different app and resuming, etc)

C: Communication (receiving sms, receiving a phone call)

E: Ergonomics

D: Data

U: Usability

P: Platform (test it for different versions of the operating system - not very practical in many cases but possible)

F: Function

U: User Scenarios

N: Network (test the app only with 3g, only with wifi, switch from 3g to wifi during testing, only with bad quality of the 3g signal, etc)

I have not learned much from it but .... I really wished I read the article a year before!!!

My last year included so much mobile apps testing that could have benefited immensely from the article's info.

What I am trying to say is that I learnt about testing mobile apps the hard way.

It was still a lot of fun but not easy.

Maybe after you will read this article, your learning will be much faster than mine.

Alex


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