Had a great time at TWiQ this week, and wanted to stash all of the "thoughts" that popped up in our chat
- Mobile testing is transitioning from The Cupboard of devices towards Cloud Services (a lot later than browser, desktop and server app testing). Some people are nostalgic for their device cupboard though :)
- Getting a new mobile testing tool adopted by your team is absolutely Leading With Quality - it's as much about communication as it is about merits of the tool.
- Rolling backwards isn't really a thing in mobile, and rolling forwards can take weeks or months to get 100% adoption. Can your API handle old clients?
- People are using mobile E2E tests to test their API, since the mobile app is a "Known Good API Client" (and might test multiple app versions)
- Folks are getting better at having the risk conversation, since we can't test All The Things on All The Things in mobile - even if mobile apps are simple, the hardware and software variation is enormous.
- We can prioritise for breadth of testing on the core combinations (recent Android and iOS on popular handsets) and for breadth of variation on the things that interact with the hardware (photo upload, push notifications). We can trust that our mobile app framework (React Native, Flutter, Compose, etc) is already testing that it can put text on a screen, so we optimise our tests for business logic and for device interactions.
- We can rely on analytics to inform our test strategy, but don't make the same mistake Dan did - verify that the usage isn't low because it's horribly broken
- It's common for apps to have a 2 week release cadence. This is a great opportunity to explain Context Driven Testing to folks who are unfamiliar. Your real risks are in the diff between 2 weeks ago, and now. This is especially true when we've got automated regression tests to rely on for the rest.
- A distributed team can be harder to collaborate on mobile issues. Can't show them what's happening. Could remote working have pushed to move towards more cloud device farms?
- Cloud device farms are great for lots of things. Bluetooth pairing isn't one of them.
