Mobile Applications and Testing it - Part I

The buzz words heard now a days are iPhone, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, Android, Blackberry etc.., all the internet and multimedia enabled smart phones.Now its just your mobile which has almost all the necessary features such as Camera, Visual voice mail, Portable media player, an Internet client with e-mail and web browsing, Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth etc..apart from the basic features of calling and text messages. Almost all these devices have virtual key board or a QWERTY keyboard which just looks like your handling a palmtop and not a mobile

Apart from all the features users are always given the best chance to add Apps to their mobile as per their interest, be it games, reference, GPS navigation, social networking etc.



When I started thinking of mobile applications, many questions came to my mind...

•  How are the applications developed for mobiles?
•  Is test driven development possible for mobile applications?
•  If so how the testing should be done?
•  From QA what are the steps I need to take care to ensure that the application is working fine?
• Does the same test cases which I write for the application functional testing on portal/website (cross browser supported) holds good for mobile testing as well?
• And lot more....

  Most of the mobile platforms are not mutually compatible i.e. most of the applications developed on one platform does not support the other platform. So it's up to the application owner's choice to decide on what platform his application should support. For more information on mobile application development click here

As my focus is mostly on testing, here are my understandings on the same.

Can test driven development be done for mobile applications?

Yes Test driven development is possible for mobile apps as well. 

Do we need to port the application daily into mobile and then test it? No. There are Emulators/Simulators which can be used for testing. They simulate the actual device environment in our computer as shown above. All the functional aspects can be tested in the emulators. 

The major change that I have observed while testing the application on emulator and the actual device is the view of the application. Now a days most of the mobiles have both landscape and portrait views. In emulators we can only check the portrait view. So at the end when we start testing on actual device, you might find lot of resizing issues. This is again if your application supports both Landscape and Portrait views. Most of the applications now are days are strictly developed for portrait view.

Some useful links:

Palm Emulator: Steps to install Palm emulator are given here

Android SDK:  Follow the steps mentioned in the following link to install Android SDK. For more info on how the Android Emulator works click here

In my next blog I will share my experiences on testing an application on actual device.