Regression testing is one of the most time-consuming tasks when developing a mobile Android app. Using myMail as a case study, I’d like to share my experience and advice on how to build a flexible and extensible automated testing system for Android smartphones — from scratch.
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Every developer knows that just because a website looks like and does what it’s meant to on the latest iPhone, doesn’t mean it will work across every mobile device. In this article, we’ll highlight some of the many open device labs out there — fantastic and helpful initiatives by the community that deserve support and attention.
Open device labs (ODLs) are a response to the myriad of operating systems, browsers and devices that litter our technical landscape. They offer developers a (usually) free space to go to test their web systems, websites and apps on a range of software and hardware. This premise forms the core of the OpenDeviceLab.com initiative, which is a community movement to help people locate the right ODL for the job and to drum up further support for these testing centers.
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Prototyping is essential to help your team create the best product possible. It’s a chance to experiment with ideas and turn them into something tangible that you can test and build upon. When you fail with your prototype, you land softly — there’s always the chance to iterate and improve.
The team behind Adobe’s new prototyping tool Experience Design (Adobe XD) uses prototyping as a method to test new features before they make it into the program. Being a product manager on the Adobe XD team, I’ll share some insights into how the team uses prototyping to build and improve Adobe XD, and make prototyping more efficient for designers.
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The bar is set high for today’s mobile apps. First, apps must meet the standard of quality that app markets expect. Secondly, mobile app users are very demanding. Plenty of alternatives are available to download, so users will not tolerate a buggy app.
Because mobile apps have become such a crucial part of people’s lives, users won’t be shy about sharing their love or hate for an app — and that feedback gets in front of millions of users in seconds.
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When designing a graphical user interface, there is always an open question: How do we automate testing for it? And how do we make sure the website layout stays responsive and displays correctly on all kinds of devices with various resolutions? Add to this the complications arising from dynamic content, requirements for internationalization and localization, and it becomes a real challenge.
In this article, I will guide you through an interesting new layout testing technique. Using Galen Framework, I will provide a detailed tutorial for writing meaningful generalized layout tests, which can be executed in any browser and on any device and at the same time used as a single source of truth in your design documentation.
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“Be agile; release early; release often.” We know the drill. But is it strategically wise to keep rolling out features often? Especially once a product you’re building reaches a certain size, you probably don’t want to risk the integrity of your application with every new minor release.
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This is an experiment in a slightly different format for Smashing Magazine – using a storytelling approach to convey the same lessons learned that a traditional article would have provided.
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Cross-browser testing is time-consuming and laborious. This, in turn, makes it expensive and prone to human error… so, naturally, we want to do as little of it as possible. This is not a statement we should be ashamed of. Developers are lazy by nature: adhering to the DRY principle, writing scripts to automate things we’d otherwise have to do by hand, making use of third-party libraries — being lazy is what makes us good developers.
The traditional approach to cross-browser testing doesn’t align well with these ideals. Either you make a half-hearted attempt at manual testing or you expend a lot of effort on doing it “properly”: testing in all of the major browsers used by your audience, gradually moving to older or more obscure browsers in order to say you’ve tested them.
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Product teams in startups and mid-sized and large companies are all implementing usability testing and prototyping as a way to de-risk product development. As the focus shifts from engineering to prototyping, it is becoming increasingly important for anyone who creates prototypes to understand the differences between a prototype and a product build.
By optimizing the prototyping process, you can produce mockups that deliver the most actionable user insights, while being as efficient as possible with design time. Regardless of which prototype tools you use or whether you test wireframes, clickable mockups or coded prototypes, what’s most important to focus on is what you want to test and what you want to learn from it.
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The incredible growth of mobile and the proliferation of mobile devices has made the UX designer’s job more challenging and interesting. It also means that user-testing mobile apps and websites is an essential component of the UX toolkit.
But unlike the desktop environment, no out-of-the-box software packages such as Silverback or Camtasia are specifically designed to record mobile usability tests. Even if you’re not developing a mobile app, chances are that a large proportion of your website traffic is coming from mobile. Running regular mobile usability tests is the only way to gauge how well this channel is working for your customers.
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