How a Cloud-Based Mobile Device Lab Accelerates Time to Market and ROI

On August 24^th, 2016, Cigniti hosted a webinar along with Experitest on the topic, “How a Cloud-Based Mobile Device Lab Accelerates Time to Market and ROI”.

The essence of the webinar is given in the following web blog post.

Quality Assurance (QA) strategy: Is your enterprise up-to-date?

Mobile applications enable businesses to connect with their customers through an exclusive platform. These applications help businesses with product or service updates, with immediate resolution of customer complaints, and for conducting reviews. The plethora of mobile applications, however, only make app maintenance and bug removal a gruelling process, especially considering the wide range of functionalities an application can offer.

[Tweet “According to Gartner, for internally developed mobile applications, the average cycle for updates will be lesser than four weeks by the year 2019.”]

According to Gartner, for internally developed mobile applications, the average cycle for updates will be lesser than four weeks by the year 2019. Abandonment is the concept of an online transaction being incomplete. In an electronic commerce website like Amazon, an online shopper fills his or her cart but does not go through with the transaction at the payment stage, leading to cart abandonment. An American Express survey claims that poor service experience accounted for nearly 78% of consumers to abandon their transaction. In addition, the app downloads are expected to skyrocket in 2017.

[Tweet “An American Express survey claims that poor service experience accounted for nearly 78% of consumers to abandon their transaction.”]

Varying Functionalities and their Associated Difficulties

Mobile applications (apps) have varying functionalities spread across multimedia, utilities, productivity, travel, and communication. For example,

• The multimedia apps are largely audiovisual format supported
• The utility apps deal with file managers and address book managers
• Productivity apps act as daily tools, such as calendars, calculators, and finance apps
• Apps in the travel category enable flight/train/bus bookings and corresponding hotel bookings
• The communications category is fairly straightforward, laden with social media and email apps

The difficulties associated with such varying functionalities among applications cannot be downplayed. There are a large number of network-and-carrier combinations, and dynamic OEM, devices and OS combinations. To top it all off, there are constantly new additions to the already existing combinations! The cost of maintaining devices is high, need for access from across geographies is rampant, and the functional components call for complex testing requirements within short QA cycles. 

Today’s Enterprise Mobile QA Goals

This brings us to the services that all mobile device labs provide, in order to meet QA goals, broadly categorized into the following five segments:

Quick go-to-market

• For the benefit of all DevOps teams, a unified environment needs to be enabled
• A round-the-clock and fully operational testing environment is necessary in order to facilitate continuous integration

Developers and QA engineers can work in tandem through both, manual and automatic methods, and ensure that various issues are immediately tackled. The usual cycle associated with waiting for one group to finish with their work in order for the next group to jump in, is completely disrupted. Simulation environments enable all parties to understand real life network conditions, thus enabling them to be prepared in dealing with network issues.

Strict security guidelines

Mobile device security guidelines must to be adhered to, a non-negotiable element in the customer services department. A hosted mobile lab is expected to support most security requirements, while the onsite lab resides inside the company’s VPN. Administrative capabilities enable the changing of security policies as per project requirement, and devices are centralized in a demilitarized network area.

Flawless functionality and performance

Test coverage needs to be maximized, and risks ought to be minimized, in order to guarantee high performance and flawless functionality. This essentially means that testing needs to be carried out across various device, platforms, versions, and screen resolutions and among varying network conditions, carriers and servers.

Scalability

Owing to the standard hardware usage and software-only solutions provided, scalability of the enterprise is catapulted by the mobile device laboratory. Initially starting with about 50 devices, the number of devices can be greatly increased over a period of time. The assigning of testers to particular mobile devices also becomes a much simpler task as the lab provides efficient project management capabilities.

Quicker ROI

Through the enablement of off-shore model, mobile device labs can ensure a quicker return-on-investment. A mobile device lab also helps reduce costs associated with procurement and maintenance (of the device). The round-the-clock automation testing in the mobile device lab also ensures that the utilization of devices is high.

What does Cigniti have to Offer?

Cigniti’s mobile device laboratory is powered by SeeTestCloud and offers two distinct types of mobile device labs:

• Onsite mobile device lab and
• Hosted mobile device lab

The former enables the customer to procure and maintain the devices, ensuring that the lab resides within the company’s VPN for maximum security, involving absolutely no third-party dependencies.

The latter, on the other hand, is hosted by a service provider, helps obtain an end-to-end solution and also enables quick access to a dedicated device in a secure environment.

For more information, please visit https://www.cigniti.com/mobile-testing.