In this episode we’ll test talk with Eran Kinsbruner, author of the brand new book The Digital Quality Handbook – a guide for achieving continuous quality in a DevOps reality. As mobile and web technologies continue to expand in almost all industries, it’s critical to understand how to take existing practices for mobile and web apps to the next level. So listen up and discover how to successfully implement digital transformation for your company in an ever-changing technical landscape.
About Eran
A mobile development leader and veteran, Eran Kinsbruner has been in the dev & test industry since 1999. The creator and author of the quarterly Digital Test Coverage Index (Factors Magazine), and co-inventor of the test exclusion automated mechanism for mobile J2ME testing at Sun Microsystems, Eran serves as a prominent resource for every step of the app development cycle.
As an influential blogger and speaker at global conferences like StarEast, Eurostar, Automation Guild and QAI Quest, Eran’s expertise has proven outstandingly valuable to developers and testers at organizations large and small. At a community level, Eran founded Meetups in both Boston and Israel to empower, educate, and bring together local dev/test experts, and launched a LinkedIn Group with over 5,400 mobile developers and testers from all over the world.
Eran is the author of a book titled The Digital Quality Handbook, the book offers intel on integrating quality into every step of the development cycle to help dev & test teams meet rising consumer’s standards for mobile and web applications. Currently, Eran is the Mobile Technical Evangelist at Perfecto, the leading cloud-based web and mobile quality lab, and was formerly the CTO for Mobile Testing at Matrix, and managed technical teams at Qulicke & Soffa, Sun Microsystems, General Electric and NeuStar.
Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk
- The book was kind of a brain dump for me. After so many years in the mobile space I’ve seen so many pitfalls and challenges the customers that they meet as part of my work at Perfecto so you know engaging with influence in the market which by the way this is also why I engage with this influencers to be part of the book I felt that there is a void out there around best practices guidelines testing mobile and web applications in a DevOps Reality and most of the organizations today are starting to say yes we are Agile an Agile Shop we are practicing successfully Devops and this kind of mature processes but in reality they either fail or they are not that mature. They think because of missing practices maybe missed seeing some ways of leveraging existing tools. And this is why for example you know I am hosting in the book companies such as Applitools with the visual analysis capabilities test fairly far better testing and many more which we can soon touch on. But basically it was time to put an end to end overview that fits this todays reality 2017 reality and give like hands on useful tools for practitioners to try and you know go with their maturity.
- Honestly Digital can mean a lot of things the way I look at digital quality today is the ability to get a consistent good user experience and user experiences can mean good functionality good performance. Because I’m mentioning digital it’s any platform. You can consumer debt data either from your mobile phone, a tablet, a desktop web doesn’t matter. Digital means the content can come from different different channels and it should perform and look you know great on any platform. I think that you know the days of testing on one or two or three platforms whether it’s just desktop or just mobile are gone. People today as I mentioned this is why I call it digital quality. Developing the applications their services to be a consumed across any platform and when you look at the scalability the market size today and you would try to achieve quality across all of these different platforms and screen sizes. It’s simply unmanageable to do it in house. And this is why cloud vendors such as you know Perfecto, Sauce even Amazon as well took the approach of cloud based testing solutions and you can continue using your own tools you know Selenium, Expresso, Appium — it doesn’t matter.
- So there are so many considerations when you are testing chatbots outside of your application as an extension. How you are sure that the voice commands are going through back and forth text to speech speech to speech to text. How is the location of the person trying to get the weather update reflected in the chatbot. You know that translation everything you know go back and forth. What about interruptions things that you know that interrupt with your chat. You know maybe an incoming call while you are actually in a voice command trying to ask what’s the weather on Facebook. OK. So it’s a very complicated thing. And to summarize you know last week there was the Google IO event. Google introduced in Android 7 if I’m not mistaken the concept of instant applications. Instant application it’s not Bots but it’s an extension to your native up you don’t need to install your native application on your mobile phone. You can actually search thru a chatbot Google assistant for a service and the service will be a subset of your application and you’ll get a link to your bot just click on the link and you get the service from the application through Google Play without needing to install the app. So summarizing it’s a very complicated extension or addition on top of mobile testing and this is why I thought it’s important at least to address it. It’s not a complete test plan but at least it gives you the concept and the awareness that it’s not a straight forward think you need to get ready if you want to go there.
- In that chapter and the one before that I am mentioning a patent that I registered about 10 years ago when I was showing quality for the J2ME SDK at Sun Microsystems. I see the same challenge today the same pattern today that a new operating system and new device comes into the market the gap in the testing because you know teams are late to catch or to automate the new functionality and bugs of slipping to production. I can give you an example…
- The book is divided into four sections. So you might not be interested in every section of the book. This is a full as mentioned the 360 degrees view to achieve dev ops in today’s reality. But I divided the book into four different sections from the beginners as you know how to size a mobile device lab. How to get started with mobile testing. What are the pitfalls. And then I’m moving to more advanced test automation techniques like y is a good XPath if your using Selenium. What are the good ways of doing visual testing. What are the best practices around Protractor. And then I’m moving to dev ops. What is the DevOps in general and what Microsoft has to say about DevOps. And then I move lastly to the production and the nonfunctional performance testing in the digital era. And this is I’m closing the book you know on the production level. You know how you assure quality quality while the end user is engaging with your application. So my last comment is you know you have this book you have four different areas for different categories and section in the book Choose and start with what’s most painful to you today whether it’s coverage automation capabilities nonfunctional testing or just going Agile shifting your processes left and right. Start making an impact by you know reading the book and making an impact in your own team.
Resources
Connect with Eran
- Twitter:@ek121268
- Blog: mobiletestingblog
- Company: perfectomobile
May I Ask You For a Favor?
Thanks again for listening to the show. If it has helped you in any way, shape or form, please share it using the social media buttons you see on the page.
Additionally, reviews for the podcast on iTunes are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them.
Test Talks is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Sauce Labs. Try it for free today!