[x]cube LABS is a leading digital strategy and solution provider specializing in enterprise mobility space. Over the years, we have delivered numerous digital innovations and mobile solutions, creating over $ 2 billion for startups and enterprises. Broad spectrum of services ranging from mobile app development to enterprise digital strategy makes us the partner of choice for leading brands.
Most enterprises recognize that end-user- his needs and requirements must be put at the heart of the ecosystem to realize the full benefits of their mobility initiatives. They also understand that without widespread adoption, whatever mobile apps or solutions they are building, will not deliver desired results. Most, however, do not know where to begin. You can start by answering a set of questions, like
What type of devices will suit their work (smartphone/tablet or both)?
Will the company own the device or should the employees be allowed to bring their own?
Which users groups will be eligible for mobile enablement (Field staff? Managers & above? Everyone?)
Do you understand the work process and needs of your targeted user group?
What apps will help them do their work efficiently?
What kind of data will they need anytime, anywhere?
What are their mobile maturity profiles?
What kind of security mechanism needs to be placed for each user group to prevent threat to sensitive data?
Similarly, while building a customer-facing app, you can begin with
What is your customer profile?
What kind of information would they want from your apps?
What type of transactions would they like to do with your app?
How can the UI/UX of the app help improve customer engagement?
How can you add value to your customer-facing solution to reinforce your brand message?
Answers to these and similar questions will help you understand your user requirements better and will provide you with a list of considerations that can be a good foundation for your mobile strategy and app development roadmap.
Technology has transformed retail business. Starting with web, mobile websites and now shopping apps- retail industry today has a completely different look. The adoption of mobile apps in retail has not only brought convenience, speed and cost-effectiveness to customers but has also given critical tools to retailers to granularly segment their audience, find the right channel to target them, understand their needs and expectations and personalize experiences.
Tools like predictive mobile analytics have empowered retailers to behaviorally target shoppers, engage with them at right moments in the buying journey and influence their decision. From customer feedback, buying history to transactional data- data and analytics tools are arming today’s online retailers with valuable actionable insights.
Here are 3 game changing benefits of predictive analytics for mobile apps
1. Product recommendation
Predictive mobile analytics can not only influence first sale but can also trigger upsell/cross sell through recommendation engines by helping you handpick products for your customers. The recommendation tools analyses customer buying pattern, browsing history and other criteria to recommend products that are best suited to his interest/purchasing power etc.
2. Customer Engagement
Understanding customers is key to effective promotion and engagement. Predictive analytics provides you with critical insights on customer tastes, preferences, buying history, price sensitivity etc., that can help you engage with your buyers effectively and influence their buying decisions. For mobile apps, it can help you design effective engagement strategy to trigger more app usage, personalize experiences and thereby boost sales.
3. Customer Feedback
Today’s business is more about listening to your customer than telling about yourself. Powerful analytics tools can help you analyze mountains of data from multiple touch points- social media, forums, websites etc., to to glean precise insights and give you an accurate idea on your customer’s engagement with your brand and business.
The applications of predictive mobile analytics is not just limited to customer-facing side apps but also encompasses internal apps for store operations, merchandising, supply chain etc. From giving you real-time data on stock availability, shelves occupancy, product positioning, stock movements- predictive analytics will help you take critical business decisions on time, pushing sales and saving a lot of dollars.
Cloud and integrated services have gone mainstream in enterprises. With mobile becoming core to any enterprise strategy today and businesses looking to mobilize their processes and people, app developers have leveraged mobile cloud computing to build intensive, data rich applications. Mobile cloud computing brings various benefits like scalability, flexibility, real-time data access and cost-effectiveness allowing businesses with limited budget also to use content rich, transaction intensive applications. However, there are a few challenges for enterprises to address while adopting cloud application for their mobile apps, like
1. Limitations of mobile devices
Though smartphones & Tablet are getting powerful everyday, still these are not close to desktops in energy management, processing power, storage capacity etc. It is therefore essential for mobile app developers to optimize energy management by partitioning of application functions and offload energy sapping processing functions to the cloud.
2. Network and Bandwidth
Mobile apps mostly run on wireless connectivity which means longer latency, slow connectivity, diverse access schemes and intermittent coverage etc. This challenge can be addressed by moving clients and server closer to each other and rerouting traffic as per location and cache capabilities.
3. Platform fragmentation
This can be a challenge when user group is using different platform-iOS, Android and Windows etc. App developers need to optimize the apps across all platforms and ensure that all users get similar app experience and feature access.
4. Data security & user privacy
Security of sensitive data and ensuring user privacy is a major challenge for enterprises building apps on cloud. Data on mobile devices is more vulnerable to threats and attacks than desktops. The security issues may range from data integrity, authorization, cloud model security issues etc.
Mobile cloud computing, despite having a few challenges, is the future. And as performance and experience become critical for business and consumer apps, app developers have to find the best solutions to address mobile cloud challenges.
The budget of developing an enterprise app is a serious consideration when a business decision maker like you sits down to plan his mobile project. There are many other things but cost of app development ranks higher. So, what is the cost of building an enterprise app? The answer is ‘It depends on what you want in/from your app’. Not a simple answer? Yes, because there is none. There are many drivers to a mobile app development cost. The more you want, the costly it will be. let’s see what they are
1. Devices
Are you developing an app for smartphones or Tablets or both? Are you building an app that will be integrated to your proprietary device- a wearable or a sensor? Your budget will increase as you start covering a wider range of devices. For integration to specialty device- the budget will depend on communication protocol, complexity of integration etc.
2. Native or Cross Platform
The platform strategy is a key driver to your enterprise app development costs. Will your enterprise app support one particular platform- iOS, Android, Windows or do you want it to be compatible across all platforms. Generally, if all other things remain constant, the cost of an iPhone or iPad app development is higher than that of building android apps or Window apps. A cross platform app development strategy may be the right pick but the functionality and experience of the app is nowhere closer to a native one.
3. User log-in
Another aspect that can make a difference of a few thousand dollars in your mobile project budget. If you want secure login in your app then it will cost you. However, a secure login safeguards your app from unauthorized access and ensures data security and hence spending a little more to protect your sensitive data is a good idea.
4. App Features
Will your app need location based services? Will it have in-app purchasing functionality? Will it have any engagement tool? Do you want any other custom add-on? All the feature additions may cost you anything between $1000 to $10,000 and more in custom features.
5. Analytics
These days most of the enterprises integrate analytics tool in their app so as understand its usage, user behavior, app performance etc. The data collected can be critical in measuring your app performance but it will push your budget up. The cost of analytics integration depends on the vendor, tool and expertise needed to integrate it.
In addition to these, there are other considerations like your app distribution & marketing strategy, maintenance and upgradation frequency that have an impact on your app budget. Understanding the key drivers to an app development cost will help you plan your budget to perfection and prevent any offshooting.
97% healthcare organizations participating in a Forrester survey agree that the IoT will be the most strategic technological initiative their organization will undertake this decade.
90% of healthcare IT departments are prepared to make the necessary changes to implement IoT solutions.
52% of all respondents already have some form of IoT solution in place or are in the process of implementing an IoT solution, while another 30% have plans to do so within the next year.
Internet of Things is transforming healthcare by completely redefining the way people, devices and apps connect and interact with each other. From personal fitness and wellness sensors, implantable devices to surgical robots – IoT is bringing in new tools and efficiencies in the ecosystem resulting in more integrated healthcare. There are several social and technology factors that are pushing healthcare organization to leverage IoT and usher in a connected healthcare ecosystem. Here are the key factors
Social Factors
1. Aging Population
Faced with a rapidly aging population, the country has been forced to explore innovative caregiving methods like Internet of Things to meet the demands of older adult population.
2. Patient Protection Affordable Care Act
The landmark legislation focussed on accountable care is making connected care a necessity for the U.S. High costs and fragmentation have long been ailing the healthcare system in the country calling for significant improvements in resource utilization and collaboration across healthcare systems.
3. Shortage of Human Resources
Hospitals are facing shortage of trained staff. Also the cost of hiring good talent is putting significant pressure on hospitals to optimize staff utilization by leveraging new technologies like IoT.
Technical factors
4. Advancements in mHealth
Hospitals are already using mHealth technologies with visible results in productivity, cost efficiency and revenue generation. Internet of Things promises to encompass siloed executions into a system-wide implementation connecting people, devices and other things.
5. Cloud & Big Data
There have been rapid advancements in cloud computing and big data enabling providers to store vast amount of data and share it across systems. Moreover, big data analytics empowers them to process data emanating from various sources. transform it into insights and drive better decision-making impacting patient care and treatment outcomes.
6. SaaS & HaaS
Internet of Things is driving the growth of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Hardware as a Service (HaaS) model, helping healthcare organization to eliminate CAPEX on new software and hardware. It also enables providers with limited budget to get access to advanced technologies with scalability.
With the competition in the post-reform era getting intense, more and more healthcare providers will embrace connected healthcare to drive excellence, be competitive and improve treatment outcomes.
The stakes are getting higher and higher for enterprise apps. With businesses putting mobile at the heart of their strategy, aligning mobile initiatives with their business goals and investing significant time & resources in app development- it is more than necessary to get things right. Here are 5 mistakes to avoid while navigating the treacherous waters of developing an enterprise app–
1. Failing to solve the OS conundrum
The first question to ask as you sit down to strategize on your mobile project is- Will your app run on iOS, Android, Windows or all? While it is easier to fall prey to stereotypes and choose iOS as it is big money or pick Android for its humongous user base; your platform consideration should depend on the nature of your app and your mobile strategy. If you are building a consumer app then you should look to pick anyone OS as per your comfort and gradually move to others covering as much ground as possible. For enterprise apps, the choice would depend on your device policy-BYOD or not. If your organization follows a BYOD policy then start with most used OS in your enterprise and then building an app for other platform.
2. Skimming on user experience
Many enterprise apps fail to take-off the ground due to lack of user interest and employee usage. Users, your employees or customers, appreciate engaging and personalized user experiences. They want the same level of experience which they get using personal apps. So invest in design and UX/UI. Keep it simple to use and cut-off repetitive tasks.
3. Not integrating analytics
The beauty of the digital world is the availability of real-time data that cuts guesswork, enables quick decision-making and help you correct mistakes quickly. Whether you are developing an enterprise app or a consumer app, integrating analytics is beneficial. Getting data on number of users, frequency of usage, time spent and retention etc., can throw a lot of actionable insights on user behavior and help you leverage it to further improve your app.
4. Waiting to get the app perfect before launching
Mobile apps don’t get perfect at once, they become perfect after several reiterations. Launch a minimum viable product in a small market, get data on user response, take corrective actions and continue doing it till you get it right for the larger audience. Keep refreshing your app with new features and experiences at regular intervals to get users hooked to it.
5. No plan for app deployment
The app is in final stages of development and you don’t have an app release strategy. Even a free consumer app need aggressive release strategy to succeed. For enterprise apps, you need to consider its distribution source, management tool and usage policy. For consumer apps, you need to think about app store publishing and app marketing. So create a mobile app deployment policy in advance to ensure successful release of your app.
The cost of developing an enterprise app, in-house or outsourced, is high. Add to it the brand image and other intangible investments on building an app and ensuring the success of your app becomes that much critical. Keep the above mistakes in mind while strategizing your next enterprise app development project and make your app a success.
Retail has been an early adopter of mobile technology. Today most retailers have made mobile central to their strategy, operations and customer servicing. So much so that many retailers have gone ‘app only’ to be more competitive and encourage customer loyalty. However, building a mobile app doesn’t guarantee success. With every retailer providing services via mobile, your app needs some distinguishing factors to attract users, provide better experience and, thereby, drive ROI. Here are 7 key success factors to drive higher ROI from your mobile retail app
1. Draw your mobile strategy
User-centricity should be at the heart of your strategy. Do a detailed study of your existing technology infrastructure, processes and people to understand your business requirements. Work closely with other stakeholders to arrive at a roadmap with benchmarks for short, medium and long-term goals.
2. Create Innovative Mobile Experiences
Your mobile solutions must offer dynamic, interesting experiences to hook shoppers. Create solutions that are useful and valuable to users and enrich it with relevant content aided by technologies like Augmented Reality, RFID and QR coding, etc., for better customer engagement. Build a user-friendly, instinctual interface that provides easy interactions and ensures speedy performance.
3. Personalize User Experiences
Leverage analytics tools and recommendation engines to keep track of your user behavior and personalize their experiences by suggesting products based on buying history and user interests. This will also help you influence user decisions by intervention at key buying phases and also upsell and cross-sell.
4. Integrate With Social
Today’s shoppers interact with brands via social. They are most likely to trust their social tribe and follow their advice. Ensure that your mobile app is integrated with social media channels to help your customers tell and share their stories.
5. Make It Scalable
Your solutions, chiefly customer-facing ones, need to be scalable enough to support high usage during holiday seasons and other festivities. Choose a multi-platform or cross-platform development strategy to attract a broader audience.
6. Secure Your Data
Your mobile apps will store and distribute key customer and corporate data, more so if you have ecommerce integration. It is of utmost importance that you have a robust multi-layered mechanism in place to check unauthorized access and data loss. Security is key to customer trusts.
7. Leverage Data for Growth
Make use of the data collected from various sources to better understand your customers and their buyer journeys and keep improving your app features to stay ahead of the competition.
Customer loyalty is key to success of your retail mobile app. With every brand giving access to their products through mobile app, keeping these 7 factors in consideration while building your next app will boost loyalty and help drive ROI of your mobile app
Mobile has transformed the way business operate. Today mobile is central to any enterprise’s core strategy with many embracing the mobile first mindset.However, as enterprise mobility grows, it is also creating a complex environment with multiple platforms, device types and apps resulting in governance and security issues. A mobile center of excellence (mCoE) is a popular strategy to bring standards and governance in mobile adoption, implementation and use in enterprises. A mCoE offers many benefits to the enterprise including
1. Tighter Collaboration
It can act as a coordination center between various business units to reduce gaps, cut down repetitive processes and reduce costs. It improves alignment across various mobile programs initiated by different business units and ensures that these programs are geared towards achieving the larger objective.
2. Cuts down development time
An excellence center can help expedite your mobile development processes by creating and making use of existing reusable frameworks and streamlining processes.
3. Consistency in user experience
A common reason behind failure of many an enterprise apps is lack of consistency in User Interface (UI) and user experience (UX). Users want experiences that they are used to in the personal lives. A mobile CoE can create a checklist for design and user interaction to bring consistent user experience.
4. Strengthening the security
With data and information security becoming a critical issue, a CoE provides you with with a standardized and centralized governance leading to better monitoring and management of devices and apps. Also frequent security audits from the center will help organizations in ramping-up their security architecture.
5. Center for transformation
Today mobile is at the heart of strategy for enterprises embracing the mobile-first approach. A mCoE with an integrated architecture and approach will help you adopt mobile-first mindset quickly. In addition, it will also be a catalyst for innovations by offering thought leadership and helping organization discover and exploit new opportunities in the mobile space.
Enterprise mobility presents new opportunities for businesses to go lean, become agile and be more responsive to their customer needs. Given its potential to usher a transformative impact in business, it has become crucial for enterprises to think deep down and embrace mobility in a strategic way. A mCoE can not only help you in bringing order in your existing environment environment but can also help you prepare for the future.
Internet of Things is changing the face of healthcare by completely redefining the way people, devices and apps connect and interact with each other in the ecosystem. From personal fitness and wellness sensors, implantable devices to surgical robots – IoT is bringing in new tools and efficiencies in the ecosystem resulting in more integrated healthcare. It promises to enable providers to better patient care, improve treatment outcomes and reduce healthcare costs. IoT offers hundreds of opportunities for hospitals and providers to promote wellness, boost patient care and save lives while optimizing resources through process excellence and automated workflows.
By leveraging connected healthcare solutions, patients can be monitored on a real-time basis, thereby cutting down unnecessary physician visits. Advanced homecare facilities will cut down hospital readmissions and stays.
2. Improved Treatment Outcomes
Connected Health enables caregivers to get access to real-time information resulting in data-driven, informed decisions and evidence-based treatments can help provide timely care and boost treatment outcomes.
3. Real-time Disease Management
With continuous monitoring of patients and access to real-time data, diseases can be treated proactively before their condition worsens.
4. Minimizes Errors
Automated workflows, accurate data collection and data-driven decisions cut down wastes, minimize errors and reduce system costs.
5. Improved Patient Experience
Connected Health genuinely focuses on patient centricity. Better accuracy in diagnosis, proactive treatments, timely physician intervention and improved treatment outcomes lead to accountable care resulting in high trust among patients.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to play a transformational role in healthcare. However, winners will be organizations that are better prepared to manage digital disruption caused by IoT and are successful in integrating it with their overall care environment to build integrated healthcare ecosystems.
Read our latest eBook to understand how your organization can leverage IoT to disrupt market, improve treatment outcomes and be at the forefront of excellence.
As stakes get higher and higher for businesses adopting mobile as a strategy, choosing the right platform- native, hybrid or web; becomes crucial. By making the right platform choice, enterprises can lower their TCO, get most from their mobile investments and provide better experience to the users. Each platform has its own strengths, weakness and suitable use cases. So, how to make the right choice? These 5 tips will help you make the right platform choice for you next mobile app development project
1. User Analysis
Conduct audience analysis to understand your users, their expectations. Customer facing apps need to be impressive in user experience to boost retention and engagement. So go native. Enterprise mobile apps need to be compatible to multiple platforms and need easy maintenance and up-gradation. So you can either choose hybrid or web.
2. App Features
Identify the functionality requirement of your app. If it needs access to device features like Camera, GPS etc., then opt for native apps. For apps that majorly serve content to users, choosing a hybrid platform or web apps architecture will be the best.
3. Development Time
What is your go to market timeline? A native or a hybrid app takes time to build when compared with web apps. So check on that before deciding on the platform.
4. Budget
The total cost of ownership for a native mobile app development is higher followed by hybrid and web apps. However, TCO also depends on app functionalities. Some feature rich web or hybrid apps may cost you more than a simple native app.
5. App Upgradation & Maintenance
How soon do you need app upgradation and maintenance? Native apps are quick to incorporate new features added in OS, whereas for cross platform apps, you need for tool developer to make the features available. Similarly, maintenance of native and hybrid apps becomes complex as it needs app store approval every time the app is revamped.
Making the right platform choice is key for the success of your mobile app project. Keeping the above factors in mind will help you make the right choice.
The manufacturing industry is excited about leveraging wearable tech in the shop floor. Already many companies are using wearable devices for product design & development, employee training and security etc.
As per a research by Goldsmiths and Rackspace, productivity of workers across 85 companies increased by 8.5%, and job satisfaction levels rose by an average of 3.5% with the use of wearables.
Wearables brings a range of benefits for manufacturers but at the same time it also brings a few challenges, especially in a sector like manufacturing which involves high degrees of risk, costs, and requirement for precision.
1. Cost
The basic challenge is the affordability of the wearable tech. The average price of wearable devices are around $1500 (whereas for consumer products the average price is $300).
2. Safety
Yes as much as safety is an opportunity it is also a challenge in manufacturing. You don’t want your employees to have something which may restrict their vision or distract them while working on a heavy machine. Operating the device with gloves on also becomes a challenge.
3. Power Backup
Wearable tech uses modern devices like sensors, Bluetooth, GPS, storage chips which consume a lot of power. Power backup thus becomes a challenge in manufacturing where people work for long hours without access to recharge points.
4. Design & Aesthetics
The success of wearable lies on how the wearable is able to replace a conventional device. In a manufacturing setup where workers are working in extreme spots like under machines or on cranes you don’t want to burden them with extra devices. The user should not feel burdened or uncomfortable while using wearables. The device should be robust enough to absorb all types of vibrations, dust, dirt, temperatures, etc., that it is exposed to.
5. Data Privacy
Enterprises are vary of the fact that confidential data would be at risk as the data is stored on a cloud or transferred through Bluetooth. The biggest challenge of wearable tech providers would be to ensure privacy and security of the clients. A lot of employees would also not want their privacy being tracked with the location tracker on the device.
Wearable device manufacturers and other stakeholders have to quickly address these challenges to make it more adoptable in the industry. Once done, it will help the industry achieve higher productivity, precision and safety.
Wondering how best you can use wearable tech for your business? Get market trends and expert insights on wearable tech in manufacturing by downloading our latest eBook.
Out of millions of apps published in the app stores, half of the apps don’t break-even resulting in financial losses for the developers. Over 50% mobile apps lose half of their users in the first 3 months. Tough, isn’t it? But then there are apps like Angry Birds, Instagram, Twitter etc., that script new success stories by continually adding new customers to its list while retaining the old ones. In fact, its the old customers that play a major role in acquiring new customers. ‘Virality’ is in online what ‘word-of-the-mouth’ publicity is in the physical world. Its free but it also take something out of ordinary. While there are many proven ways to get your app go viral with new ones discovered with each successful viral campaign, but if you study all the successful apps they have these 3 things in common
1. Value
All successful apps add value to a user’s life. It may solve a problem, simply entertain or do both. But offers something which is relevant, unique and valuable. Is your app offering any value to your users? Is you app positioned rightly so that the value is at its core?
2. Built-in virality
If you want people to talk about your app then you should enable sharing it with their friends and showing it. If A has downloaded a new game and he finds it interesting then he should be able to share this game via mail, chat, social media etc., with his friends. Also he needs to be encouraged to do so. So how about some incentives in form of coupons, virtual currency etc., for people who share your app?
3. Keep it fresh
The reason half of the users leave the app in the first 3 months is that they get bored of it. Google, Twitter, FaceBook know it and hence work on improving the experiences. So keep your app fresh by continually improving it. Monitor user behavior to identify opportunities for improvement.
And aggressively promote till your app gets the minimum threshold of users to initiate virality. Push it to reach a certain number of downloads by marketing it inside and outside the app stores and from there it will start attracting users on its own.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is not a buzzword anymore. It is gaining significant traction and is all set to become the dominant technology in the enterprise space. According to a report by BI Intelligence, it is estimated that by 2019, IoT will be double the size of the smartphone, PC, tablet, connected car, and the wearable market combined. It will result in $1.7 trillion in value added to the global economy in 2019.
Image Credit: BI Intelligence
So, what’s driving IoT growth in enterprises? Here are the 3 drivers that is pushing growth of enterprise IoT–
1. Helping enterprises build competitive advantage and boosting operational efficiency
Many organizations are looking for new ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors and to fend off threats from new entrants. The ability to use and capitalize on the data collected by IoT is helping firms build and sustain competitive advantage. Companies are using IoT to find new revenue streams and improve margins. For example, industrial equipment manufacturers are selling outcomes, like machine hours, rather than just products.
IoT is also helping companies increase their operational efficiency by enabling them to monitor assets in a real-time basis. For example, monitoring shipping containers for temperature changes that could affect the quality using battery-powered sensors and 4G LTE connectivity.
2. Better understanding of customer behavior resulting in improved customer experience
IoT is helping organizations improve the customer experience by providing organizations with data necessary to better understand customer behavior. Organizations can use data to understand where the customer is and what they are doing. This makes it possible to understand what the customer needs.
IoT is transforming the delivery of goods and services. For example, major retailers are leveraging telematics and asset tracking solutions to speed-up order delivery. And the same data can be used to offer customers the ability to see exactly where their delivery is via a smartphone app or a website. IoT is also enabling organisations to reach out to tap new markets.
3. Improving safety and reducing risks
IoT is enabling organizations to improve environmental standards, improve efficiency and cut waste. IoT can help employees working in hazardous areas by alerting them to hazards. Automobile and train companies are also fitting vehicles with IoT-enabled systems that can predict and help prevent accidents.
IoT is also enabling organisations to remotely monitor sensitive inventory, equipment, and plant & machinery. Connection motion sensors with locks and alarms can help detect unauthorised access and automatic activation of countermeasures.
It’s still early days for Internet of Things in enterprises. As the adoption of IoT grows more in enterprises, we will see businesses leveraging the technology in discovering new benefits for them and optimizing it.
To know about enterprise IoT in detail and how your business can benefit from it, download our latest eBook ‘Building a Connected Enterprise’ here.
Testing a wearable app has become a brand new challenge for test engineers. Wearable to app communication is important, and creating that connectivity/ association can be a primary cause for concern. The word wearable refers to the electronic system that is being incorporated into items such as clothing and accessories which can be worn or attached to the body. Wearables are integrated with sensors and are communicated to via an application installed on primary devices like smartphones or tablets. Wearable apps consist of both hardware and software components, and applications are incorporated into various wearable home appliances, tech and vehicles. Let’s look at some of the challenges that testers face while testing wearable apps.
Data Sync
It is a very important challenge in testing the wearable application. Test engineers need to be more focused on data sync and need to check if data from the tablet/smartphone is synced properly to the wearable apps. QA plays a crucial role in testing the data sync especially when the connection of the device through bluetooth is lost, device gets switched off due to low battery, when wearable apps and device get disconnected or reconnected to each other. Communication between the wearable and the app is very important, hence testers need to be more careful while testing.
When wearable apps get synced to each other, the data on the actions performed by the user in Apple Watch or in other devices needs to be synced properly without any technical issues.
Screen Size/UI
Testing a wearable application is different from testing mobile apps. Another challenging task for testers, therefore, is testing the resolution of the application on wearables like Apple watch. As the screen size of the Apple watch is very small, test engineers need to be more cautious on UI/design of the application. The user should find the look and feel of the application to be user-friendly and not clumsy. The application look and feel should be user-friendly and not be clumsy to the user.
Functional Testing
Wearable apps have come to the market with a bunch of sensors, and while testing the application with different kinds of sensors, the functionality should not be affected, but needs to remain the same as expected. QA testers have to come up with new and different scenarios for testing wearable applications since customers will use different kinds of wearable devices.
Battery Life
The other major challenge for testers as well as developers is the battery life of smartphones or wearables (by kaseman). Many different test scenarios come into place when the battery of the phone or the wearable device is OFF while testing the wearable-to-app. The data of any actions performed by the user when the battery is off in the primary device or the wearable has to be saved. Whenever the battery is ON, the data of the device and the wearable need to be restored.
Testing on Real Devices
Testing the application on a real wearable device is quite essential. Very few emulators are available in the market to test the wearable applications, and it is also possible that they may not provide accurate test results. Hence, testing the application on a real device is a challenge for testers.
Jyothirmai works as a Senior QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS. She has 4+ years of experience in Mobile, Web and Desktop applications, and expertise in testing different domains like Health Care, Social and Insurance.
Launching a mobile app? You are not alone. Rough estimates suggest that in Apple appstore and Google Play, close to a million apps are published every year. All vying for user attention. Needless to say, in an extremely crowded marketplace, mobile app user acquisition has become highly competitive.
Further, mobile app user engagement too has become a lot tougher. Data from Localytics suggests that 52% of the apps lose half of their peak users in 3 months. Here are 5 simple yet smart tips to help you make your app popular and make users hooked to it.
1. User Experience
Ensure that your app is free from all technical flaws and provides excellent first impression to users. Make customer on-boarding simpler and easier. Optimize the login and account creation process. Provide your users guides and FAQs within the app.
2. App Marketing
In the crowded marketplace, marketing your app to give it visibility is important. Make use of all customer acquisition channels mobile advertising, social media promotion, paid search campaigns, app store marketing, in-app promotion etc.
3. Personalize experiences
Track your user behavior leveraging advanced analytics tools. Deliver targeted and customized content to your mobile app users based on their preference, context etc.
4. Make loyalty rewarding
Reward users who are continuously using your app. Motivate users who have not returned after using your app once or twice through attractive incentives. Make use of event-based triggered automation techniques to encourage further use.
5. Listen to your users
App success depends on user satisfaction. Listen to your audience using surveys, feedbacks, app store ratings, user behavior metrics etc., and accordingly optimize your app offerings. Continuously engage with your customers to understand their needs.
Among millions of apps released every year, only a few thousand succeed. Most fade away within weeks of launch. Optimize your mobile app user acquisition and promotion strategy to make your app a grand success.
Security concern tops the table among major challenges faced by enterprises in their mobility journey. Critical corporate data and consumer privacy is at risk, in the absence of a robust security mechanism. Consider these numbers from ‘2015 Security Report’ published by pure-play security vendor CheckPoint:
106 unknown malware hit an organization every hour: 48 times more than the 2.2 downloads per hour reported in 2013.
96 % of organizations studied used at least one high-risk application in 2014, a 10 point increase from the previous year.
81% of the organizations analyzed suffered a data loss incident, up 41% from 2013.
So mobility in enterprises is at more risk compared to last year. And therefore need for a secure mobile environment is of critical importance for organizations.
Types of enterprise mobile security threats & measures-
Threat types
Challenge
Measures
Devices
Portability of devices makes it vulnerable for theft, loss etc.
Device locking, wiping of data, memory card security etc.
Data & Information
Emails, financial data, customer data etc., can be misused by unauthorized access.
User authentication, data encryption, log monitoring and device protection
Network
Breach of enterprise network, unauthorized Bluetooth access
Robust network security, credentials based access
Disallowed apps
Accessing apps from non-trusted sources can lead to Trojans and malwares etc., in the network.
Monitoring app usage, splitting profiles for personal and corporate usage, allowing approved app usage
Malicious software
Attacks from sophisticated malware, viruses and Trojan horses
Security software, spam protection software.
Enterprises adopting mobility need to look beyond MDM and consider mobile security comprehensively encompassing devices, apps, data, network etc.
How will your enterprise handle disallowed devices, non-compliant apps and unauthorized user access?
How will your organization handle critical corporate data from falling-off into wrong hands due to loss or theft of devices and breaches in security?
How will you monitor and manage user behavior?
How will you lock and wipe data from devices lost or stolen?
What policy will you adopt for employee owned device?
How will you ensure that you have a centralized control and capability to track each device, record their behavior and when required take preventive mechanism?
Answers to above questions will help enterprise build the right mobile security strategy and framework to safeguard their data and gain more from their mobile investments.
The Global Mobile Banking Report2015 by KPMG predicts that the number of mobile banking users worldwide will double to 1.8 billion over the next four years, accounting for over 25% of the world’s population.
The banking landscape has changed over the years. Massive shift in consumer behavior and expectations, regulatory challenges and emergence of new technologies present new challenges to banks. In the new banking environment, banks are adopting ‘Mobile First’ approach to serve customers better and stay competitive.
The changing landscape Mobile Phone and Tablet Usage are soaring. Access to mobile networks is now available to 90% of the world population and 80% of the population living in rural areas.
Mobile banking, which started off with banks offering services like balance inquiries, checkbook requests, etc., via SMS and later with the browser through WAP and GPRS, has, over the years, widened its scope to include a huge part of banking operations, both internally and externally. Today, banks are adopting a mobile first strategy and investing heavily into mobile and other related digital technologies like cloud, social, wearables and Internet of Things. As mobility takes center stage in the technical infrastructure of banks, business processes are being reengineered and new models are being explored. Mobile payment processing, location-based services, add on devices, etc., has led to a greater extension of mobile solutions enabling banks to provide the seamless banking experience to their customers.
Today, banks not only use mobile devices and applications as a channel to offer services to customers but also as a tool to connect within the organization, empower their workforce and control its various processes and assets. So, we not only see basic banking operations performed through mobile devices and applications, but we also see increased use of mobility solutions within the organizations for complex operations like asset management services, loan approval processes and database management.
The customer’s attitude towards mobile banking has also undergone a sea change. Far from being wary of doing financial transactions on mobile, as was the case in the early days, people, owing to ubiquity and convenience today, have nicely warmed up to the concept of banking on their devices and are pretty comfortable paying utility bills and transferring funds on the go.
The drivers
Several factors are at play behind the growth of mBanking or mobile banking–Smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous. Consumers are welcoming banking services on their devices. Internet connectivity has widened its spread and is getting faster. Mobile apps are more powerful and secure enough to integrate with banking processes and operations. While powerful game changing drivers like faster ROI, higher productivity and a direct and personal communication channel with the customer base have attracted banks to embrace mobility, customers are excited about quick anywhere anytime services.
One of the significant benefit that has made banks embrace mobile technology is cost efficiency. The above graphic illustrates how mobile can bring significant cost efficiency in transactions.
Mercatus LLC Survey on mobile banking discovered some interesting results, validating how mobilizing operations and services can boost customer acquisition, brand perception and sales. The report reveals that–
Banks offering mobile financial services can increase new customer acquisition by as much as 60%.
Mobile financial service capabilities have more impact on a consumer’s decision to select a bank than availability of online banking, access to ATMs or nearby branches.
Banks offering mobile financial services should anticipate as much as a 60% increase in sales.
Customer acquisition promotional offers including mobile financial services outperformed those that did not include mobile financial services by nearly 30%.
It can decrease the cost of acquiring a new customer by as much as 20%.
The Possibilities
Retail banks are mostly using mobile in following ways
Payments: Banks are rapidly leveraging mobility solutions to enable customers to use their mobile devices to make payments at stores. Similarly, efforts are ongoing to facilitate person-to-person payments, allowing money to be transferred from one person to another like PayPal.
Branch less Services: What about the ability to deposit documents like checks, pay order, etc., by simply scanning the check and sending the image to the bank rather than depositing the physical form in the bank?
Customer Engagement: Mobile apps can help banks engage with customers, offer real-time advice/suggestions for up-sell/cross-sell based on the past history and make banking fun via gamification, contests etc.
Location based Services: Many banks have already embraced the location-based capabilities of mobility solutions to locate ATM’s, bank branches, etc.
Within the organizations, powerful enterprise solutions have facilitated a spectrum of services on mobile devices. Bank employees today not only use mobile devices to connect and interact within the organization through email, messenger etc., but also use it to access various company resources like Management Information Systems, Transaction Management and Sales Force Automation, etc. Mobility solutions for banking are making processes leaner and quicker not only with their own might but also by complementing other technologies.
Today, mobility for banking is not only a viable medium but also an enabler that can act as a force multiplier for other channels. Mobile applications are quickly replacing bank mobile websites by providing a better experience and secure transactions. With wearables like Google Glass and Smart Watches gaining traction among customers; some banks have started experimenting by proving banking services on wearables. Some banks have also introduced mechanisms that enable interaction between the ATM and the mobile devices of the customer. Armed with a smartphone or tablet, a user can connect his device wirelessly to the ATM, authenticate and make a withdrawal or transfer fund s through it without a debit or credit card.
The challenges
The ride, however, is not so smooth. There are multiple challenges facing the banks as they move to leverage mobility solutions. The biggest impediment is banks struggling to creating a comprehensive mobile strategy resulting in mobile implementation in silos. There is a massive proliferation of devices differing in form, functionalities and features. The challenge will be to come up with one solution that fits all and offers seamless experience across.
While the world may be stepping into 4G, bandwidth latency and coverage is still an area of concern if mBanking is to adhere to its promise of anywhere, anytime banking. The security of banking transaction over the air is another complicated challenge which calls for continuous intervention as the technology evolves. Decision makers should also keep an eye on the scalability and reliability of their mobile infrastructure as the usage grows and mobile devices become the major channel instead of just yet-another-channel of contact between customers and the branch.
The trends point towards a future where banking will be real-time,anytime with mobile being the key enabler. New technologies like Big Data, Internet of Things, Cloud etc., will further build on the mobile and bring a paradigm shift in banking. Tapping into the opportunities available will help banking institutions derive enduring value.
Our Recommendations
Embrace mobility: Mobile banking is here to stay. It offers tremendous value to both banks and customers. The opportunities are endless. Devise clear strategy: A comprehensive strategy encompassing your people, processes and services will help you better leverage mobile and get higher RoI.
Focus on consumer experience: Create an omni-channel, user-friendly and secure mobile banking environment.
Pick the right platform: Diversity in screen sizes, functionalities and operating system necessitates banks to adopt a multi-platform approach.
Turn data into Insights: Monitor user behavior leveraging advanced analytics tools. Customer intelligence will be the guide for future.
Lay down the groundwork for next generation of m-banking: Emerging technologies like IoT, Wearables etc., promises more opportunities. Be ready to seize them.
The beginning
The world of convenience banking on mobile phones and tablets is very engaging. A powerful value proposition! However, it is just the beginning. The swift pace of change in mobile technology is opening new opportunities, driving innovation and prompting banks around the world to ask “What else?” This is a big shift from, “Why go mobile?” a few years back. The evolution has led many banks to not only see mobility as an enabler towards greater customer access to their services, but also as a game changer in the disruptive world.
With the increase in the number of smartphones available in the market, people started trusting technology and are using mobile devices to perform different tasks in their day-to-day life which ultimately led to a leap in the development of mobile apps. Being user-friendly, smartphones and apps are being handled even by children below ten. However, if an app is excellent but isn’t user-friendly, then it will not reach the target audience/users. So, this is one area where mobile developers and testers need to concentrate.
Mobile app testing is not simple as there are multiple parameters that need to be considered and tested. As we know, testing is something where we need to do the things repeatedly which requires a lot of time and patience. This is when testers tend to make mistakes.
Making mistakes is a normal human tendency so it’s not uncommon for people to make mistakes in life – personal or professional. While it’s a fact that it’s the tester who always finds mistakes in the tasks performed by others, there’s also a possibility that even testers make mistakes during testing. A mistake will be negotiated when it is small but some mistakes are more accountable, and one should take care to avoid them.
Let’s now analyze some mistakes that need to be avoided, and how to avoid them.
Proceeding to test the project without an in-depth knowledge of business logic and functional requirements
A mobile app will be developed in a very short time; so, sometimes the tester will test the app without knowing the complete requirements of the app. This should be avoided because a tester will not cover all user flows in the application if s/he doesn’t have an in-depth knowledge.
1. Inadequate language skills in reporting bugs
Besides being a fast-growing trend, developing mobile apps is new to everyone involved. Getting the terminology right is, therefore, a difficult thing. This is where a tester will make mistakes. This should be avoided because without a proper description of the issue, a developer will not be able to fix it.
2. Prioritizing UI over functional aspects
As the adage goes, the first impression is the best impression. All said and done, people will always prioritize looks over other things – this is true in the case of a mobile app as well. Even a tester gives more priority to the UI and takes more time in testing only UI while giving less time to functional aspects. This mistake should be avoided at any cost and same priority should be given to both functionality and UI.
3. Not capturing crash logs which makes identifying the bug difficult
If a simple crash occurs after the app is released into the market, it irritates the user a lot and the negative impact it creates may prove to be disastrous (by kaseman). In fact, it makes users uninstall the app at times. So, while testing, if the tester does not capture the crash logs, that makes it difficult to fix the issue later on.
4. Flaws in reporting formats
For a tester, finding bugs is as important as sending reports. However, due to the time constraints, testers tend to commit mistakes in sending the reports.
5. Coverage of testing on different OS versions
Due to lack of time on hand, testers end up covering testing on fewer devices. This should be avoided because when an application is designed for multiple devices, testing in fewer devices will not be enough. As every device will have a different configuration, the issues that crop up will also be specific to that device. So, before releasing any app into appstore/play store, testing should be covered in all supported devices.
6. Conclusion
Delivering a quality product at the end of the day is important to testers. So it’s important that testers take care to avoid mistakes at every stage of testing because once the app is made available on App Store/Play Store, even the smallest of mistakes can have a huge negative impact.
Preethi works as a Software QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS and has experience in Mobile and Web Application testing in different domains like Social, Gaming and Healthcare.
The adoption of cloud computing in businesses has grown manifold in the last few years. For some organizations, cloud has become the go-to model to become more cost-efficient, productive and innovative. Over the years, cloud computing in enterprises has undergone many changes. Here are 11 stats you need to know about enterprise cloud computing
1. Size of market
Enterprise cloud subscription revenues predicted to reach by 2018.
Source : Appsrunthecloud
2. Cloud is rapidly growing
CAGR growth in spending on cloud computing infrastructure and platforms from 2013 through 2018.
Source : Goldman Sachs
3. Cloud taking center stage in enterprise IT
IT decision makers are planning to increase spending on cloud computing in 2015.
Source : Computer World
4. Enterprises are embracing cloud computing
Enterprises will have at least half of their infrastructure on cloud-based platforms by 2018.
Source : Digital Business
5. IaaS is popular
Organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service.
Source : Right Scale
6. Hybrid cloud is popular as a strategy
Enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014.
Source : Right Scale
7. Public cloud preferred over private
Organizations are using public cloud while 63 percent are using private cloud.
Source : Right Scale
8. Still there is enough space for growth
Enterprises run less than a fifth of their application portfolio in the cloud.
Source : Right Scale
9. Cost-efficiency is the major driver for enterprise cloud
Businesses surveyed are using cloud to drive cost efficiencies while 42% are using to better enable mobile work force.
Source : KPMG
10. Cloud boosting business performance
Business surveyed experienced improved business performance as a result of cloud implementation while 70% experienced cost reduction.
Source : KPMG
11. Data and privacy are major challenges
Enterprises find Data loss and privacy risks as most challenging areas when adopting cloud while for 50% intellectual property theft is the major challenge.
Source : KPMG
As Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, puts it “It (cloud computing) has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack”. With so many benefits to offer, cloud computing in enterprise will continue to grow.
Testers are used to performing routine tasks on a daily basis – be it setting up or configuring or refreshing test environments. These tasks can be quite frustrating as they are time consuming – especially when the number of testing combinations grow in mobile environments where new devices are introduced every year which need to be tested.
But, is it possible to increase the productivity while avoiding these frustrations?
Yes, it is very much possible when cloud comes into the picture with its unlimited computing power available on demand. Virtualization enables us to have multiple pre-configured test setups ready, and allows us to spend less time configuring and more time performing testing which would make testers more productive. The cloud gives us the added benefit of mobility, as all resources are centralized and easily accessible through the Internet, which means that teams from across the globe can collaborate with ease.
So, what are some of the advantages of cloud-based testing? Let’s look at the top five benefits
1. Anywhere, Anytime Access
Easy access through the Internet allows team members to work from anywhere, anytime. It’s a known fact that Cloud Testing is perfect for Agile. Agile development is a concept which enables cross-functional teams to get involved at every stage of the development process and also take care of every step in testing. Cloud testing empowers stakeholders with access to all tools available in the company regardless of where they are located or what they are working on at the moment.
2. Increase in Productivity
If frustrations and time spent on configuring can be minimized, it helps the team in spending more time on actual testing, thus increasing the productivity. There are over 20,000 device models in the market with 27 different varieties of operating systems. At a minimum, we can achieve a test coverage of over 600,000 scenarios. Nonstop cloud testing gives you the luxury of expanding the amount of scenarios you can cover in the same time period.
3. Cost Reduction
No capital expenditure and much faster deployment times means you can have minimal project start-up cost and infrastructure cost. To perform testing, to load the tool and to provide a substantial hardware/ infrastructure platform in-house, you can straightaway opt for the cloud service provider without investing in tool licenses (by aaron). You have an option of choosing a tool of your choice depending on the product to be tested. The service provider will ensure that the latest version of the tool is provided. So, instead of paying a very high amount to buy a tool, keeping track of updating it with latest patches, getting bothered about the new release, and then depending on it for all your product range, you just need to ‘pay as you use’.
4. Perfect for the Mobile Economy
Twenty percent of all online commerce is on mobile, and ten percent of this is online. Since the concepts of mobile commerce and online commerce didn’t exist 15 years ago, the growth of these markets is eye-popping. The present generation has created an entirely new way of doing business and it is changing everything. The one and only method that puts an application through such a rigorous process, to make it ready for the unexpected surprises that will come in traffic and usage, is cloud testing.
5. Continuous Integration
The development team is also benefited because continuous testing leads to continuous integration. Adding a piece of a code each time to a mobile application which is to be tested is very complicated, as it has to be redeployed. Cloud testing ensures there is always a tester closeby. It means that you can test under larger scenarios right away. New builds can become new versions faster than ever before, benefiting not only the testing team but also the entire development team as well. And the mobile application tester has a wider variety of devices to choose from. Any tester can choose any device, rather than only the physical devices he can access to. A tester can book devices in advance, as he knows exactly when he wants to test on which device. Making all devices available to all testers eliminates the need to buy more than one type of device for multiple teams, and saves a lot of money.
Shravani Keerthi works as Senior QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS, and has 4+ years of experience in Mobile and Web Applications in testing varied domains like Social, Gaming, Logistics and Insurance.
In this era of digitization and smartphone revolution, it would be difficult to find someone who hasn’t played or heard of mobile games! Typically the easiest to play and less time consuming, mobile games enthuse all smartphone users alike. However, most game developers target children and young adults as they’re more likely to try new games than their adult counterparts.
Mobile games can be played on portable devices like tablets or music players and smartphones as they require less memory and processing speed compared to other console/PC games. Many of today’s mobile games are based on open source or commercial game engines like Play Canvas, Unreal, Cocos2D, Construct and Unity3D, most of which provide great tools and frameworks to get your game built quickly, with graphical features. Even with their limited resources, good mobile games make more revenue in the market compared to PC/console games, and can even serve as an excellent means of advertising.
All mobile games have one goal in common – to keep end users entertained, engaged and thus increase repeated visits and rate of retention. Entertaining end user is more complex than one can imagine, especially when we look at the domain in which most mobile applications are built. Herein lies the significant difference in testing games and applications.
So which aspects of gaming make testing a challenge?
Multi player – Tested in two different approaches – host and client, where data is received from the server that creates numerous test cases to cover all the scenarios.
Network – Testing a game under various networks depending on the speed/ types can impact the performance as the game is played with backend server.
Fun – Creating a game with fun as an integral part is a daunting task. A game with a bad review will not attract users to download the next version. As every user has his/her own definition of fun, testing the fun aspect is imperative.
AI – Unlike mobile applications, games have AI implemented in them. Complex games have complex AI mechanisms, and it takes more time and patience to test the accuracy of the AI.
Realism – Domain expertise plays an important role as users can easily spot the unrealistic actions.
The what-s and why-s of different testing approaches
Installation testing – To verify whether the game is installed or uninstalled without interruptions.
Performance Testing – To verify the behavior and performance of the game under particular conditions like low battery, bad network coverage and low memory.
Certification Testing – To verify the guidelines set by the mobile platform.
Usability testing – To verify if the game is user friendly.
Interrupt Testing – To verify the behavior of the game when user gets a call, message, notifications, alert messages, etc.
Memory Testing – To verify whether the device lags due to lack of memory which may affect the performance of the game play.
Functional Testing – To check whether each feature is working as per the design, and the game play meets the requirements.
While playing mobile games is fun and easy, testing these games before launching to ensure excellent quality and seamless game play is complex involving many steps and procedures. The goal of every game developer and tester is to provide users with a flawless product that helps them not only enjoy gaming but also keep coming back to the brand for more versions or newer games. If the gaming app companies succeed in giving what users want, without compromising on the quality, they’ve surely gained a loyal user for life!
Sindusha Rudraraju works as a QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS and has over 2 years of experience in desktop, web and mobile applications. She is ISTQB certified and has experience in testing business applications and games.
The adoption of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices has expanded the growth of mobile applications in recent years. As mobile devices have become the primary medium of interaction for consumers as well as businesses worldwide, mobile applications have started driving these interactions. Nowadays, mobile apps put the business operations in the hands of consumers who are literally running businesses.
However, the big question is: “What makes a mobile app compelling enough to influence consumer behaviors and make them engage with your brand or product?” Of course, a strong mobile app development strategy is the foundation of any successful mobile app, but one key component in app development is testing which ensures your mobile app meets customer expectations and business goals.
Testing plays a critical part in the application’s success or failure. Mobile application testing is important to ensure that the app meets quality standards. Mobile apps should pass the quality test before it is released to Play Store / App store, and reaches end users.
So, how do you optimize your mobile testing for better success?
The main challenge in testing mobile applications is testing in a variety of devices, platforms, screen resolutions, memory sizes and connectivity options to ensure that the app is supported in multiple platforms and devices. Given below some things that one needs to follow to achieve success:
OS Version: The mobile app should be tested on all major stable OS versions.
Screen Resolution: Test the mobile application in different screen resolutions because the user experience varies on different screen sizes and screen resolutions.
Form Factor: The mobile application may act differently on smartphones and tablets. Therefore, if the app is compatible with both phones and tablets, then it should be tested in both form factors.
Mobile testing should cover different platforms like iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows, and multiple versions of Operating System for each device when the application is mentioned as being compatible with all. Testers need to also test the app in several permutations and combinations, every time, to ensure zero defects.
A majority of the mobile application’s functionalities depend on network connectivity. So, testing the mobile apps in real network environment is essential to get the real picture and assess the behaviour of the app in real mobile networks. Therefore, testing should be covered in different types of network conditions like WiFi, 2G, 3G, 4G and also without network, besides testing it in different bandwidths.
A few more points to remember
While testing the mobile app, testers should also think about the different battery backup states like low charge, medium charge, high charge and perform tests accordingly.
Performing Beta testing on your mobile app is one of the effective methods of mobile app testing which gives you access to real world testers, devices and actual networks.
You need to ensure that application works fine when it is upgraded to the next version or when bugs are fixed. Tester should be responsible to perform upgrade testing for every release of the app.
Complete functionality & UI of the application should also be tested in different devices with different versions to ensure that the application meets customer expectations.
Automation testing can be started once manual testing is performed, and it is preferred when the application is growing and when there are a large number of test cases related to functionality. Automation testing saves you time and is most useful to perform regression testing – especially when any new features are added and those changes are not reflected upon old features.
Performance testing can be done when you want to test the mobile application by giving excess load and by testing a huge number of users performing the same action at the same time.
Conclusion
A well planned mobile app testing strategy will ensure quality and performance of mobile application especially when testers select correct target devices, right mix of emulators, physical devices and testing methodologies.
(Divya Priya works as a Software QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS. She is an ISTQB certified tester and has over 2 years experience in testing mobile & web applications for different domains like Education, Social, Gaming, Travel, Finance and Hardware Integration.)
If you’ve users who need to set up alarms for regular reminders about taking medicines, or customers who constantly worry about the way their insurance claims are handled by your agents, then jumping on the bandwagon of mobile solutions will ensure that you partake of the gains — financial and otherwise — a la top Insurance companies like United, Geico and MetLife.
Why mobile solutions?
In these times of uncertainties in the global economy, players in the insurance industry are bound to face many risks. In order to assuage the fears of customers and have an edge over competitors, it has become imperative for insurance providers to offer a new range of products with their customers’ needs in mind. Mobile solutions (read creating mobile apps), therefore, have become a natural choice for insurers to improve the ROI and empower them to gain their customers’ trust.
How do mobile apps help?
Mobile solutions help insurance companies in a lot of ways – especially when it comes to handling claims. They certainly help increase efficiency, customer satisfaction, user engagement and loyalty, besides reducing formalities of paperwork to a large extent. According to a report put together by Forrester, by 2016 there will be 1 billion smartphone users globally which shows the tremendous potential created for mobile solution providers to leverage this growing trend.
We’ve put together a five-point strategy to help you understand how mobile apps can work to the advantage of insurers.
1. Have an edge over competitors
If you can deliver claims-related stuff right to the user’s smartphone, you have gained an edge over competitors by winning a loyal customer. Involving employees in customer-engagement activities and improving the productivity of insurance agents will increase your chances at being successful. The other tactics that you can employ include consistent app experience for users, reduced cost per transaction which can be achieved by providing efficient service(s), and improvement in user base and loyalty, among others.
2. Make claims processes simple
An insurance app will be the most handy tool when it comes to Claims. It is believed that a mobile app can improve the efficiency of handling insurance claims by 25%-30%. While it makes consumers’ lives easier by letting them make claims using their smartphones, it also eases the workload on employees, by eliminating a few tasks, and helps them use their time productively in user acquisition and engagement (by aaron). The ability of a smartphone user to take pictures at the scene of the accident helps make a strong impact on the insurer.
3. Deliver what customers want
Although not all apps created in the insurance industry are for customers alone, it’s good to have more consumer-oriented apps in place. In a survey conducted by PwC, over 75% of the participants in the age group of 25 to 44 use health and wellness apps regularly, understand the benefits of an app in comparison to traditional methods of service and, hence, expect apps to provide “Alerts and Reminders”, “Access to your personal health record”, “Access to specific disease info/products”, “Provider/specialist search”, and “Disease Management apps”.
A targeted mobile strategy, especially in the realm of health insurance, is the need of the hour, writes PwC in its report
“Smartly designed mobile applications can provide a competitive edge, especially for younger consumers. But to see the biggest return on investment, insurers should think about conducting targeted market analysis, assessing the value of popular/high-use apps for activities such as exercise tracking and food intake, and building on mobile applications that have already proven successful with other audiences.”
4. Improve customer engagement
How can you engage customers in better ways? As a service provider, you can ensure that consumers can report an accident, a theft or a loss; take, upload and submit photos from the scene of an accident; do claims; make an inventory of all valuables in your home for insurance purpose; or seek information on getting your vehicles repaired. Policyholders sure have a field day now with many top insurance providers vying with each other to woo customers with their mobile solutions. Having realized that mobile apps can make claims process easier for customers, the companies are now trying to attract more users even while retaining the existing ones by providing an excellent customer experience.
5. Increase revenue opportunities
Mobile apps are certainly cost-effective and, therefore, provide the right incentive to companies to leverage the mobile space. Insurance providers are in a better position today in terms of gaining customers’ trust through multiple means of customer engagement thereby ensuring satisfaction. From getting the requisite information on policies available, and comparing various options and providers available, to browsing the company’s website to understand the different kinds of insurance policies before making a choice, from buying policies and upgrading the existing ones to reaching agents and paying bills using a smartphone, now the users have umpteen reasons to celebrate. This customer-centric focus is what improves the chances of revenue increase for companies.
To sum up, there are a bunch of things that mobile apps could do to benefit both the providers and their customers: tracking insurance claims, enrolling for a particular plan or purchasing it online, get an in-depth understanding of the company’s products, learn ways to improve their health via healthcare and wellness apps (some of which are created by insurance companies) are just a few in the list.
“Health is Wealth” – this line sounds more meaningful nowadays than it did in the past as consumers are now worried about the food they eat, activities they do and the effect of these on their health. This consciousness of well-being that makes consumers avoid unhealthy habits that have a negative impact on the system has influenced even software development, and this phenomenon is called “Lean Software Development”.
Lean Software Development is the advanced part of the Agile Process, in which every part of the process is addressed more efficiently by focusing on the throughput while reducing the risk. This is put in practice by identifying the waste and delays in the process.
As these changes are necessary for the effective development of software, how to adopt the methodologies and strategies to achieve quality is a major challenge faced by the testers.
Testing in Lean Software Development yields benefits such as a good understanding of the flow that is directly proportional to the throughput. It helps in identifying the gaps that increase the time spent on estimating and planning test products, thereby achieving Quality in the shortest time possible to deliver value to the customer.
Lean is Mean
The process of testing in Lean Development model requires a committed QA team to ensure continuous improvement in order to understand the process within the context of business needs and to plan the testing process accordingly. The prime focus should be on adding value while improving the ability to achieve goals in the limited amount of time.
Aggressive testing strategy and futuristic planning (like taking notes from User Stories and Release Planning meeting) will help the testing team to zero in on requirements which, in turn, help in formulating test cases, scenarios and other testing artifacts.
Constant analysis is done on the factors that cause the time delay and hindrances to the progress of the sprint. Thus, noted points are added to the team retrospective and are discussed during the Retrospective Meeting.
Lean Development design is effective because every aspect of the process is designed in a way that the tasks carried out resemble a flow of events. This flow is the key to achieve Quality.
Test Flow in Lean Model
The testing process is redesigned in the lean development model wherein the bottlenecks that halt the progress are identified and eliminated. To achieve this, each task is broken down at the resource level. This process helps the cycle in two ways: identifies the exact number of tasks that can be carried out by the app testing team and injects a sense of ownership and responsibility to each member of the team.
Hence, each individual in the testing team is fully aware of his responsibilities and tasks and will be clear in contacting the concerned developer for carrying out the task given to him. This eliminates the wastage of overburden on the team which leads to delay in the delivery of a quality product.
Automating the testing process is an effective way to improve the time utilization for testing and thus plays a prominent role in the Lean environment. Automating the process also helps in achieving quality in a reduced time. Identifying the areas where automation is required is the challenge the team needs to address for its effective implementation. Having a thorough knowledge on the requirements helps in deciding this.
Regression testing in Lean environment plays a vital role in deciding the quality of the product while keeping time constraints in check. As a tester, the challenge is to keep the time short without compromising product quality.
For this the process of prioritizing the testing aspects during the regression is crucial. One needs to identify the areas which might be affected the most and which are affected the minimum. This helps in framing the time stamps for the regression process.
“Shrinking the Testing Duration without any compromise in Quality” is the defining line that describes the testing in Lean Software Development mode.
Bhargava Yellamraju works as Senior QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS. He has 5 years of experience in Mobile, Web Application and Security Testing and has built significant expertise in various domains like Health Care, Finance, Banking and Procurement.
Technology advancements, especially web, mobile and then social media, has changed the buying process. Today’s customer engages with your sales rep at a much later stage. Before he engages with you, he already knows a lot about your company, product/service and may be had a chance to talk to a few of your customers on social media. In the current environment, your salesperson has to be more knowledgeable, swift in action and be able to take the customer to the final sale.
Mobile Sales Enablement Tools can step up your sales team for the changed sales process and arm him with the necessary tools and information to win deals.
Customers are better informed today. They seek solutions and financial justifications to buy a product or a service, and you only have a few minutes to catch his attention. Instantly attract customer’s interest with the right storytelling and highly customized digital assets like 3D videos, CAD drawings, animations, online assessment tools, graphics, and ROI calculators, etc. Make your presentations notable by giving them the feel of your products and services and show them its benefits. Update the content on-the-fly to make it fresh, relevant and customized to your call requirements.
2. Sales Quota Attainment
Identify and capture best practices of your ‘star performers’ and share them with other team members. Monitor sales methodology practices and asset utilization to optimize your sales approach. Automate your sales tasks like follow-up, customer feedback, etc., so that each of your reps follows the same procedure. Get insights from analytics to discover buyer preferences, pain points and response-time, etc., to prepare your team for objection handling in different scenarios through collaboration and team exercises.
3. New Customer Acquisition is Tough Expensive
New customer acquisition is a long and expensive process. It is far cheaper to cross sell/up-sell to an existing client. However, most sales reps struggle to cross-sell/up-sell because of lack of skills and knowledge to execute cross-selling strategies. Help your sales force aggressively cross-sell/ up-sell through fine customer segmentation, need-based product suggestions and personalized recommendations.
As per a survey, 76% of reps from companies that use mobile sales tools attained their sales quotas, while just 53% of reps from companies without a sales mobility strategy did so. A mobile sales enablement can go a long way in driving the sales effectiveness of your team.
With a phenomenal rise in the usage of smartphones and tablets, we’ve reached an era where mobile devices have become an integral and inseparable part of our life. As per the latest statistics, nearly 80% of world’s adult population own a smartphone – which gives ample scope to businesses to create extremely useful lifehacks via mobile applications. And with that comes into picture the need for proper mobile application testing process to ensure that the app’s quality and performance are flawless. To achieve this, it’s imperative that testers have a good mobile testing strategy in place.
So, what’s a mobile testing strategy? It’s a description of the plan of action to be followed in the testing cycle to let PMs, app developers and testers know of certain key processes involved in the testing part of the app development. App testing happens at two levels
Native Apps testing
This has become very significant no, as testers need to verify whether native apps can be easily downloaded on to the phone from the Playstore or AppStore, and executed without difficulty. The QA also has to determine how the app is interacting with the backend support. Native apps testing also becomes important when updates to the app need to be pushed, or when major changes are made to the app or the OS on the device(s). Therefore, it is essential that the app be tested on multiple physical devices and the older generations of devices to ensure backward compatibility.
Web apps testing
While dealing with web apps that have to be deployed on to mobile devices, testers need to understand that web apps are viewed by users across the world – so they need to think about the scalability factor at the global level rather than at the local level.
Getting the right app testing strategy in place depends on the complexity of your app, your industry and also on which kind of app is being developed – native, hybrid or web. A tester needs to put in a lot of thought and effort in creating a successful mobile application testing strategy. However, creating a test strategy isn’t very easy as, at times, testing becomes difficult due to the following factors
Device Selection
Selection of different devices is the most crucial part to start testing because there are tens of thousands of devices in use by millions of consumers worldwide to open mobile apps. So, the device selected should make the experience perfect for different customers who use your mobile application.
While choosing any device model there are different options that need to be considered.
OS Version: The mobile apps need to be tested on different OS platforms to ensure consistency.
Screen Resolution: Portrait & landscape are the different screen resolutions that need to be considered while testing any application.
Memory Size: It plays a key role in understanding how the usage is for that particular app.
Connectivity Options: Bluetooth & WiFi are two main connectivity options to be considered and tested.
Emulators
An emulator is a software that can emulate the behavior of one or more mobile devices. A Quality Analyst can use emulators to test that particular app in different devices with different versions. Besides being highly efficient, emulators tend to be cost-effective as well. Emulators such as Jennymotion and Bluestack are good for testing the app’s basic functionality, especially in an agile environment or when features are under development. Emulators also help in effective testing of the app in all possible scenarios. Beta testing an app – either on emulators or on real devices can help testers understand how users use the app and how the app behaves on different mobile devices
Automation vs Manual
Automation tools are good to test any application in emulators to avoid manual work, and reduce time and cost. The tools available in the market such as SeeTest, QTP, Selenium and TestNG will help in covering multiple categories of tests using different scripting languages. However, it is advisable to use device OS-specific tools to carry out the testing process across platforms while development is still in process. Automation can be performed in the following scenarios
When a new OS version is released, the application compatibility should be verified.
When an application is updated, the compatibility factor needs to be checked.
Cloud Testing
Cloud computing allows users to provide a web-based testing environment where apps can be deployed and tested. So, cloud testing can be very effective in testing mobile apps. Complex apps can be tested perfectly as cloud testing environment provides real-time testing results which means defects can be analyzed while testing is in progress.
Conclusion
In mobile application testing, selection of devices & emulators before creating the application testing strategy is considered as perfect to achieve good results for the apps we tested. All these testing strategies and practices can help all those involved in the app development to overcome obstacles of mobile application testing, while making it easy to test mobile apps in all possible scenarios and strategies.
Chevulapelli Nikhil works as QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS and experienced in Mobile and Web Application Testing. His expertise in testing extends to different domains like Education, Hardware Integration, Finance & Healthcare.
The concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate users to achieve their goals.
In other words, Gamification is the use of game mechanics in a non-game context to engage users or solve problems.
Game Mechanics is a combination of Design, Rules and Tools intended to produce a Game play.
Game play is a way in which players interact with a Game.
Good Game play = Good Game = Engagement.
There are different kinds of games and over the years they became more complex, more interactive and more real. All of them have something in common, A special feature that drives us to spend more time playing making us feel like we’re part of the game. This is called Gamification.
A guy steps out of the elevator with a laptop bag and smart formals, swipes his card and enters a floor where only hi-tech systems are visible with lots of “heads” behind them. He walks to a system, logs in and starts hitting the keys on the keyboard. He does this for 8 hours (of course with all tea-biscuit-smoke breaks) and leaves for the day.
Before going any further, read the above sentence continuously for 10 times. I bet you won’t even be able to do it more than 3 times. Why? Your interest is lost. When an adult can’t even read four lines 10 times, how can we expect a kid of 10 years to do the same problem or write the same spelling again and again?
Now let’s start a small game. Imagine there is a crossword table in front of you on a screen. Start filling it. Once you’re done, a sentence will be displayed saying, ‘He was going at the speed of light and suddenly there was a loud bang’. Immediately, one more crossword table comes and throws an alert saying if you want to continue the story complete the crossword puzzle-2. To know what was the reason behind the bang, you will definitely try to solve the puzzle. After solving it comes the second line. By using such a sequence can’t we make kids learn “Algebra” or “Trigonometry”? This process is known as Gamification.
Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher in 1100s, once stated: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
In the present-day, using gamification we can state “Teach a man to fish, he will be fed for a lifetime. Teach a man an interesting way to fish, he will teach his heir too.”
While the potential of Gamification was realised by the intelligentsia in 2010, it was originally coined by Nick Pelling, a British computer programmer, in 2002.
The three pillars that Gamification is founded on are
1. Achievements
Achievements can be divided further into 3 factors
Progress: (Saying game is XX% complete, Motivate the user to progress further)
Badges: (Awarding users various types of Badges with respect to their progress and Game play)
High scores: (Displaying list of top users and displaying ‘zero’ before the score of the top user, This shows he is first but there is a lot more in the game to Achieve)
2. Competition
Competition can be further divided into 2 factors
Opponent: (Competition in Progress, Badges and High score)
Pride: (Leader boards, Displaying the list with respect to their positions in the game)
3. Fun
can be further divided into 2 factors
Easy: (Learning how to play or do things in the game should be easy)
Challenging: (Each level that the user passes should be challenging)
Areas where gamification can be implied include Physiotherapy, Wellness, Teaching, and Mechanical engineering, etc.
Over 95% of the youth plays video games. They live it, eat it, breathe it and will embrace gamification! Roughly 50% of the current Internet population plays social games.
So how can enterprises leverage gamification to increase revenue? According to me, by following/maintaining the Achievements, Competition and Fun elements, we can motivate the user(s) to play more and to make In-app Purchases.
Keep running stories like “Panchatantra” to make kids play the characters of the story. It gives enjoyment along with teaching moral values. We can increase productivity in offices by making employees play various puzzles, crosswords, etc.
Finally, I would like to say that Gamification is a great way to motivate users to do what you want them to do as it leverages our love for competition and reward, and uses it to encourage certain actions of the game.
Sairam Reddy works as Senior QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS and has over 3 years of experience in Mobile and Web Application Testing. His expertise in testing extends to different domains like Gaming, Health Care, Finance, Logistics and Travel.
From ‘we too need an app’ to ‘mobile as a strategy’ and ‘optimize mobility benefits’ enterprise mobility has travelled lot of distance. Today, mobile technology is at the heart of every business strategy fueling innovation, new efficiency gains and driving profits and customer satisfaction. A robust enterprise mobile strategy has become essential for enterprises. A comprehensive strategy offers numerous benefits such as:
Leveraging your existing enterprise technology like ERP, CRM, etc., and integrating the existing IT infrastructure to derive optimum results.
Improving adoption rates by focusing on user-centricity.
Enabling enterprise-wide adoption—connecting people, products and processes.
Maximizing productivity by speeding up responsiveness to employee needs and process requirements.
Making the organization more agile and responsive to customer needs and, thereby, boosting brand perception.
Maximizing results and returns from investments on mobility solutions by widening its scope and coverage.
Allowing businesses to create sustainable and clear policies for mobile governance.
But where to begin? Here are 9 simple steps to a winning mobile strategy
1. Define Business Goals
State the purpose of enabling mobility in your enterprise. What are your high-priority business goals? What type of apps will help you reach those goals? Look outside, as well as, within your organization, to identify opportunities for mobile.
2. Prepare Mobility Roadmap
Once you have a set of business goals that you wish to achieve through mobility, the next step is to find the desired mobile devices and apps that will help you reach those goals. For each mobile solution, you need to build a case summary that lists key benefits, functions, target users and target beneficiaries, etc. Prioritizing these mobile solutions based on your set business goals will evolve into a mobility roadmap.
3. Do user Workflow analysis
Any mobility solution will replace an existing workflow process. Therefore, it is important to do a comprehensive analysis of the existing process before it is mobilized. This will not only help you improve the existing process, but will also help you measure the impact of mobilizing the particular process and justify the costs.
4. Prepare a Technology Blueprint
Designing a technology blueprint has several facets, including deciding on a mobile platform, OS and device selection, device procurement strategy—company sponsored or BYOD— core mobility architecture, mobile app development strategy, security policy, app and device management strategy and wireless connectivity requirements, etc.
5. Set a Budget for Mobility
Many organizations make the mistake of combining a mobile budget with IT, which often results in confusion and, at times, pushes mobile investments down the priority ladder. You need to create a separate budget for your mobility efforts. What are you planning to invest today, in the next six months and in the next few years? Breaking up the budget for processes, departments, etc., will enable you to build an accurate ROI model.
6. Draw an Implementation Roadmap
The mobile implementation roadmap will allow you to assess the current state of mobility in the organization, to compare it against the business goals, and to set up the timeframe and work process to realize it. Since an implementation roadmap requires the identification of risks and dependencies and the entry and exit criteria of each mobile project to be well defined, it can help you to monitor and manage each project effectively to achieve the overall strategic goals on time.
7. Build a Center of Excellence
Mobility serves the requirements of various stakeholders in the system. To accomplish this, build a Center of Excellence with people from diverse domains and expertise to unify and centralize the many voices.. The COE will institutionalize best practices for mobility, bring consistency to the integration process, define policy and procedures for use and access of mobile solutions and look for opportunities for further adoption of mobile initiatives, etc.
8. Do Test Deployment
Pick a particular process or mobile opportunity to test your mobility plan. Implement it and see how it turns out. Analyze and document the deployment to understand success and failure points. Fine-tune your mobile strategy based on the test deployment experiences. Then, expand it to an organization-wide rollout.
9. Monitor, Evaluate and Review
It is important to constantly monitor and assess your strategy based on the feedback collected from various sources. Any deviation has to be immediately corrected. There should be a calendar for the review process for each element of your mobile environment.
The key to success in enterprise mobility is to adopt mobile devices and apps within a well-defined strategy, integrating processes, products and people to optimize the benefits. The goal should be to derive optimum value by creating a collaborative, secure and scalable mobile environment. In your journey to mobilize your enterprise, the keywords to remember are strategy, synergy, security and user-centricity.
As enterprises embrace mobile engulfing their entire ecosystem, it is creating a complex, non-standardized environment consisting of varied devices, several enabling technologies and numerous security issues. The result: poor control, under achievement and less than expected ROI. A mobile center of excellence (mCoE) can be a stable solution to bring order, establish policies and governance and help enterprises in leveraging mobile as a strategy.
1. Set strategy and goals
The first step in creating a mCoE is to set strategy and goals of your CoE. You can begin with answering following questions-
What will be the core function of your excellence centre? Will it play the role of a coordinator between various mobile projects or will it play the lead in driving your mobile strategy and programs?
What will be its span of control? Will your mCoE support the entire enterprise mobility architecture- internal and external apps, mobile platforms and other enabling technologies?
How will your CoE interact with your existing IT infrastructure- legacy system and software, IT workflows and processes etc?
2. Pick your team
The MCoE will sit between the technical and business part of your organization. The size of the team varies between a couple of executives at the kick start stage to as big as 100 executives under the leadership of a senior executive depending upon the size and requirements of a business. You would need people who are technical experts as well as people who understand the business and customer well. Bring together people with different skill sets and subject matter expertise to foster broader synergy.
3. Get Top management buy-in
A MCoE cannot be successful without the management endorsement and participation. In fact, it is better if it is led by someone from top management with lot of executionary and budgetary powers. Put MCoE as part of your organizational structure to help it gain visibility and authority across departments. Empower it with decision-making and execution responsibilities.
4. Spread the word
More so for a bigger organization with numerous business units spread across geographies. The mCoE, in future, would need to collaborate with other business units to guide and fulfill their mobile programs. So, spread the word on the establishment of a mCoE, create awareness among your workforce on its mission, scope and nature.
5. Make it easy to approach
Centre of excellences fail when they are perceived to become an impediment rather than facilitating projects. While a certain degree of regulation is necessary to bring governance and policy into your mobile programs but keep rules and regulations to bare minimum. Business units will avoid your center if they find it to be erecting barriers rather than guiding them into taking decisions.
6. Look for low hanging fruits
A few small but early success stories will not only put you mCoE in motion but will also help you convince other business units on the need to maintain collaboration and consistency. You can start as small as building an app or bringing standardization and consistency to existing apps.
7. Define success and measure it
It is important to measure the success of your center of excellence by defining performance metrics and measurement methodologies. Also vital is to set a calendar for evaluating various projects implemented by the center, document the hits and fails and use it as a guide for future.
A mCoE comes across as a best approach to adopt mobilefirst attitude and ride on the next wave of mobility. Moreover, today with enterprise mobility not just limited to smartphones and Tablets, and encompassing M2M, sensors, wearables, NFC and Internet of Things, a mCoE can help you minimize fragmentation, provide better control over your infrastructure and help you derive more from your mobile investments. A mCoE can not only bring order in your present complex mobile environment but can also help you be better prepared for future.
Research firm Strategy Analytics predicts massive surge in the wearables industry with revenue in the global wearable devices market expected to reach $37 billion in 2020 from $1 billion in 2014.
Juniper Research predicts shipments of wearable devices to be almost 130 million by 2018.
From being a consumer fad to becoming the latest enterprise phenomena-wearables have come a long way. And, there are very few industries as manufacturing that have huge opportunities for embracing wearables and leveraging it to gain new efficiencies. From product design & development, shop floor operations to worker’s training and safety- wearables have the potential to play a major role in the entire value chain. How? Here’s 5 application areas in the manufacturing industry where wearable technology can make a significant impact:
1. Improving Employee Safety
Imagine having employees operating a press machine from a distance using a glass, or operating the paint booths with the tap of a finger. Wearable tech has tremendous potential to improve the safety of the workers by providing them a hands-free, face up environment to work.
2. Field Service
In industries like maintenance which require workers to work at a height and also underground, wearable devices can play a greater role. It can help workers connect to their managers to collaborate and take decisions. They can also get access to online support tools aiding in resolving issues faster. Gartner research predicts that wearables could help personnel diagnose and repair problems more quickly, saving up to $1 billion annually in 3 to 5 years.
3. Line Monitoring
Wearable reduces the need of your worker to be tied to his workstation for long hours to monitor the assembly line. It enables you to monitor various aspects like line speed, or failure of any component or machine from anywhere. You can also control the process and manage operations with the device.
4. Employee Monitoring
Imagine a situation where you can schedule employee breaks depending on their fatigue levels. This empowers the managers to manage their workers more efficiently and also reduce the risks of mishaps, as most of the mishaps are found to be caused due to lack of concentration originating from tiredness.
5. Warehouse Management
Wearable tech like sensors, watches and Google Glass enables anyone having to work in a warehouse to locate goods stored, maintain the inventory, order in case of shortage — all at the tap of a finger on the device. This saves on time, reduces chances of misplacements and reduces downtime.
6. Employee Training
Wearables can be used by enterprises to improve training facilities or sessions and helping workers learn on the shop floors. This will save time and help manufacturers take training out from the confines of training rooms. Moreover, it will also help employees access learning material on the move anywhere, anytime.
Wearables promises exciting possibilities for manufacturers. But where to begin? Download our latest ebook ‘Wearable Tech in Manufacturing’ to gain deep understanding and insights on-
Before QA moves on to test development, it is very important to figure out the importance of having the processes in place throughout the project. In order to get better results w.r.t increased efficiency, productivity and for a stable system, QA needs to implement the processes correctly and effort should be be made enhance them as and when required.
It is always a good practice to start with requirement analysis. A Quality Analyst needs to understand what the product/project is about and what should the QA do, besides understanding the Entry and Exit of the product/project. A better understanding of requirements will reduce lead testing time.
Test case creation process is the base for a stable system testing. If test case scenarios cover the functionality completely, then there will be no coverage Issues. Good test case writing not only ensures effective testing but also helps in covering future risks like knowledge gaps, testing gaps and defect free delivery. We’ve put together a few important aspects of test case development, listed below, and following these practices will help in an intelligent test suite.
1. Estimation Template
The test lead/manager should use or create a template for estimation of effort required for delivery. The template should be a realistic one which takes into account each and every aspect of the process and the effort involved in completing a task. The template should be shared with senior managers and should have an approval from them to use (by aaron). A good estimation will not only lead to realistic schedule but will also not burden the tester due to incorrect estimations and timelines.
2. Checklist for Test Cases
Before going for the test case creation, the test lead/manager should discuss with the client and understand the structure of the test cases the client wants to be prepared. Create a document with all the points a tester needs to take care of while writing a test case. Discuss the points that are not feasible to cover and take a buy-in from the client on those points. A baseline review checklist will be ready, based on these points, which needs to be followed while creating test cases.
3. Session with BA Team
A discussion with a business analyst is very helpful before you start the test case creation process. The BA team can help the testing team to give a holistic view of the application to be tested. The BA team will be helpful not only in clearing the functional doubts of the testing team, but also in understanding the impacted areas. This discussion will help the testing team close any functional or knowledge gaps and will, therefore, lead to a complete test suite.
4. Maintaining Query Log
It’s a good practice to maintain a query sheet for the queries resolved by the BA Team. A tester should log his queries into a query sheet and the BA Team can periodically update and answer the queries. This sheet will help new associates who join the team as they can go through the query sheet and get their queries resolved. This will help in saving the BA Team’s effort.
5. Format of Test Cases
The test case, when written, should be clear and concise. It should clearly state what needs to be tested. For this, it is required that the format used for test case development should be defined properly so that there is no ambiguity in the test case. This will help in creating coherent test cases. The advantage of using a standard format is that the test suite is not only easy to maintain, but also to modify, repair and review. The points mentioned below are the base for effective test case creation:
Scenarios written should be precise and complete.
There should be no “if” and “or” statements in test case.
Pre-requisites should be mentioned clearly and the ones that are not required need to be eliminated.
Design steps should clearly state what needs to be performed and how.
Design steps should not mention the pre-requisites.
Expected result should be clearly mentioned with each detail of requirement.
Test cases should be written on the basis of the requirement document. Tester’s knowledge should not be the base of test case.
Expected result should never be blank.
Scenario and Design steps should be in sync.
6. Scenario Based Test Cases for Reports
Reports represent the face of the application to the Management. The management will always rely on reports to check what is going on in the system/application. Reports, therefore, require a thorough testing with a different mindset. At times, the management relies on the data present in reports to make business decisions. It’s imperative that the testing team should understand the importance of data shown in report and how a minor defect can impact the business. Test cases should be written from an End-to-End perspective. They should not be written just to test the field values. If reports show correct data, it shows that the system is in good shape.
7. Peer Review
Once the test cases are written, a peer review is necessary to validate the test cases against the client-agreed checklist and also as per the Use case. It will also help you catch the structural or grammatical mistakes. It will bring everyone in the team on the same page and people will learn to follow the guidelines by learning from other’s mistakes. Peer review will be more effective if the test cases are given to peers who know the functional area. It will help you in spotting the functional gaps in the test cases. The test lead/manager should ensure that the review comments are incorporated and closed. A sheet should be maintained in central repository to track the same.
8. Business Analyst Review
A review by a business analyst is an essential part of the test case writing and review process. Every tester in the team is concerned about his own functional areas, which essentially means that an effective test suite may not be ensured. A business analyst not only reviews the test cases but also looks at the impacted areas. She/he will help you in identifying the missing areas or scenarios. A rigorous BA review is definitely a smooth path towards an effective test suite. The test lead/manager should ensure that the review comments are incorporated and closed. A sheet should be maintained in central repository to track the same.
9. Traceability Matrix
Traceability matrix is the most important component of the test case creation process. A traceability matrix will help you map the requirements with your test cases. Every section of the requirement should have test cases against it which signify the complete coverage of the functional areas. Every time a CR is received, it will be easy to determinate the functional areas impacted by the CR. This will help in calculating the exact number of test cases that will be impacted due to the introduction of a CR and hence will provide precise effort estimation.
10. Delivery Quality Audit
Once all the test cases are written, it is a good practice to get the quality audit of the delivery done. This will not only help in improving the quality of the delivery that is made to the client but also gives us a chance to learn and close the gaps for any future delivery. Quality Audits are performed at three levels as mentioned below:
It’s the responsibility of the Test Manager to get the Quality Audit completed before making the delivery to the client.
If there are any comments or observations, the Test Manager should ensure that all comments and gaps are closed in the delivery.
It’s a good practice to maintain comments and observations for future reference.
The quality inspection should pass all three levels.
11. Customer Review
Once a delivery is made to the customer, it’s important that customers also does a review of the delivery made to them. This will help in gaining customers’ confidence in delivery besides making sure that we keep delivering quality results. If there are any comments by the customer, the Test Lead should get the review comments incorporated on priority.
“Venkat Devarapu works as a Senior QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS and has over 4 years of experience in Web, Desktop and Mobile Applications. He is an expert in domains like Retail, Telecommunications, Insurance and Healthcare.”
“Testing on simulators will never replace testing on real handsets as there is no substitute for the real things.”
The mobile market is booming. This is evidenced by the large number of handset manufacturers as they are continuously delivering a wide variety of devices with different mobile operating systems and different sizes. As more companies and brands are turning towards developing mobile applications, their risk exposure is also high. If users don’t have an excellent experience with the app, they may switch to an alternative product. To avoid this switch and to retain users, pre-launch testing on mobile platforms has become a challenge. This may be tricky sometimes because today there is a wide range of handsets with varied specifications. Therefore, the simulator has become an important tool for developers and testers.
Simulators are very powerful tools but they are virtual devices which lack the real target environment. A virtual device is not a real phone but a software which gives the same functionality as the real phone.
But not even 0.01% of the end users use simulators after the app release. So we have to test mobile apps on a real device at some point of time during the development cycle to catch bugs at an early stage. Now the question is: which one should a tester prefer – real devices or simulators! As different kinds of users run the application on different devices, most companies prefer real devices for testing than simulators as it gives accurate results.
Limitations Of A Simulator
Processing Speed
Simulators are often laggy as it takes a lot of time to load and they often depend upon the amount of RAM allocated at the time of designing. Hence the whole process is dependent on the hardware. By using real devices things can be tested directly. So we need at least one real device available during all phases of development to assess the processing speed of the app.
Gesture Testing
Simulators can emulate touch screen gestures, but it’s a bit clunky. Using a mouse or a keyboard to click on a simulator is different from using a finger on the screen of mobile devices. Certain actions like pinching the screen, zooming the image and scrolling the screen are considerably different on touchscreen devices.
Network/WiFi
In terms of network configuration, simulators run on the PC, connect to LAN and access the internet via corporate firewall. Slow network is not possible to be tested on simulator where devices experience network issues.
Screenshots
For marketing the app we need to upload some quality screenshots in multiple sizes for each of the multiple devices. For example, we uploaded nearly 20 screenshots for our Advocare app using multiple devices. (iPhone 6+, iPhone 5S, iPod 5G, iPhone 4S). By using a simulator, we can capture these screenshots but it renders somewhat low quality. Therefore, a real device is a better choice.
Preview Videos
Videos are an excellent way to showcase our app for marketing than screenshots alone. It is possible to screencast in a simulator but simulator’s extra latency won’t show our app in the best light. The best option for video is to take it straight from the device itself, which is well recommended by Apple.
Display
It is not always about the resolution but problems are also related to the quality of a display i.e. pixel density, colors and overall quality of the display used in the device. For example, developers want to have dark blue button for login as per requirement, but due to low display quality of simulator, it is shown as shades of blue.
Real occurring events
Interruptions like incoming calls, SMS and battery consumption i.e., how charger effects overall performance can be performed in simulator but they’re not real. The only option for such events is to do it in real devices.
Hardware Features
No support for IMEI number (00000 is returned) or device ID
No support for Mac Address
No support for GPS testing
No support for Camera
No support for Recording and Audio playback
No support for Sensors (Gyroscope, Acceleration sensor, Gravity sensor)
No support for USB connections
No support for attached device headphones
No support for determining SD card eject/insert
Software Features
Some of the APIs behave differently or don’t work at all on the simulator (For example – Canvas API like clipPath, drawPath, etc).
Camera and Flash functionalities cannot be tested.
Email functionality cannot be tested.
Installation and configuration cannot be tested.
The Verdict
Although there are a few advantages of simulators like cost- and time-efficiency, covering of more devices, easy integration at early stages of development, we must maintain the quality of the application, and this can be achieved only by testing the app on real devices as it covers different experiences.
As everything has both advantages and disadvantages, there’s no guarantee that the software which works perfectly on a simulator will definitely work in the same way on the real device. A good approach is to use simulator in the early stages of testing when the maturity level of the app is low, and use real devices in the later stages.
A lot of factors should be carefully considered like submission deadlines, costs and customer demands. A healthy mixture of real device and simulator testing can give you the test coverage you need at a reasonable price. If you’re intending to release your application in App/Play Store, or to devices, it’s worth testing it on the device at least once. Only then can we be sure that it will act and perform as expected on the platform you intend to target.
Vikas Donkeshwara works as QA Engineer at [x]cubeLABS and has 3 years of experience in Mobile and Web Application Testing in different domains like Education, Healthcare and Finance.
Mobile apps have changed everything- from the way we live, connect, entertain to the way we work. Pick any interest, subject, topic or activity and you have an app for that. Thousands of apps are added every day to various app stores and the app user base continues to grow. Recent data from various sources suggests, an Apple user downloads around 6.2 apps every month while the Google Play user downloads 4.1 apps per month.
Over the years, with increase in app usage, we have also witnessed significant shifts in app user behavior and app developer revenue model. However, one fact remains as it was- the majority of apps in the stores are free or are priced very low.
Users love free apps
As a mobile app developer, if you think your users hate seeing ads on their apps then you are right? However, if based on the above fact, you think that the users are ready to pay for an ad-free experience then there are not many takers. The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) with Zozby Analytics conducted a survey of 1,015 Americans which reveals that 58% respondents preferred free, ad-supported apps to those than paid apps. Further, when asked if they would download the existing apps if they were required to pay, 46% said they wouldn’t download the apps.
If you look at the download download distribution of Android apps by price category, you will find that it’s really tough for paid apps to cross 5000 downloads.
Source-Appbrain.com
Users are in no mood to pay
The above data certainly provide overwhelming evidence to suggest that the users as much as they dislike in-app ads, but the vast majority of them, be it an iPhone or an Android user, would rather tolerate them rather than pay for an app. The Freemium model, wherein a user gets the basic version of the app for free and later have to pay for advanced versions is gaining some traction, especially in games and productivity apps, but paid apps from other categories rarely match the success of free apps. Mobile app developers and publishers have to continue exploring new revenue models to make money from their apps. The user is in no mood to pay.
Apple rules the enterprise mobile space and is gaining lead over Android. The latest mobility index report from Good Technology reveals that Apple’s iOS has retained its top slot in enterprise adoption. The total activations for iOS devices increased this quarter from 69% to 73% while Android numbers slide down from 29% to 25%. According to the report, the upswing in iOS activations is mainly due to the introduction of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
While the report provides no specific reason for slowing down of Android numbers, however the variance in platform adoption across industries does throw up some light on the major barrier blocking Android growth in enterprises. As per the report, Apple’s iOS significantly outpaced Android in regulated industries like legal, financial services, public sector etc., whereas Android got more traction in industries with less stringent regulatory compliance to follow. For example, Android numbers in High Tech, Manufacturing and Transportation were 45%, 39% and 35% respectively.
While Google and Samsung, with Android for Work technology, have made real strides to beef up security capabilities in the operating system, Android still has a long way to go to match iOS security mechanism. Device encryption issue is still not fully resolved with most Android devices enabling optional and partial ebncryption. Risk of malware on Android apps remains a threat with regular reports of phising apps found in the Google App Store. Apple’s tighter control on publishing and distribution of apps in its app store has helped it restrict phising attacks in a big way.
With data security being a key issue for enterprises, more so in regulated industries, Android has to do more and quickly if it wants to unsettle Apple from its top slot. Android has given tough competition to Apple in the personal mobility space, by dominating the market in terms of device activations, and it would be really interesting to see its strategy to arrest its slide and challenge Apple’s dominance in the enterprise market.
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