Mobile cloud services: experienced-based insight

The author of this blog post, Pavel Andreev, is an experienced tester and QA manager at a1qa. Pavel is a talented QA engineer, with 6 years of working experience. During this years published articles in several magazines, like “Power electronics”. Pavel has a bachelor degree and fluently speaks English. Being a well-versed specialist, he knows every shoal of mobile functional testing and offers an experienced-based insight in mobile clouds services.

The issue of acceptable application functioning becomes more and more essential in mobile testing industry. Various platforms, operating systems, screen sizes and mobile devices complicate the process of app adaptation and cause new issues. Thus mobile cloud services become popular for mobile device testing. Nevertheless, multiple questions arise. As for efficient use you are to know how the cloud services function, which service is better and are they really valuable?

It worth saying that applying to cloud services you get a great package of functions that simplify and optimize mobile app testing, among those you can find:

• Remote use of mobile park devices;
• Big choice of devices with different screen sizes and functioning on different platforms, operation systems;
• One-click function imitation (incoming call, incoming messages, connection loss etc.);
• Establishment of mobile testing environment: logging, screenshots and one click video record.

These functions offer you considerable advantage for mobile testing. To be specific you can:

• Test devices that haven`t come out to market yet (for example, devices made only for the US);
• Work with most popular devices, which launch delays in some regions;
• Work with outdated devices, which are of no buying purpose in company`s devices park;
• Work with real connection to foreign Telecom operators (at&t, T-Mobile, Verizon, Vodafone etc.);
• Work with various types of internet connection (Wi-Fi, 3G, LTE, Edge, GPRS);
• Test mobile apps without need of buying expensive devices.

Nevertheless, there are some disadvantages when you operate with cloud services:

• Low connection speed;
• Weak device response;
• Constant server and device glitches;
• Expensive subscription for  paid-for-service.

Today among the world the greatest domain companies stand Israeli company Perfecto Mobile (MobileCloud project) and American Keynote Systems (DeviceAnywhere project). Wondering which to choose? In these article series we`ll have a detailed insight into the both services.

Next article of Cloud services for mobile testing comes on next Tuesday.