The Pragmatic Tester

In this post I'll describe how to access files and databases associated with a mobile app. On the apps that I test we have log files and SQLite databases that are useful to look at when investigating potential bugs. How do you access files and databases on a mobile device? As usual that depends on whether you are testing iOS or Android. App specific files are available on both devices but they way you access them is different for each OS. iOS For Apple devices, you can use iTunes to access app specific files. Open iTunes on your PC or Mac and connect your device. You will see the device: Select the device icon. This will open the apps page. Under File Sharing you can then select your app to view its associated files. You can then add files, save files to your PC or delete files on the device. Android On Android devices there is usually a folder called "MyFiles". App specific files are stored under that folder. To access them, ...

In this post I'll describe how to actually get test versions of the app onto a device. But first let's discuss whether you should test on an actual device or on an emulator. An emulator is a desktop application that mimics the hardware and OS of a mobile device. The developers will generally do their app development on an emulator and you can use them for early stage testing but when it comes to meaningful end to end testing, a device is a must have. There is no other way to get a feel for the performance of the app and how users will use it real life. Of course you will probably need to test on multiple devices as they vary not only by OS (iOS and Android) but also OS version, device make (e.g. Samsung or Motorola), and screen size. We also now have a new OS for iPads called iPadOS. In a future blog post I'll look at device fragmentation and how to handle it. For now let's assume you are only testing on one iOS device and one Android device. Your developers h...

You all no doubt own a mobile phone, most likely an iOS or Android device, so you probably think it wouldn't be too difficult to test mobile apps. While the principles of testing remain the same, there are significant differences between how you test websites and mobile apps. For example: You can't just open a browser on your laptop to test the latest version of the application. Somehow you need to get the latest version of the app onto your test device. iOS and Android have completely different design patterns. It's more difficult to get under the hood of an app to see what's going on. You can't just open Chrome DevTools. This is the first in a series of posts where I'll give you some background on how to test mobile apps and include a number of tips and tricks that I've learnt the hard way in my 10 years of mobile testing experience. I'll focus on iOS and Android since those are the most common apps but I also test...

In my last blog post I described how we have got rid of step by step test cases but didn’t have any automated regression tests. Since then we have embarked on a test automation journey and we are building up a suite of automated regression tests. In some of my older posts on unit and integration testing I talked about “valuable” automated tests. In summary, a valuable automated test is one which: Has a high chance of catching a regression error Has a low chance of producing a false positive Provides fast feedback Has low maintenance cost The more code that is covered, the more chance there is of catching a regression error. End to End (E2E) tests are good for this but feedback is often too slow. So how do we make E2E automated tests more valuable? They already have a high chance of catching a regression error and a low chance of producing a false positive but they tend to be slow and have a high maintenance cost. How can we improve those two aspects? A good way to do this i...

In my last blog post I told you what I think is wrong with step by step test cases. In this blog post I’ll tell you how I got rid of step by step test cases at the company I work for. When I joined Yambay about 18 months ago, the company was following a fairly traditional waterfall style development approach. They had an offshore test team who wrote step by step test cases in an ALM tool called Test Track. Over the past 18 months we have moved to an agile way of developing our products and have gradually got rid of step by step test cases. User Stories and how I use them to test Getting rid of step by step test cases didn’t happen overnight. Initially we replaced regression test cases and test cases for new features with user stories that have acceptance criteria. The key to using a user story to cover both requirements and testing is to make sure that the acceptance criteria cover all test scenarios. Often product owners and/or business analysts only cover typical scenarios. It...

Many companies have moved to agile software development but they still maintain large suites of step by step test cases for regression testing. At the company I work for, I’ve managed to get rid of these step by step test cases altogether. What is wrong with step by step test cases anyway? If you are in a traditional waterfall setup with high level requirements and test cases, then the test cases are actually quite valuable as they document how the system works. But if you start to move quality to the left and specify requirements in more detail upfront with user stories, then test cases make much less sense. You are essentially duplicating the requirements in test cases and end up with a whole set of assets that need to be maintained in a separate test management or ALM tool. A big problem with that is that you do not have a single source of truth on how the system behaves. A second problem with step by step test cases is that they are not visible to the business. I can’...