Mobile App Testing with the Right Mobile Devices
Running an active test lab, QualityLogic needs to be able to offer testing of the mobile devices that our customers want to test, and be ready to go when they are! To accomplish this, we must have many iOS and Android devices spanning the widest operating system and manufacture diversity possible. Realizing that we simply cannot have everything, we have to make strategic decisions on what devices to purchase for our test lab.
What Mobile Devices Do We Invest In?
QualityLogic uses several strategies in parallel for selecting mobile devices to include in our testing inventory:
Mobile Device Market Research
QualityLogic constantly monitors trends in the phone and tablet world, monitoring as much reliable information as we can find for sales figures and device popularity. Using this data, we can ensure that we have the most popular devices available to include in our test device inventory.
Legacy OS vs. Updated OS
QualityLogic has programs in place to continually monitor the development of new iOS and Android operating systems. We manage our device inventory to update devices to the newest OS or purchase additional devices when needed to add the latest OS to our testing inventory. We hold devices back from the update process in order to maintain a rich selection of legacy OS and device revisions, allowing our customers to test with major revisions of OS releases, old and new.
Customer Driven Mobile Device Selection
What are our customers asking us to test for them? Customers are most often driven by their individual web analytics for the popular customer profiles using their services or site. Customers typically want to test to include the OS and devices used by the majority of their customers, within their budget constraints. We want to make sure we have the devices most requested by customers. For iOS devices, the focus is generally on the iOS revision, not the specific device. For Android devices, the focus is often on a specific model of phone or tablet, rather than Android OS version.
By applying these strategies in parallel, and managing the inventory of devices carefully, QualityLogic is able to offer mobile application testing on a very wide variety of devices and OS versions to our customers.