Today, I made my Nokia E71 crash or hang. I'm capable of doing this to any phone and I have done this to multiple phones that I owned. Not intentionally. As an ambitious user, I load a lot of widgets and apps on my phone as I have practically given up using my laptop for my daily activities. However most apps don't work on all published features. And most browser based apps don't render properly on the mobile screen because...yes, they have either not been tested for mobile platforms or not been designed for them at all.
That got me thinking. Can you believe that 47% of apps are accessible or available on the mobile as well according to a study by DataCorp? Thats an enormous amount to be left untested or partially tested.
What challenges does mobile (as in cell phone) testing involve?
1. Multiple Operating Systems - Win Mobile, RIM, Symbian...etc
2. Great variety of handheld devises (all of which cannot be practically emulated by testers)
3. Rich UI, rich media such as high res images, video streams, Ajax based animations are not implemented for low memory, low processor systems such as mobile phones
4. Form Factors are different
5. Users can switch languages - for example Japanese use English for business bt switch the skins to Japanese for every thing else.
6. Carrier speed, carrier frameworks vary
If the dataplan does not allow video streaming, then does your software detect that or does it make to and fro requests to the server in an end less loop (aka. hang ;-)
I'm researching to know if mobile test automation (or test automation tools devices for embedded in a broader sense) has matured?
Until then,when in trouble reboot the phone.
