Cross Platform Testing: Challenges & Solutions

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-team-designers-working-together-laptop-business-project-image33394896With the flood of multiple devices pouring into the market – tablets, smartphones, set top gateways, gaming consoles – there is rapid-fire demand for more efficient, cost effective software testing across multiple operating systems, including Windows, iOS, Mac, Android, Linux and more. Manual testing across multiple platforms and devices due to fragmentation and redundancy can be time consuming and challenging. And because of the lack of cross consistent teams and best practices, product quality suffers and cost escalates.

 

Meanwhile, consumers continue to demand the latest devices, more accessibility, increased mobility and functionality, adding to the workload of developers and testers. By implementing cross platform test automation, you can not only reduce your time to market, but also ensure greater efficiencies throughout the testing process.

 

Decide which test cases to automate first by looking for low hanging fruit, weighing their value against the effort to automate the scripts. Test cases with high value and low effort should be automated first. Then test cases which represent frequent use, changes, and past errors should follow. Also test cases with low to moderate effort in setting up the test environment and developing the automation project are well suited for automation.

 

Cross Platform Test automation alleviates testers’ frustrations and allows the test execution with limited user interaction while guaranteeing repeatability and accuracy. Instead testers can concentrate on more difficult test scenarios and data analysis.

 

Using full spectrum testing with cross platform testing tools and a global resources team ensures higher product quality and affordable, timely delivery. Automation can create significant value to unit, integration, functional, and performance testing; but is especially suited for regression testing – which is based on the routine execution of a test scenario repository to ensure no existing functionality was broken due to change in the applications. This provides a significant positive impact to production quality.

 

Working with a managed team that uses automated test tools as part of or their routine practice creates measurable advantages for even the most challenging software development project. Benefits include:

  • Improved quality, reliability and performance of your IT systems
  • Reduced total cost of application maintenance and enhancements
  • Faster time to market by minimizing bugs and rework
  • Sustained, predictable and high quality development results