In my last post a week back, I had talked about an upcoming webinar hosted by QA InfoTech on a trending topic on Application Profiling to Measure End User Experience leveraging an open source test automation solution. The event was very well received yesterday and the full video of the webinar is available below. We would love to hear any feedback and thoughts you may have on the content.

End User Display options were limited to just a handful of browsers even a few years ago. With the mobile revolution we are facing, this situation has changed quite a bit. The options are plentiful spread across laptops, PCs, Macs, smart phones, tablets, e-readers. This combined with the technology evolution to support rich internet display to the end users has all of a sudden made compatibility testing a challenge and a huge opportunity to the test teams.

This change combined with a move to application driven computing has made development teams re-think their development strategy for online products. A simple client-server solution with add on web services to support third party communication and integration is no longer sufficient to scale to all supported platforms. A few years ago as this trend was gaining popularity organizations would finish one round of full functional testing and then run compatibility tests across supported platforms to determine issues that need to be fixed. It was still a bottom up or a reverse engineering approach that was being adopted. However in the recent years they have rightly understood that is important to start engineering applications which are ready for all kinds of supported devices and the technologies they use rather than adapting applications to work on them later on.

While development groups are getting ready for this new trend, what does it take from a testing stand point to gear up? Compatibility testing continues to be required as always, but a different kind of performance testing is becoming necessary. The standard performance scenarios especially around the server hand back to the browser and the time it takes does not guarantee a satisfactory user experience. Although the server may fulfill its part by handing back the response on time, with multiple rendering solutions in play along with rich technologies such as HTML5, the actual time content and UI rendering to the user takes is not negligible any more. This is all the more the case if the system processing the request runs at low processing power. Mobile devices tend to typically have lower processing power than desktop machines which poses this additional challenge of delayed rendering times. Thus performance tests need to include this in their testing scope to provide an E2E experience within acceptable times. This is the crux of what we will present in our upcoming webinar next week on the 18th June titled “Application Profiling to Measure End User Experience – An Open Source Test Automation Solution”. You can register for this event at: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7260931049051632384

We look forward to seeing you at the event to additionally help you gear to handle this opportunity in shipping applications of exceptional performance to your end users.