Mobile Application Lifecycle Management

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3200 Patrick Henry Drive, Suite 250 Santa Clara, CA 95054 408.727.1100 | [email protected] | www.infostretch.com

Mobile Application

Lifecycle Management

An InfoStretch White Paper

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2 TO SUMMARIZE

It’s been years since mobile applications became requirements for any significant business. As mobile devices continue to proliferate, and in some cases supplant conventional computers/laptops in people’s everyday life – businesses need a comprehensive mobile ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) strategy to meet end-user demands and respond to evolving market requirements.

Mobile ALM is much trickier than conventional ALM because applications need to perform at a high level on a wildly heterogeneous combination of devices and operating systems. To meet this challenge, businesses are required to use both development processes and testing tools – this paper will review the most common pitfalls developers encounter in building and maintaining mobile applications, and present best practices on how to avoid them.

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Mobile ALM — Opportunities

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Developing, delivering, and maintaining a quality mobile application that excites your end-users can be challenging. However, with the right tools and processes, mobile application development can keep your development team more engaged with business leaders and open new opportunities for

your company.

There are a number of common complexities that any organization moving to mobile will encounter. In some instances, teams may port an existing application to serve as a mobile app, while others may build net-new mobile applications that need continuous maintenance. Regardless of how mobility is embraced by your team, it will undoubtedly create new challenges for testing.

Testing is one of the most critical steps to achieve mobile success because there are so many new challenges when it comes to mobile development including:

NATIVE VERSUS BROWSER-BASED APPS HETEROGENEOUS DEVICES AND OPERATING SYSTEMS

Mobile application development presents a daunting increase of variables that impact the performance of your application, the end-user experience, and ultimately the perception of your brand. Beyond all the different hardware and firmware that devices run on, the plethora of operating systems including Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows can paralyze development and testing efforts.

VARYING BANDWIDTH AVAILABILITIES

Another common stumbling block for mobile ALM are the ranges of bandwidths users rely on when accessing a mobile application. Development and QA teams need to design for and test against multiple bandwidths, including 3G, 4G, and LTE. Additionally, teams must account for and test against other network issues such as latency, dropped connections, and other geographically related factors.

Native applications are an excellent way to improve end-user experience. On the other hand, browser based applications are popular for their flexibility. A growing number of companies use both approaches to ensure maximum coverage and customer choice. This is because many users don’t want a native application on their device if they only intend to use the app occasionally. However, this two-pronged approach increases testing complexity for your team.

MOBILE-SPECIFIC SITES

Because mobile devices generally have slower CPUs, less memory, and smaller screens than desktops and laptops, many companies build mobile-specific sites to support their mobile initiatives. However, this creates additional complexity in the testing process, because QA teams must now take varying display and browser sizes into account to ensure their mobile app presents content properly.

INCORPORATING AGILE PRACTICES

Most teams today favor agile development practices because it empowers them to iterate quickly, react to customer feedback, and

accelerate development velocity. When it comes to mobile development, agile methodologies can create unique challenges for QA teams because the pace of agile, when multiplied by the number of target devices for your mobile app, can either cause testing backlogs, or prompt teams to release an app that’s not ready for prime-time.

MOBILE SECURITY

Security for a mobile application becomes significantly more complex due to the array of new attack surfaces that malicious hackers can target. Mobile security is a fast growing concern because so much consumer data, and increasingly enterprise data, is available in the event of a successful attack. See the sidebar ‘Mobile security on the rise’ for more specifics on this point.

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5 Mobile Security Concerns on the Rise

According to an April 2013 SearchSecurity.com poll of IT and security professionals, it’s clear that mobile security a key concern. Respondents reported growing concern in their ability to provide robust security for multi-device environments. Nearly 60% of respondents believe mobile devices present more risk to their organizations compared to Q2 2012. Despite growing concerns over mobile security, only 60% of respondents indicated that their organization required security technologies on mobile devices. In the group that did, the top 5 security concerns were: access control (67%), authentication (57%), encryption (53%), remote wipe (44%), and anti-malware (44%).

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Achieving Mobile ALM Success

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Software testing to ensure the quality and security of your mobile applications is integral to delivering an application that is adopted by your target

audience. Mobile application testing is complicated, but with the right combination of tools and techniques, you can build a process that allows your team to maintain velocity throughout lifecycle of your application.

Based on our experience with several enterprises, here are some keys to mobile ALM success:

DESIGN WITH FLEXIBILITY IN MIND CHOSE THE RIGHT TESTING FRAMEWORK

TEST BASED ON EXPECTED

USER BEHAVIOR BE MINDFUL OF MEMORY

Depending on whether your mobile application is native or web based, you’ll need to make sure you design not only for the devices you want to support today, but also for new devices that will come on the market in the future. Because of this unpredictability, it’s critical that development teams build an application that can scale, and that they adopt testing tools that can support this inevitable growth.

To make sure your application runs properly on all the flavors of all the operating systems you intend to support, select a development framework that provides coverage for your most important operating systems. Sample frameworks include: Kony, Worklight, and the open source Phonegap product. To avoid end-user frustration,

teams should strive to test their mobile applications based on expected user behaviors. For example, banking applications will have higher security concerns, but they are typically used for short periods of time, so application interruptions due to a time-out will be less bothersome. Conversely, gaming or media apps may have less security issues, but time-outs will be very frustrating. By working with business leaders, developers can properly scope their testing protocols to ensure they meet the intended use of their application.

It’s important for developers to keep in mind that your app will not be running alone on mobile devices. Most likely, your users will be running one or more memory intensive applications when they boot your application up. If your application is going to be memory intensive, you must test it on devices that are running similar apps to make sure there are no performance issues. You can mitigate this risk by making sure you write your app so it efficiently accesses the file system. You should also avoid using memory when your app is running in the background.

BE AWARE OF NATIVE VS. DEVICE FEATURES

If you have both a web and native application, keep in mind the different feature sets for each environment to ensure proper test coverage. Not all features between web and native applications will translate similarly during testing, knowing which features are running in each version will help avoid painful field issues.

TEST BASED ON EXPECTED USER BEHAVIOR

For B2B apps in particular, make sure you have proper device and carrier support in your testing suite that maps to your customer use profiles. This can sometimes include reviewing market data to see what’s coming from your target device manufacturers.

DELIVER EXCEPTIONAL DOCUMENTATION

One commonly overlooked difference between standard development and mobile development is the need for expanded documentation. People tend to compare UX experiences very quickly when it comes to mobile applications, and your team will be held to this standard whether it’s fair or not.

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8 Mobile ALM is radically different from conventional software development

practices and tends to be more complicated – however, building mobile

applications the right way can invigorate your development and test teams

while supercharging your business. The proper combination of processes and

testing technologies can help you build an application lifecycle management

system designed for mobile, but doing it the right way requires forethought

and smart decision making.

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It’s important to understand that even though you’re supporting a wide array of devices and operating systems, your mobile users will have high expectations from your application of meeting their needs in a very personal way. Security or quality issues that slip past your testing is the fastest way to lose the trust and confidence of your customers, and potentially damage the brand equity of your company. Because of this, testing (and testing in the right way with the right tools) is essential to the success of your mobile initiatives.

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ABOUT INFOSTRETCH

InfoStretch is a leading provider of mobile and enterprise QA services and solutions. Our offerings range from enterprise QA, mobile application development, testing, and automation to certification and sustenance. We’ve been providing expert solutions and services to various large and strategic players in the mobile ecosystem including enterprises, carriers, app stores, VAS, and ISV’s to actualize their mobile and QA strategy very successfully.

We offer the most cost effective, secure, and scalable models to service our clients across various verticals such as banking, healthcare, education, and entertainment to name a few. Our innovations have allowed us to provide an SLA of 24 hours and the ability to scale and test over 2,000 apps a day.

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