作者：Eran Kinsbruner

手机应用市场持续发展着，并且似乎根本没有停下来的趋势。像任天堂和华纳兄弟等大品牌也不断投资于手机领域。最近任天堂宣称他们的U-turn将首次出现在其手机游戏上，华纳兄弟也表示对全新的《蝙蝠侠》和《权利的游戏》手机游戏充满期待。

根据Gartner，到2017年，应用的下载量将接近2690亿，这将对各种规模的公司产生影响，并且这也将成为所有公司所进行的最具竞争性的尝试。

但是尽管那些涌进手机领域的巨头们的故事向我们传达了开发手机游戏的机遇与好处，但这里也仍然存在许多风险。

事实上，因为应用开发和质量控制的问题，手机应用策略将不断遇到各种困难。根据数据显示，44%的缺陷是由用户找到的—-24%是源自直接反馈，另外20%是来自用户在应用商店中的评价。

有许多低价值或高价值的应用在发行前并未进行充分的质量测试与控制，如果一个品牌想要避免终端用户的失望与生气而带来的财政或信誉上的损失，它就必须重视测试与认证过程。

在本文中，我们将列出发行商在手机测试中所面对的主要挑战以及他们该如何提高整体的应用质量。

如今开发者所面临的挑战

手机应用很大程度地改变了用户与品牌间的互动。但随着手机硬件和软件的快速创新，许多组织都在努力满足用户的需求。有些公司会花好几个月去投资，计划并创造一款应用以协调公司的手机策略，他们希望应用发行是成功的，并且面向所有手机平台的每一个目标用户都能够提供同等质量的体验。

质量保证团队和开发者社区所面临的最大挑战是设备覆盖面不足，缺少可靠的自动化技术并需要更广泛的覆盖范围以执行测试方案。当然了，如今的开发和QA团队并不能自由掌控时间，所以他们必须及时调整一些全新的动态变化。

以下是更多常见的挑战：

快速创新

手机市场中的快速变化给开发和运营团队添加了更多压力，他们不得不去适应快速的开发与部署过程。新设备，OS增强功能，可佩带设备，传感器以及第三方插件等等产品不断涌现在市场上。手机应用开发团队必须不断更新他们的发行计划以确保能够跟上不断出现的变化。这些外部压力将发行日程压缩到以周为单位而不再是以月为单位。

不断提高的复杂性

手机体验是依赖于电池，内存，CPU/GPU，网络连接，屏幕大小，传感器以及应用风格等等元素的结合。保证手机环境中的质量需要增强测试，复杂性分析以及客户端的可见性。

不断提升的用户期待值

通常情况下，商业性网站的页面加载时间大概是6至10秒。手机用户则会期待更快的结果。尽管一些与谷歌合作的公司通常会将1至2秒的内容加载作为目标，但是研究显示用户会因为反应延迟而快速抛弃一款应用。

克服测试挑战

为了确保手机应用的成功发行，我们需要进行更多测试。一些调查对象认为减少手机应用漏洞的最有效方法便是进行更多功能测试，以及更多设备/OS覆盖范围和更多性能的测试。

在几乎所有情节中，用户体验都是不同的，所以任何情况都有可能导致问题的出现。测试需要考虑应用如何在不同的操作系统（游戏邦注：如Android，iOS等等），OS版本（如Jellybean，KitKat，iOS 7等等），载波网络（Vodafone，EE，02等等）以及设备（三星Galaxy S4，S5，iPhone 5，5C，5S）上运行。

当你在制定一个设备覆盖面策略时，有关手机应用的大量市场调查数据将是你需要真正考虑的内容，仅仅只是关注与市场趋势是远远不够的。

为了确保拥有足够的覆盖面，你必须回答的一个重要问题是“我们的目标用户正在使用怎样的设备？”分析用户流能够帮你制定一个真正的设备策略并提供给你最广泛的的覆盖面。

创造一款不会失败的应用

在当前的手机时代，为了保证应用质量，我们需要采取新的方法，

作为一名手机应用开发者，为了确保应用的成功，在创造过程中我们需要考虑许多因素。对于开发者来说最可怕的噩梦便是发行一款自己花了无数时间去创造但却具有许多漏洞和缺陷的游戏。所以开发者必须在一开始便学会阻止失败的出现。

一款应用必须在所有手机平台上提供给所有目标用户同等质量的体验。手机应用应该在广泛的手机设备，操作系统与网络上得到有效的运行。前期测试能够帮助我们避开一些常见的问题，如UI故障，跨平台矛盾，糟糕的性能以及过度的资源消耗等等。只有当测试策略能够有效地解决这些问题，你才有可能创造出吸引人的终端用户体验。

来自Perfecto Mobile的调查显示，任何开发团队能够轻松执行一些快速的修复：

停止将你的用户作为QA团队的一部分

调查中所呈现的最让人担忧的一个结果便是，用户已经成为了测试团队的一份子，而这并不是什么乐观的情况。根据数据显示，有将近一半的问题（大概44%）是由用户所发现的。当你完成所有创造与测试工作后，如果用户成为了影响并传达问题的一份子，那便说明你所做的工作并不合格。

用户会做出评论（游戏邦注：如在苹果的App Store，谷歌的Play Store和Twitter上）并发送关于问题的直接反馈给公司。像用户界面（58%）；性能（52%），功能（50%）以及设备兼容性（45%）等问题是最常出现的问题类型。DevOps团队需要专注于制定一个能够提高手机应用质量的策略；将终端用户作为测试员并不能成为解决方法的一部分。

提高整体的应用质量

为了从应用开发的一开始便提高手机应用质量，我们需要采取3个阶段的方法：

1.使用基于云端的服务性设备平台。这能够帮助我们保证足够的设备与OS覆盖面，并帮助团队专注于测试而不是管理设备。

2.执行能够支持持续测试的工具，自动设备测试能够让开发者基于较少的资源投入与更出色的一致性进行测试。选择一个能够创造适用于各种设备且基于关键字的自动脚本并且能够在真正的设备上并联运行它们，同时还能与多个现行网络相连的自动化工具也非常重要。

3.在应用性能开始影响用户前使用一个能够提供有关性能问题的早前检测的监测系统能够有效地提高应用质量。

一旦确定了手机策略并开始开发应用，你就必须确保应用有能力满足用户的期待。如果不能适应当前快速发展的市场或难以执行能够保证高质量应用的自动化工具，你的应用注定会遭到用户的抛弃。

创造一份公司测试策略

在创造手机应用策略时，你必须清楚，不管是开发团队的成员还是执行高层都应该对创造一个面向消费者的应用过程有一个整体的了解，并清楚在这一过程中可能出现的最糟糕的问题。

测试是保障手机应用成功的关键，开发公司需要通过决定匹配消费者需求的适当设备组合从而明确测试手机应用的最佳设备。

以下是你在创造策略的过程中应该问自己的一些最重要的问题：

最广泛使用的设备是什么？

为了决定测试的最佳设备组合，开发公司需要进行研究并了解当下市场上有哪些设备，消费者正在使用哪些设备以及市场上新出现的设备是什么。

我们发现现在的开发公司会为了内部应用去分析雇员所使用的设备，同时也会分析终端用户的设备去明确手机流的来源。结果便是，49%的公司测试时间贡献给了苹果。这一数值远高于整体的英国市场数值和全球手机市场数值，但是随着手机策略的不断完善以及开发公司对于终端用户意见的重视，设备测试选择在不同产业标准下也会发生变化。

此外，开发公司还必须领先市场一步并不断致力于相关的市场分析。如果最新的手机或平板电脑，如全新三星Galaxy 6进入了市场，你们的应用就必须想办法去支持它。结合这两种分析方法能够帮助你创造出最适合测试的设备组合。

那么关于传统设备呢？

像网络覆盖，屏幕大小，传统设备和操作系统等问题都是开发者需要考虑的内容。根据我们所收集的数据，iPhone 5S/C以及谷歌Nexus 5都是当前最快速发展的操作系统。尽管已经诞生将近3年时间，三星的Galaxy S2仍然拥有广泛的用户。这一设备已经从手机零售店中下架并且在过去一年里也不再获得Android OS更新。但是却仍有许多用户在使用这一设备，所以它也应该成为开发者进行质量控制的对象。

我们的应用是否能够运行于其它国家？

随着市场的不断扩展，你的消费者将遍布不同区域，所以你的手机策略便需要确保能在所有的这些区域（基于当地的运营商与网络）测试手机应用。例如，你的应用上的一个功能也许能在英国运行，但在美国却不行。这时你就需要搞清楚该如何通过在当地测试而解决问题，从而避免应用的坍塌。

规格重要吗？

在创造整体测试策略时，我们有越来越多需要考虑的屏幕规格和形状系数。屏幕分辨率将影响终端用户在各种设备上观看应用的体验。我们发现如今市场上的主要分辨率为640 x 1134，也就是最受欢迎的Android设备。然后便是640 x 960—-iPhone。测试者在手机测试策略中需要包含超过7种不同类型的分辨率。

苹果与Android的战争

尽管最近的研究表明，Android凭借超过80%的全球市场份额而领导着当前的消费者市场，但是根据Perfecto Mobile的数据，我们发现欧洲和北美的开发公司将50%左右的时间都贡献在iOS设备上。

计划是成功的关键

所以为什么会有应用遭遇失败呢？这也是大多数项目失败的原因：缺少计划与策略。在创造应用过程中，手机应用测试是开发者在发行过程与发行后最应该重视但却常常遭遇忽视的一点。

如果你的手机应用不能有效运行于目标用户所使用的所有设备上，它们便会遭遇各种问题，甚至包括来自用户的抛弃。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Why apps fail – and what you can do to prevent it

By Eran Kinsbruner

The mobile app market continues to grow and shows no signs of letting up. Major brands such as Nintendo and Warner Bros are making big investments in mobile. Nintendo recently announced their U-turn to take their games mobile for first time, and Warner Bros has said that it expects its new Batman and Game of Thrones mobile games to be its biggest ever.

According to Gartner, the number of app downloads will reach nearly 269 billion by 2017 and this shift into mobile is impacting companies of all shapes and sizes, making it one of the most competitive ventures the company will face.

But, while stories of major brands pushing into mobile talk up the opportunities and rewards of developing mobile strategies, the risks remain.

The reality is that mobile app strategies continue to come unstuck because of app development and quality control issues. It is estimated that that 44 percent of the defects are found by the user, 24 percent from direct feedback, and another 20 percent from public user reviews in app stores (Source: Perfecto Mobile 2014).

Too many apps of low or high value are released without sufficient quality testing and control, making it important to tighten up testing and certification processes if a brand is to avoid the financial or reputational damage of seriously disappointed and angry end users.

In this article, we outline the main challenges publishers face in mobile testing and what they can do to improve overall app quality.

Challenges for today’s developer

Mobile apps have dramatically changed the way users interact with brands. But with the rapid pace of mobile hardware and software innovation, many organisations struggle to meet user expectations. Enterprises spend months investing, planning and building an app to coordinate with the company’s mobile strategy, and when it launches they want it to be successful and have the same quality experience across all mobile platforms for every unique user.

The top challenges faced by quality assurance teams and the developer community can be summarised as insufficient device coverage, lack of reliable automation, and needing more coverage to execute test scenarios than time permits. Certainly, time is not on the side of today’s development and QA teams, as they must adapt to a number new dynamics emerging in real time.

Below are more of the most common challenges:

Rapid Innovation

The fast pace of change in the mobile market is putting pressure on development and operations teams to adopt rapid development and deployment practices. New devices, OS enhancements, wearables, sensors and third-party plug-ins are continuously being released into the market. Mobile app development teams must constantly update their release plans to ensure compatibility with a growing number of variables. These external pressures have compressed release schedules to weeks instead of months.

Increased Complexity

The mobile experience is dependent on a combination of factors including battery, memory, CPU / GPU, network connectivity, screen size, sensors and even app style. Ensuring quality in mobile environments requires enhanced testing, complex analysis and client side visibility.

Skyrocketing User Expectations

Typically, commerce websites will fully load pages in about six to ten seconds. Mobile users expect faster results. Although few enterprises are achieving Google’s often cited one-second content load target, studies show that users will quickly abandon applications with response delays.

Overcoming Testing Challenges

To ensure that mobile apps launch successfully, more testing is needed. Survey respondents believe that the most critical measures to reduce mobile app defects are more functional testing, more device/OS coverage and more performance testing.

The user experience is different in almost every scenario, each one contributing to an endless possibility of use-case issues. The testing needs to consider how the app will perform on different operating systems (Android, iOS, etc.), OS versions (Jellybean, KitKat, iOS 7, etc.), carrier networks (Vodafone, EE, O2 etc.) and devices (Samsung Galaxy S4, S4, S5 iPhone 5, 5C, 5S).

Broad market statistics about mobile adoption are important to consider when formulating a device coverage strategy, but paying attention to market trends is not enough.

The most important question to answer in order to ensure sufficient coverage is “What devices are my target users using?” Analysing user traffic should help formulate a real-device strategy and give the most comprehensive coverage.

Building an app that doesn’t fail

In order to ensure application quality in the modern age of mobile, a new approach is required.

As a mobile developer, there are many components in building an app that needs to be considered to ensure its success. The worst nightmare for a developer to launch an app they spent hours, days week and months with bugs and errors that taint the user’s experience. The important thing is to prevent failure from the beginning.

It is critical that an app is launched with the same quality experience across all mobile platforms for every unique user. Mobile apps need to effectively perform well across a broad range of mobile devices, operating systems and networks. Pre-production testing is necessary to avoid common pit falls, including UI glitches, cross-platforms inconsistencies, poor performance and excessive resource consumption. A positive end-user experience is only possible when testing strategies can effectively navigate these common pit falls.

The findings from Perfecto Mobile’s survey show some quick fixes that can easily be implemented by any developer team:

Stop having your users as part of the QA team

One of the most alarming stats from the survey conveyed how users have become part of the testing team – and that’s not good! According to the data, nearly half of errors (44 percent) are uncovered by users. After all the work in building and testing, it is quickly diminished when a user is the one who is impacted and communicating the problem.

Users are taking to public reviews (i.e. Apple’s App Store, Google’s Play Store and Twitter) and sending direct feedback to the organisation about these errors. The types of errors that were most frequently reported included user interface issues (58 percent); performance (52 percent); functionality (50 percent) and device compatibility (45 percent). DevOps teams need to focus on a strategy to improve mobile app quality; using end users as testers cannot be part of the solution.

Improving Overall App Quality

In order to improve mobile app quality from the start of the app building process, we recommend a three-phased approach:

1.Use a cloud-based Device-as-a-Service platform. This will help to assure sufficient device and OS coverage, and can help teams focus on testing, not managing devices

2.Implement a tool that supports continuous, unattended testing, Automating device testing enables developers to test more with fewer resources and greater consistency. It’s also important to select an automation tool that can develop cross-device, keyword-based automation scripts and run them across real devices in parallel, while connected to live networks. The tool should be a scalable and dynamic solution which integrates with existing tools

3.Deploy a monitoring system providing early detection of performance issues before they impact users will help to improve quality for users.

Once the mobile strategy is set and the app is being developed, the key is to ensure its ability to perform and meet user expectations. Not accounting for the rapid changes in this tremendously fast-paced, fragmented market or failing to implement the proper automation tools that will ensure quality applications will guarantee user abandonment and app failure.

Developing an enterprise testing strategy

When developing a mobile strategy, a company’s application should not only be at the core but everyone from the developer team all the way up to executive leadership should have a very clear picture of what goes into building a consumer-facing application and be aware of the worst case scenarios that could arise during the process.

Testing is the key to ensuring mobile app success, and enterprises need to decide which devices to test their mobile apps by establishing the right mix to match their customers’ needs.

Here are some of the most important questions to ask when devising your strategy:

What devices are used the most?

In order to determine the right mix of devices for testing, enterprises need to research and understand what devices are in the market, what devices are being used by their customers and what new devices are coming to the market.

We find that currently enterprises are analysing their employee’s device pool for internal productivity apps as well as their end-users device pool to generate a representation of where mobile traffic will come from. As a result, data shows 49 percent of enterprise testing hours are dedicated to Apple. This percentage is higher than the overall UK market representation and much higher than the global mobile representation, but as mobile strategies improve and enterprises listen to their end users, device test selections could quite possibly vary from industry norms.

In addition, enterprises must be a step ahead of the market and keep continued tabs on relevant market analysis. If the newest phone or tablet, like the new Samsung Galaxy 6 smartphone, enters the market and finds its way into the company, apps must be supported it. Combining these two analyses are important in creating an optimal device mix for testing.

What about the legacy devices?

Issues such as network coverage, screen size, legacy devices and operation systems all need to be considered. According to our data collected, iPhone 5S/C and Google Nexus 5 are the fastest growing operating system versions in use. And, despite nearing three years old, the Samsung Galaxy S2 continues to be used by many customers. This device is not even available in mobile retail stores and stopped receiving Android OS updates over a year ago. However, it is still being used by many, making it important from a quality assurance perspective.

Will my app work in other countries?

As your market expands, your reach into different regions also grows and with that, your enterprise mobile strategy needs to ensure its mobile apps are being tested in all regions, with all carriers and networks. For instance, a function on your application may work in the United Kingdom but not in the USA. Knowing how to fix your app by testing locally will prevent the app from failing.

Does size matter?

There are a growing number of screen sizes and form factors to consider when building out the overall enterprise testing strategy. Screen resolution will impact how the app will be viewed by the end user on the various devices. We find the leading resolution of the market today is 640 x 1134 (4”), the popular android devices. Next was 640 x 960 (3.5”) resolution—the iPhone. There were over seven other types of resolutions that testers were using in their mobile testing strategy.

Apple vs. Android Battle: the surprising leader

Finally, despite the latest studies that show Android leading the consumer market with more than 80 percent market share globally, Perfecto Mobile’s data shows that enterprises in Europe and North America actually spend close to 50 percent of their time testing on iOS devices. Consumers may be leading the pack with their Android devices outside of work but enterprises often take longer to adapt to market trends.

Planning is the key to success

So, why do apps fail? The same reason most projects fail: lack of planning and strategy. One of the most critical protocols that should top the list but is often overlooked is mobile app testing prior, during and after launch.

A company’s mobile application can have all the bells and whistles to blow away the competition, but if it’s not available on all the devices their customers are using, doesn’t perform well or isn’t reliable they will face a number of implications, including app abandonment.(source:develop-online)