TestBash Mobile 2022 - AMA with Maaike Brinkhof

[dianadromey]

In this session, hosted by the great @ministryofmischief , @maaike.brinkhof answers questions about Mobile Testing, from our attendees live on the Main Stage.

@maaike.brinkhof lives in Utrecht, Netherlands and is an independent mobile tester and iOS developer. She loves testing because there are so many ways to add value to a team, be it by thinking critically about the product, working on the team dynamics, working to clarify the specs and testability of the product, getting the whole team to test with Exploratory Testing…the options are almost endless! She likes to help teams who are not sure where or what to test. During ‘analogue time’ Maaike likes to practice powerlifting, reading books and drinking different kinds of craft beer.

We’ll use this Club thread to share resources mentioned during the session and answer any questions we don’t get to during the live session.

[dianadromey]

Questions Answered Live:

1. So do ur snapshot tests cover the same things the espresso tests did? do you have the same faith in them? @pfitz
2. In your opinion, what’s the biggest miss most people make when testing mobile? @wildtests
3. What strategies to lower the bar for mobile app testing can you suggest for teams traditionally used to web app testing? @alg
4. Can you walk us through what it would look like on your product just to get set up to where you can start writing tests? @karentestsstuff
5. How do you handle the balance between needing consistent confidence the app is shippable, regular builds and slow app store approvals? @wildtests
6. I see you identify as a Metal Head. How does listening to music support your mobile testing efforts? @simon_tomes
7. What do you wish you knew when you first started doing automated testing? What advice would you give to people starting out in automation? (Anonymous)
8. This is fascinating … so what are the other ‘options’ for UI testing? @pfitz
9. What are your thoughts on scriptless mobile solutions and the current state of the market? Are we there yet? (Anonymous)
10. What kind of challenges or difficulties have you faced being a woman in a white male-dominated field and how did you overcome them? (Anonymous)
11. How can testers influence the design of the apps they work on so that: the UI is dumb; unit & int tests cover behaviour instead of implementation? @stuc
12. Not a question but: I work for a retailer and the thought that user journeys testing would be replaced by snapshot would terrify my bosses🙂 (tho I am onboard) @pfitz
13. Who should I be following on Twitter to learn more about mobile testing? Other than you, obviously? (Maddie)

Questions Not Answered Live:

1. Are there special Metal soundtracks when opening defect issues and do your devs know this? Test Pairing session could be fun @alexschnapper
2. Have you ever had anyone try to mansplain testing to you? (Anonymous)
3. Saw your talk, “We Scare Because We Care” and resonated with me. What advice do you have for those of us that scared too hard and it gets in our way. (Maddie)

[maaike.brinkhof]

@dianadromey

Saw your talk, “We Scare Because We Care” and resonated with me. What advice do you have for those of us that scared too hard and it gets in our way. (Maddie)

Hey Maddie,

This is tough as I do not know your situation and what’s blocking/stopping you from trying. If you feel you are too scared and you can’t figure it out yourself, therapy is a good option. I’ve been in therapy for depression and anxiety and it’s been very helpful. It taught me how to take smaller steps and break through my personal barriers.

[conrad.connected (Conrad Braam)]

We deleted all of our Espresso Tests!

We all here want to know how deleting 3000 lines of test code can hurt. I know this was throwing a way a year of effort, so how do we get help deciding to yeet our test suite if we have sunk far more effort than that into it already?
How hard was it to convince testers that we were going to shift to letting the devs test at the “model” level not at the UI level at all? How long did it take to change the app so that testing at the model layer and keeping the UI logic thin as a good way of building. Did you have to spin up entirely new tooling, and how hard was it to make that tooling work on IOS and Android?

[conrad.connected (Conrad Braam)]

Another question or clarification really on how do you get started fresh into a mobile testing project. Maaike highlights an important point, you need a mac machine. But in the AMA it is made to sounds like a quick thing to get started, it’s not. When you install Android Studio and the toolstack it will take about an hour to do it correctly if this is a task you only do once a year. When you are new to MacOS, getting Xcode just installed and at the correct version will actually take you most of a day if you are unlucky to have been given a mac that is not fully patched already. and then getting appium or any other mobile testing stack correctly configured the first time. will take anywhere from 1 day to 2 days. If you are using a cloud based test farm, I would guess similar kind of setting up time because of the extra security hurdles you inherit.
Another big time waster is buying test phones so the devs have devices in their hands, you need a few real devices anyway. That often takes up a whole day just to put orders in. Plan for this kind of time consumption to happen whenever you onboard a new team member or once a year whichever come first. Not saying it is hard, just that it takes time.