This question is for those who have worked as a tester on an iOS or Android team and is aimed to understand what your release process is when a build is ready to be released.
At the moment, we spend a lot of time manually smoke testing before we submit the app to the App/Play Store for review.
I’d like to know
What process do you have in place when your build is ready to be tested?
How many manual tests are done?
How much focus is there on automation?
How long does it take for you to smoke test the app before submitting to the App/Play Store?
When I was testing mobile apps I was aware of the changes done in the code repository. Plus have a conversation with the devs.
Being a bit technically oriented I could tell what features, and components a change would affect.
I’d then do testing for the change, and potential risks/issues that the change incurred in the known places.
Go with a dev through your testing strategy, and ideas and get their feedback for things you might have not thought of.
Manual tests, 0.
Focus on automation, depends if I’d need some tool to support the testing; but generally very little.
Smoke test the app before submitting - isn’t a smoke test supposed to be done after a product change to see that the product is ready for testing and no major problems are in the way? Before submitting to stores, I’ve done a quick exploration of about 30 mins; as varying things might reveal things you’ve not thought of to test or automated before.
Oh dear. Yes. Welcome to the MOT community @atester .
Um, you don’t tell us what your app does, is it a mission critical app, a line-of-business app, or just a game, or a tool and does it consume web services. Does it have a Hybrid web/native aspect or is it entirely Native?
We choose which manual test cases we want to run by looking at automated test case gaps around the functional changes and around components and workflows that use the same components within the app.
That’s our test plan and will involve writing at least one more automated test most of the time. Usually a few days after we have an RC we either raise a stopper bug, or we go into a release readiness check meeting and thump out the release notes one more time and then send to the app store.
While the app store reviews, we have usually got one more day to run exploratory and stress tests and then we wait. We use manual deployment since we never deploy on Thurs/Friday
depending on store we manually increment rollout and monitor each day. about 7 days later we have 100% and we all move onto next.
How big your feature is, the environment complexity and so on is going to impact a lot, sometimes we have 2 weeks of testing, sometimes just 2-3 days. Your release cadence and cost pain point and amount of automation cover has a lot to say on the cycle time. Rollout takes 5 days, so you have a lot of time to regret not testing more thoroughly.