What would be your ideal talk to see at TestBash Mobile?

Weā€™re running our biggest call for papers yet and we have an opportunity to help speakers share their experiences on topics youā€™d like to hear about. To help spark some ideas for our future TestBash Mobile speakers, reply with your answer to this question:

What would be your ideal talk to see at TestBash Mobile?

Personally, Iā€™d love to see more about tools to assist exploratory testing Mobile apps. But what would you suggest?

Who know itā€™s might end up on the TestBash Mobile line up :slight_smile:

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Iā€™ve been a mobile tester for 8 years and I guess Iā€™m at this point totally blind for what new comers need information-wise.

I use several tools to improve my ā€œquality of lifeā€ as a mobile tester like:

  • Scrcpy to get my Android device on screen so I can test with keyboard and mouse.
  • run the mobile app against a Postman mock environment for contract testing, isolating app testing and easily faking odd API responses.
  • I let my developers code a debug menu in the test version of the app so I can switch backend environments, clear logged-in tokens, force a/b test responses, turn off and on the feature flags we have and such. Testability improvements can be found there, basically.
  • use Charles Proxy between the app and the ā€œreal APIā€ to fake response codes, response body.

Thereā€™s probably moreā€¦Would this be interesting for people to learn more about?

There are also topics that have become less of an issue over the last years:

I remember when I first started back in 2014, device fragmentation was considered an issue. You sometimes found exotic bugs on specific device configurations. Right now, Iā€™m not concerned about this at all. Why? Because we have better traceability tooling. I can check in Crashlytics what crashes we have. I can check in analytics what the top-10 devices + OS comboā€™s are.

And for exploratory testing I make sure to test on one small device + oldest supported OS in the simulator and itā€™s good enough. There are still tons of different Android devices, but itā€™s good enough to check for the worst possible situation (small screen, lowest supported OS) and be confident enough. I say this in the context of native apps, it might be different for Web apps that are supposed to look good on mobile, because then youā€™re back in browser-land.

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That all sounds super interesting and super useful for other mobile testers.

I saw you mentioned similar on Twitter so Iā€™ve shared the link here as there were some excellent responses to your thoughts and suggestions for others.

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Btw, thereā€™s some confusion going on with the term Mobile Testing when people replied to my tweet. Some people thought it meant I test mobile web apps, but I only test native apps.

Iā€™m guessing you want both types of mobile app testing covered in this Testbash?

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Interesting point. I think as long as it covers one of those domains (native/mobile web) then it should receive some positive reviews. It definitely doesnā€™t have to cover both as a requirement.

I almost wonder if a talk that discuss the differences and challenges between both domains might be useful for others?

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Maybe something on improving the testability of mobile testing. How do you get the most out of the process. Things like Scrcpy as Maaike mentioned are good but thereā€™s so many variations with mobile, 3-4-5G, signal drop in the middle of a process, landscape with a keyboard up (mostly impossible on phones) and many more. How do we make all those easier?

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Um, testing using own devices versus cost of using a cloud service - when I use a cloud service what is the network backhaul look like? Can i still hook into a local proxy and does the device have to be on a public network? How does one set up the mobile-cloud deviceā€™s VPN for non-public test farm assets and secrets? or do you have to limit what you test in cloud and split your testing efforts anyway to run most tests on-premisis?
Tools like scrcpy, vizor, apple simulators and android simulators, and how to run them optimally. Tools like gnirehtet or the apple ā€œcamera-connectorā€ to remove need to use dodgy wifi and use reliable transports for less flakeyness? These are topics I want to hear about, much else would just be slideware recycling for folk who have been active in the domain a long while and needing aha! moment inspirations.

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A few years ago I saw blind people using a mobile phone to plan a train ride. It was amazing to see people tapping on a black screen. Then they would state the number of platform from which their train would depart.

My ideal talk would have a title like: accessibility tested for mobile devices.

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