DeviceAnywhere Blog

DeviceAnywhere Forum Has Been Revamped and Relaunched

A little cross-promotion between the DeviceAnywhere Test Center blog and the DeviceAnywhere Forum!

The DeviceAnywhere Forum is a discussion board where DeviceAnywhere users and prospective users can post questions and engage in discussions with other DeviceAnywhere users. (The blog is still the place to go to see info about new handsets we've launched, and we'll continue to post articles on interesting new features or general commentary on mobile application testing.)

We have two main forum areas. The first is everything about DeviceAnywhere products. We're expecting here any and all questions about how to use features, requests for new features, and comments on whether a feature is liked or disliked, etc. We also have a brand new section focused on our Test Automation product. Our product team and support team will actively be monitoring this site, and questions or comments will be responded to within one business day.

The second area is for questions and discussions around devices, mobile operators, operating systems, etc. Any question related to developing or testing mobile applications is fair game. We at DeviceAnywhere over the years have gained a lot of knowledge in this area, and will answer every question we can. We hope that our forum users will also offer up their knowledge and experience and help others navigate the often complex and confusing world of testing and certifying mobile applications. We may also have some guests from partner companies (the operators and manufacturers) lend their expertise from time to time.

If you'd like to check out the new forum, click here!

Using Virtual USB Long Distance

We first wrote about the vUSB feature back in May, in this blog post. For those of our customers currently taking advantage of the vUSB feature, or interested in doing so, I wanted to share some additional guidelines on effective use. vUSB is sensitive to latency. In actuality, it is not the feature itself, but the application you may be using that is sensitive to latency. Many applications that communicate over USB were designed to expect a quick response (after all, it is a local connection - no reason it shouldn't be fast). But since the vUSB feature makes your computer think that the phone is locally plugged in when in reality it may be thousands of miles away, the latency of communication to the device may be higher than what the application expects and can handle.

Since max communication response time is a very application-specific parameter, and response time is dependant on many variables (like bandwidth) it is difficult to give guidelines as to what will work and not work through vUSB. But as a general rule, if you are utilizing a device located in the same continent, it should work fine. Going back and forth between Europe and the US should also be fine, as the internet routes are fairly good. Otherwise, if utilizing vUSB while testing on devices on different continents, you may find that it works only intermittently, if at all.

In the next release of the product, due to be deployed into Test Center in October, we will include a utility that will perform a ping test and tell you the round-trip time between your computer and a given device. This information can help in determining whether vUSB will be an effective tool for that device. In the meantime, you can check the actual location of any device in the device bank by right-clicking on the device (it does not need to be acquired) and selecting Properties. As a rule all UK operator package devices are located in the UK, all US operator packages are located in the US, etc. Lastly, if you are generally experiencing high latency, please contact DASupport@deviceanywhere.com. We have found that certain antivirus software for instance can cause delays, and our support team can diagnose and resolve these issues.

If you have any questions about vUSB, or are interested in trying it out, please write to robstler@deviceanywhere.com.

DeviceAnywhere Partner, Sprint, announces its 2009 Developer Conference, Oct 26-28, in Santa Clara California

Sprint's annual Developer Conference will be held on Oct 26-28, in Santa Clara, California. Participants who register by August 1st will receive $100 off the normal registration free! To register, go to: http://developer.sprint.com/devcon2009

From Nathan Smith, Group Manager of the Sprint Application Developer Program - two reasons that anybody interested in mobile development should attend:

1) We will cover anything and everything related to mobile development (and it's more than application development)

• Learn best practices for all supported Sprint mobile device software platforms (Android, Windows Mobile, Mobile Java, Palm Web OS, RIM Blackberry, Mobile Browsers, etc)
  
• Network and Product Service Capabilities: LBS (learn why Frost and Sullivan continually recognize Sprint as the LBS leader in the US), Messaging (MMS, SMS), Streaming Multi-Media Best Practices, Sprint Developer Sandbox (first sandbox exposing free network services such as LBS, Network, Presence to developers)
  
• OSGI: Come see our demos that will show what a services middleware on the device can do
  
• M2M/Embedded: Sprint has over 300 non handsets, certified to run on the Sprint Network, an example is the Amazon Kindle. Come learn how you can get your device running on the Sprint network.
  
• 4G: Sprint is the first US carrier to roll-out 4G services. Come learn about our plans and see 4G services running live

2) We will be covering how developers can monetize their content

• Working with Sprint's partner channels to take your content to market
  
• Learn about new payment mechanisms
  
• Submit to participate in the 'Lightning Pitches' to present your idea to Sprint (it can be an app, M2M, or any other relating to mobile/wireless technology or business opportunities)
  
• You can also network with a lot Sprint's core ecosystem partners including handset manufacturers, enterprises, ISV, mobile content providers, and many others.

Register at: http://developer.sprint.com/devcon2009

Connect your PC to DeviceAnywhere devices with Virtual USB

Virtual USB (vUSB) is the feature within DeviceAnywhere that allows you to connect your PC to the DeviceAnywhere device that you have acquired within DeviceAnywhere Studio using the USB protocol.  Long requested by the developers in our user community, we have rolled this feature out to a wider set of devices and are currently soliciting Beta users to help us test the performance of the feature. 

 

How does it work?

 

The vUSB connection is initiated by the client machine by right-clicking on the device, choosing hardware controls, and then “Connect to Virtual USB Port.”  Note, this command will only be visible on devices that support vUSB. 

 

After the vUSB connection has been completed, a confirmation message will appear.

 

 

At this point, the data cable will now need to be connected, allowing the vUSB connection to detect the data cable.

 

 

Once the data cable has been connected, the DeviceAnywhere device will appear on the local machine, as if it had just plugged into the local machine.  In this example, the device has been recognized as a Mass Storage device by my PC.

 

Why would I want to connect to a DeviceAnywhere device via vUSB?

 

A USB connection to your host PC is sometimes the only way to upload an application to a device.  In order to test your client application, your test deployment options would normally be limited to devices that you had on-hand.  Now you can make that same deployment directly to a DeviceAnywhere device that supports vUSB. 

 

Similarly, you can also use the vUSB connection to hook up your debugging tools, like Android's DDMS, to the DeviceAnywhere device you've acquired in DeviceAnywhere Studio.  These tools will recognize the device as if it were directly plugged into your host machine. 

 

Lastly, vUSB can expose the DeviceAnywhere device as a ‘mass-storage USB device’, allowing you to transfer files to and from the device’s file system.  This flexible mechanism could be useful for pulling other types of debugging information from the device or for loading content to a particular area on the device (such as the Storage Card instead of Main Memory). 

 

I like it, how do I get started?

 

If you are interested in using vUSB for development or testing send me an email at  jsarreal@deviceanywhere.com expressing your interest and a short description of how you plan to use vUSB.  Once part of the Beta group, your account will have access to a special package of devices currently enabled with vUSB which includes a good mix of Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone, S60 and J2ME phones.  You'll also receive 10 free hours of usage on this package so that you can explore and experiment with the feature without using your subscription's credit hours.

 

In return, you would agree to participate in a brief and painless call from us to gather your feedback about the feature.  Please note, that vUSB is currently only supported on host machines running DeviceAnywhere Studio running Windows XP. 

 

I look forward to hearing from you!

 

-John (Sr Product Manager at DeviceAnywhere)

DeviceAnywhere Customer Survey

Recently the product team sent out a feedback survey to our customers. We do this at least once a year (this is the third time we've sent out our survey), to ensure that we are aware of our customers' needs and current attitudes about DeviceAnywhere. The product team also reaches out to customers directly over the phone and gathers feedback indirectly through our sales and support teams; all of these methods work, but surveys are obviously the best for reaching a wide cross-section of users with a consistent set of questions.  We received over 300 responses (thanks to everyone who responded!) and I wanted to share some of the results that might be of interest to the mobile industry as well as our customers.

The Results

One question I always like to ask is what mobile business our customers are in. With three surveys now under our belt, it's also possible to see some interesting trends. In the following question, respondents were asked to pick the one answer that was closest to what their company does.   

Now while these results are indicative of our customer base, and not necessarily the mobile industry as a whole, I still found it very interesting to see that Mobile Internet was the most popular answer, and that Mobile banking/payment came in third, but increased considerably vs. the last 2 years!

We also asked about the wireless technologies our customers utilize. Interestingly, most of the answers got fewer responses as a percentage of the total than last time, with the exception of SMS. One possible reason for this is that as the industry grows, some mobile companies are beginning to specialize.

We see this with some of our customers who are focused on developing for certain smartphone platforms, like BlackBerrys or the iPhone. BREW saw the biggest % decrease - this may be a function of our expansion into Europe; more European developers and European phones likely means a smaller percentage of BREW developers in our customer base.

In this last posted question, we asked how our customers use DeviceAnywhere. While the traditional use is QA of mobile applications and content, customers are using DeviceAnywhere for a variety of other reasons as well, including product demos and marketing presentations.

This is a theme that has been prevalent in a lot of our discussions with customers; that as phones and apps become more functional but also more complex, the need for online demos and tutorials increases. That's the idea behind our DeviceAnywhere Consumer product, which provides interactive demos of phones and applications that can be hosted on any website.

Thanks again to our survey respondents; I personally read every single response and your input and ideas greatly influence the features and improvements we make to DeviceAnywhere on an ongoing basis.

-Rachel (VP Product Marketing at DeviceAnywhere)

Are you ready to automate your mobile testing?

Last week I made the case for automating your mobile testing using DeviceAnywhere Pro.  Automation projects, however, will fail quickly if the testing team does not have some key pieces in place before beginning the automation effort.  How can you tell if your group is ready?  Reviewing the state of your test cases is a good place to start. 

Your team’s test cases do not need to be formally stored within a fancy test case management system.  Excel spreadsheets and Word documents can be just as effective at capturing this information as a dedicated test case management tool.  What is important, however, is that your test cases have the following characteristics and attributes which are key for any successful automation project:

1) Detailed Instructions

• Keeping detailed instructions helps to reduce confusion when automating test steps.  Vague instructions may lead an automated test developer to script a testing path that is rarely used but convenient for scripting.

2) Modular Format

• Modular test cases increase automated testing efficiency.  Modular test cases are designed to be both reused and combined with other test cases so that they fulfill specific testing goals.  Modularizing your test cases greatly eases the maintenance of your full set of test cases.  When the procedures for one of the component test cases changes, you can simply change the instructions in one place instead of having to revise all the test cases that execute that script.

3) Testing Data Separated From Testing Instructions

• Decoupling test data from the test execution instructions improves the maintainability of your test cases since changes to testing data (e.g., new login credentials or a new staging server URL) can now be changed in one place and referenced whenever they are needed.  This saves you from having to replicate that data change in every test case that uses it. 

4) Clearly Defined Preconditions

• Well defined preconditions (or starting state) make it easy for tester or scripts to validate whether or not the test steps that follow are relevant.  When used properly, testers do not become sidetracked by issues that are rooted in configuration, device or environment-related problems that are unrelated to the system being tested.  A starting state is also a nice organizational aid during automation since test cases steps can be associated to specific device states.  When you then reuse automated test steps, the defined starting states make it clear which automated steps can be chained together.  

5) Sharply Defined Expected Results

• Discrete, well-defined expected results make your automation results easier to interpret. Ideally, your test results will clearly show what step the automated test failed on, what result was expected and what was actually received (and thus caused the failure).  Vague success criteria will lead to inconsistent automated test results that will eventually be hard to interpret and evaluate.

Once your group has test cases that have these attributes, you can be confident that you have the right foundation to start automating.  Of course, there are other “best practice” considerations to keep in mind as you embark on a test automation project, but evaluating your test cases using these criteria will give you a good initial indication for how prepared you are to do more with less.

Do more with less - automate your mobile testing

Do more with less.  In today’s economic climate, you hear this slogan echo over TV and radio airwaves and from management during company announcements.  And, since you’re reading this blog, you’re probably wondering, “How do we apply this mantra to our mobile content or applications testing?” 

Automating your test execution achieves this productivity boost by giving you a scalable mechanism to increase the coverage and consistency of your testing.  In the non-mobile world, automated testing tools are robust and plentiful.  Open source tools such as Selenium and Watir are gaining traction as Web 2.0 apps proliferate at a blistering pace.  Commercial desktop automation tools are already quite mature and innovations such as tools to involve non-QA staff in the quality management process (see HP’s Business Process Testing whitepaper as an example) keep coming. 

Alas, in the mobile world, the diversity of devices, platforms, and operator customizations impose serious challenges for mobile test automation tools.  DeviceAnywhere’s hardware-based approach for providing remote access to handsets offers a compelling solution for this fragmentation problem.  Although the service doesn’t eliminate the device diversity, it standardizes the way that testers interact with devices, which is the crucial first step for scalable automation. 

DeviceAnywhere Pro is our automation framework that leverages these standardized device interactions to offer a quick path to automating mobile testing.  Despite its intuitive interface and drag and drop scripting environment, your team needs to be properly prepared in order to make the most of the tool.  How can you tell if your team is ready?  I’ll cover that in next week’s post – stay tuned! 

- John (Sr. Product Manager at DeviceAnywhere)

Taking the pain out of usability testing

It's come to our attention that some customers have figured out ways to use our product in ways we didn't even think about - always a pleasant surprise. For those of you thinking of usability testing of your mobile app, you've probably realized that you have some in-house options:

1. Print out mock-ups of your screens and show them to your potential users.  How's this going to go? You show your users a printout of a mocked up screen, they tell you what button they would press if it was the real device and you show them another printout? Not a very fluid experience and unlikely to produce very useful feedback.
2. Load the app on a device and then look over the subjects shoulder as they navigate your app. Problem: people get self conscious when you are watching them. They start thinking harder. Buttons that may not have been noticed during a relaxed casual session are now noticed because your user is thinking really hard about the task.
3. Load the app on a device and set up a camera over the user's shoulder. Again, you're making the subject nervous. And really, who wants to deal with setting up cameras, running wires, etc.

But the biggest problem with all of the above methods is that your test subjects will be using your handset which is likely not the same handset they already own. They will have to learn a new device interface as they are learning the UI of your mobile app. You've just increased their learning curve. Maybe your app is pretty usable, but having to learn a new device UI during the usability test makes your app appear harder to use.

So, why is DeviceAnywhere growing in popularity for usability testing? Probably because the in-house options aren’t quite cutting it. With DeviceAnywhere:

1. You can give your users the same device they already own. DeviceAnywhere has over 2000+ devices in our data center so it's not hard finding one your test subject is familiar with.
2. You don't have to breathe over the user's shoulder. DeviceAnywhere allows you to share a device with another user remotely. Your engineers can sit in another room (or in another country!) and silently snoop on the usability session.
3. You can record the entire session and play it back later to analyze your user's actions. This is invaluable as you redesign your application UI.

Give it a shot and let us know how it goes.

-Nick (Sr Product Manager at DeviceAnywhere)

International Expansion

As many of our DeviceAnywhere customers are aware, while we originally launched our DeviceAnywhere service in the US, we’ve been more than just a US-focused company for a while. Our first DeviceAnywhere EU location (London) was launched in early 2007, and now DeviceAnywhere provides access to devices in seven countries. And we have customers from countries all over the world as well, representing India, Denmark, Japan, Brazil, Australia and South Africa just to name a few.

Over the next few weeks and months, we are putting even more focus on supporting our international customers, and I wanted to share some of the efforts going on that will result in exciting new features and capabilities for DeviceAnywhere.

• New Currency Support: We now have the ability for customers to pay in Yen, Euros, and British Pounds. Exchange rates may be all over the place, but now your bill doesn’t have to be! Whichever currency you choose to pay in, your price will stay consistent in that currency. All customers have a one-time opportunity to choose the currency they would like to pay in, either upon initial sign-up, or for our existing customers, by contacting dabilling@deviceanywhere.com. If you would like to view the price list in Yen, Euros or Pounds, go to https://www.deviceanywhere.com/index.aspx?sid=4 and choose the currency in the drop down near the top of the page. The package prices and hourly prices in the below tables will update to the chosen currency.

• Mobile World Congress: This event, hosted in Barcelona February 16th – 19th, is a big focus for our marketing team. We will not only have our own booth (#2A17), but we’ll also be featured in 5 different partners’ booths: Telefonica (#8B178 & 8B185), O2 and O2 Litmus (#8B178 & 8B185), Accenture (#CY15 3-0 Courtyard), mBlox (#1F45), and Enough Software (#7A43). DeviceAnywhere is also sponsoring a Mobile Jam Session. And, at this event we’ll be giving out promotions for the DeviceAnywhere service on all of our European packages.

• More Devices: Over the last year, we’ve added a lot of new devices to our device bank. The UK now has 313 devices, France has 162, and Germany has 186. Including the 40+ we just launched in Spain, that’s over 700 devices in Europe. And these deployments will continue to grow. In fact, stay tuned for more new carrier announcements coming soon for Spain. And keep in mind - if we don’t have the device that you need, you can always request it by sending an email to our support team: dasupport@deviceanywhere.com.

• Web Site Localization: We have started the process of localizing our DeviceAnywhere.com website. The first languages supported will be Spanish, French and German. Look for this feature to launch during Mobile World Congress.

• Product Localization: We’ll also be offering Spanish, French and German versions of our product, around mid-year 2009.

• More Local Sales Offices: DeviceAnywhere now has local sales staff in England, France, and Germany, with Spain coming soon.

We hope these improvements to our service will enhance your experience with DeviceAnywhere!

-Rachel

The Mobile World Is Changing; We’d Better Keep Up!

Hi everyone. We thought we’d mix it up a bit and have some other DeviceAnywhere folks contribute to the blog. So expect to be hearing more from me and the other members of the product team going forward, interspersed with Faraz’s entries.

I’ve been working in the mobile space for over 10 years now, and one of the reasons I first got into mobile is just as true today: it’s always changing. One of the major changes of the past year is the infamous App Store trend, first mainstreamed by Apple. Now you can’t go a month without a manufacturer, operator, or other mobile content channel announcing it is launching some type of application portal.

With our DeviceAnywhere service, we’ve traditionally aligned by mobile operator. It’s the way we sell it (by package), and even the way we display a lot of our information. (With over 1500 handsets, dozens of operators, and 6 countries offered, we need to be more and more conscious of displaying information in an organized and useful manner!) But increasingly it seems that operator alignment no longer meets the vast majority of mobile developers’ needs. Because the size of the mobile data market has finally achieved critical mass, and manufacturers, platform vendors, and other content delivery channels are creating storefronts that serve a large audience, some companies are beginning to specialize and target their mobile offerings. And with the advent of the App Store, sometimes these products are not targeted at a specific carrier network. It is not uncommon to find a company focused on smartphones, or MS Mobile, or Motorolas, etc.

As a result, we’re changing things up a bit. In the last year, we have launched the Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Forum Nokia, and BlackBerry VDLs, and created packages aligned with these companies. We’ve recently beefed up all of these packages, adding many more handsets. Going forward, you will see even more packages aligned by manufacturer, by operating system, or other special interest. Many of the actual handsets we offer will be available through more than one package (e.g. the Verizon Motorola V3M can be found in both the Verizon package and the US/CA Motorola package), and you will be able to choose the packages that best align with your product strategy. We won't stop aligning around operators - this still works for the majority of our customers - but we will be providing more alternatives.

 

So - stay tuned for all sorts of new DeviceAnywhere packages. And if you have a target market that we are not currently addressing, please drop us a line at features@deviceanywhere.com (this alias comes to the product team) and let us know what you think.

-Rachel (VP Product Marketing at DeviceAnywhere)