Automated Testing With Visual Studio App Center

Automated Testing With Visual Studio App Center

Automated Testing With Visual Studio App Center

With the huge growth in the usage of smartphones in the last few years, the demand for mobile applications has exploded. Hundreds of new apps are being released each day and with so many of them to choose from, if consumers are not 100% satisfied with your app, they will not give it a second chance. One major reason for the failure of apps is insufficient testing, any app that has not been tested properly may well have a plethora of bugs that can affect the user experience.

Frustratingly, it is almost impossible to ensure your final product is completely bug-free before it reaches the customers but with successful testing, all major kinks can be ironed out before initial release. One method commonly used is trawling through the app and manually testing it. Not only is this incredibly time consuming it is also unreliable due to the huge risk of human error; being a long and monotonous task, mistakes are often made.

Automated testing, writing a computer program to test your software for you, is another possibility. This is a great option and much more reliable than manual testing. However, for mobile apps, there is a huge variety of devices and versions available which all need to be tested and bug-free before release. In order to achieve this, you need every device you plan to test on to hand, which can get very costly.

Simulations can be used instead of physical phones to test apps but simulations are not the real thing. Although these tests can be effective, they are never perfect. Simulations look and behave like the phones but are fundamentally different and as a result, the app could look different on the physical device.

For these reasons, StyleTech opt to use Microsoft Visual Studio App Center Test. App Center Test, a cloud-based solution, allows you to run automated tests on over 2,000 physical devices all in one place, with no simulations. This enables anyone to ensure that their application performs correctly and efficiently across a variety of devices with minimal effort. As a result, we don’t need to buy numerous devices and don’t have to spend the time individually testing each one. We write tests alongside the bespoke mobile app and when ready, we send it off to Visual Studio App Center Test where it is tested for us. This allows our team more time to focus on quality development.

As the app is tested, App Center Test makes it clear where any issues arise so we can get to work fixing them before being passed on to the customer. Moreover, once the tests are completed App Center Test sends back clear reports detailing the results of each, along with videos so you can see exactly where issues occur. With the huge amount of devices App Center Test holds, it is more likely to find device-specific issues. There are so many devices on the market it isn’t feasible for a developer to have access to every single one and App Center Test allows developers to find phone-specific bugs that they couldn’t have otherwise.

Visual Studio App Center Test is the next generation of Xamarin Test Cloud. Because of this, you can test mobile applications while also integrating push notifications and make use of new and improved features such as device sets, crash reporting, and user analytics. Not only can we test our bespoke mobile apps, but we can also use the new features to deliver apps to our clients faster.

These benefits are passed on to the customer as they receive more robust and reliable applications in a timely fashion. Due to the time saved, our bespoke mobile apps can be developed even with a tight deadline as reliable testing is done for us.


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