Mobile is the future. The numbers do not lie. The PC’s death is not a Mark Twain situation. While there are some who like to engage in semantic debates over whether or not a tablet/iPad is really a variety of PC, when it comes down to it mobile application development is set to become a much larger segment of consumer and enterprise software engineering.
Of course, with development comes testing. Well, this hasn’t always been strictly true with some extremely casual mobile apps – the drive to get them to market very quickly has often made quality assurance a cursory affair. However, it also turns out that exhaustive mobile testing is actually hard. Developers have to deal with the amazing proliferation of device. As mobile application development becomes more serious, engineers will have to do what they have always done – come up with clever solutions to the problem.
This report graphically illustrates the immense number of Android device configurations that developers may potentially have to test against. With a multitude of vendors, models (some of them fairly obscure), and different versions of the operating system, we are seeing a challenge that more than rivals the difficulty of validating software on highly-variable PC configurations.
Of course, the most basic way in which engineers are mitigating this problem is by focusing on platform-independent development, as with PhoneGap or HTML 5. Using rich cross-platform tools instead of focusing on native development actually solves many more problems than just test fragmentation, but the ability to test only one code base has always been one of the greatest headache-relievers for developers.
Also, when it comes to true native testing across mobile device types, there is a growing market of cloud-based test automation solutions.
The massive distribution of Android devices is actually key to its proliferation, and its relatively open nature has been fairly attractive to most developers. If we can just continue to get this test fragmentation issue under control, things will be wonderful.
