Shifting Mobile App Quality Into the Dev Build Cycles

It’s no doubt that quality is becoming a joint feature team responsibility, and with that in mind – it is not enough for traditional QA engineers to develop and execute test automation post a successful build, but actually the growing expectations now are from the Dev team to also take part and include as many tests as they can in their build cycles per each code commit.

Tests can be either unit, functional, UI or even small scale performance tests.

With that in mind, Dev team need a convenient environment that allows them to perform these quality related activities so they deliver better code faster!

Developers today are specifically challenged with the following:

Solving issues that come from production or from their QA teams that require a specific device or/and environment that’s usually not available for the dev team
Validation of newly developed apps or features within apps across different environments and devices as part of their dev process
Lack of shared assets for the entire dev team
Ability to get a “long USB cable” that enables full remote device capabilities & debugging

Perfecto just made available as part of its continuous quality lab in the cloud a set of new tools and capabilities that addresses these requirements and enable Dev team to accomplish their goals.

Perfecto’s DevTunnel solution for Android that is part of the recent 9.4 release is the 1st significant step toward helping developers accomplish more tests as part of the build cycle.

With the above challenges and requirements in mind, Perfecto has developed a unique solution called the “DevTunnel” which enables developers to get enhanced remote access to mobile devices in the cloud and perform any operation that they could have done with these devices if they were locally connected – things like debugging, running unit tests, testing UI at scale from within the IDE and more.

In addition, when referring to Android Dev activities, it’s clear that Android Studio & IntelliJ IDEA are the leading IDE’s to operate in. For that, Perfecto invested in developing a robust plugin that integrates nicely into the development workflow.

Espresso Framework

It’s no doubt that Espresso test automation framework is becoming more and more adopted across the developers for various reasons like:

Embedded into Android Studio play an important role for Android developers.
It’s very fast and easy to execute and receive feedback on Android devices

Espresso can be used within the Perfecto lab today in the following 2 modes

Locally – Execution through DevTunnel (see below)
Via Continuous Integration (CI) – using a command for Espresso test execution through Jenkins server

In the community series targeted to Dev Tunnel, you can learn more about the capabilities, use cases and get samples to get you started with the new capability.

To see this also in action, please refer to the video playlist that demonstrates how to get started and install DevTunnel, use Perfecto Lab within Android Studio with Espresso for testing and debugging purposes and more.