January 2018 – Continuous Testing and DevOps Blog

A Guest Blog Post by Alli Davis.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is one of the best phones that the smartphone manufacturer has in its lineup. The Note 8 is revered for its large and gorgeous looking display, a fast performance, and improved S-Pen among other features. Despite its release in the latter half of 2017, the Samsung Galaxy Note has already received gadget of the year awards and other accolades. Here’s what the awarding bodies has to say about the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.

Exhibit Tech Awards

The Note 8 received the Flagship Smartphone of the Year Award at the Exhibit Tech Awards in India. It received the award for its screen size battery life as well as a great camera. The award is the most recent one for the Note 8, having come in late December of 2017.

Considering the place Samsung was with the Note 7, the Note 8 is nothing short of an amazing comeback. After the previous iteration’s battery issues, some reports suggested that the company might be considering ending the Galaxy line with the 7. But coming out with the next generation 8 proved to be the right move.

India Mobile Congress

Just over one month after the Samsung Galaxy Note came out in August, the India Mobile Congress awarded the device with its Gadget of the Year honor. The inaugural event awards honor innovations and initiatives designed to better the ICT ecosystem. The ICT ecosystem refers to everything that goes into making a technological environment for a business or government. This includes things like policies, processes, applications, and of course technologies.

Samsung introduced the Galaxy Note 8 in the Indian marketplace as an effort to give consumers the opportunity to do more with their smartphones. Upon receiving the award, Asim Warsi, the Senior VP of Mobile Business at Samsung India confirmed the effort to improve lives in India. Introducing the phone into the premium sector of the market has only strengthened the company as a leader in that category. It leads the way not only with a great screen and camera system but also with Samsung Pay and Samsung Knox, the security feature of the phone.

MySmartPrice Mobile Of The Year Awards

The MySmartPrice awards also honored Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 in December 2017. The device received My SmartPrice’s Flagship Smartphone of the Year 2017 Award for the most feature packed phone in this category. Its 6.3 OMLED screen and camera features captured the attention of people for the award. It was slightly out edged by the iPhone X and Google Pixel 2 in areas such as the screen and camera, But the phone manages to hold its own among the stiff competition in the marketplace.

The Galaxy Note’s Snapdragon core processor makes it a very good option for day to day use according to reviews and performs relatively well in low light conditions. The reduction in price also makes it stand out amongst the competition. In the higher-end phone market, Samsung prices itself quite well for the features it offers.

At a time when Samsung could have ended the Galaxy Note line forever after the Note 7’s battery issue, the company persevered with its Note 8 and the risk paid off. In a highly competitive marketplace, Samsung still produces a Note that is productive, powerful, and innovative with features and a price that a wide variety of customers can enjoy. With all of the Accolades that the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 has received, the future looks bright for future iterations of the phone to come.

Alissa B. Davis is a freelance writer who has a passion for writing about technology and stories about her community. Read her latest stories at http://alissabdavis.com/

How to Implement CT?

A risk-based approach means sufficient coverage of the right platforms (Browsers and Mobile devices) – such platform coverage eliminates business risks and assures high user-experience. Such platform coverage is continuous maintenance requirements as the market changes.

Continuous Testing needs an automated end-to-end testing that integrates existing development processes while excluding errors and enabling continuity throughout SDLC. That principle can be broken accordingly:

Implement the “right” tests and shift them into the build process, to be executed upon each code commit. Only reliable, stable, and high-value tests would qualify to enter this CT test bucket.
Assure the CT test bucket runs within only 1 CI –> In CT, there is no room for multiple CI channels.
Leverage reporting and analytics dashboards to reach “smart” testing decisions and actionable feedback, that support a continuous testing workflow. As the product matures, tests need maintenance, and some may be retired and replaced with newer ones.

Stable Lab and test environment is a key to ongoing CT processes. The lab should be at the heart of your CT, and should support the above platform coverage requirements, as well as the CT test suite with the test frameworks that were used to develop these tests.

Utilize if possible artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)/deep-learning (DL) solutions to better optimize your CT test suite and shorten the overall release activities.

Continuous Testing is seamlessly integrated into the software delivery pipeline and DevOps toolchain – as mentioned above, regardless of the test framework, IDEs and environments (front-end, back-end, etc.) used within the DevOps pipeline, CT should pick up all relevant testing (Unit, Functional, Regression, Performance, Monitoring, Accessibility and more), execute them in parallel and in an unattended fashion, to provide a “single voice” for a Go/No-Go release – that happens every 2-3 weeks.

Lastly, for a CT practice to work time after time, the above principles needs to be continuously optimized, maintained and adjusted as things change either within the product roadmap or in the market.

Happy CT!