A common pain point for today’s development teams is procuring and testing the plethora of devices modern applications are now running on. To ensure the highest quality for their business-critical mobile apps, development teams require robust mobile testing solutions that address the complexities of multi-platform development in a highly fragmented mobile market. While solving just this problem would be “nice”, without integration back into the over-all application lifecycle a silo solution simply wouldn’t enable the agility and release intervals demanded by todays’ markets.
In a nut shell most development teams are or will be seeing the following problems when taking their applications to the device market:
- How to develop and test mobile products on a huge variety of REAL devices across carriers and geographies (i.e., device governance)
- How to leverage and extend existing ALM investments in tools, processes and resources to the mobile space (for source code management, continuous integration, deployments, monitoring and more)
- How to develop efficient mobile test automation based on device-agnostic and platform-agnostic scripting (as well as exploratory testing)
The Solution:
Integrating Team Foundation Server with Perfecto Mobile’s MobileCloud™ Platform
To meet the distinct challenges of mobile ALM (described above), Microsoft has partnered with Perfecto Mobile to provide seamless mobile development and testing extensions to Team Foundation Server based on Perfecto Mobile’s MobileCloud™ platform. Perfecto Mobile's unique cloud-based approach to mobile quality enablement, based on real devices and powerful automation capabilities, complements Microsoft's vision for and end-to-end mobile ALM.
This integrated solution enables enterprise developers and testers to quickly ramp up mobile activities in their existing visual studio environment, leveraging existing investment in tools, people, knowledge and processes.
Perfecto Mobile offers a cloud-based solution with thousands of REAL devices located securely around the world. This cloud-based approach is the most efficient way to ensure enterprise-grade solution that supports device governance, offshoring, security and scalability.
With Perfecto Mobile’s Visual Studio Templates development teams can easily extend product builds and manual and automated testing to 1000’s of devices from their existing Team Foundation Servers installations. This means, that any development team can use TFS to manage Windows 8, Android and iOS versions of a business application, while testing each version on the relevant set of real devices in the MobileCloud.
Benefits of Using Perfecto Mobile's Cloud-Based Solution
I was lucky enough to spend the last two weeks with members of the Perfecto Mobile development team and some of their benefits were readily apparent:
· Develop mobile products and test them on REAL mobile devices around the world
· Implement continuous integration across the organization which enable development, build, deployment and testing in a managed, scheduled and automated manner
· Assure high service quality across various mobile platforms and devices with a device-agnostic testing solution (Perfecto Mobile patented ScriptOnce™)
· Run exploratory manual testing on real devices (e.g., tests that involves incoming call or SMS during application run )
· Flexibility to develop and run unit testing on real devices and/or emulators in a scalable cloud based solution
· Enable domain experts to setup and administer the multitude of mobile platforms apps and services in the MobileCloud
· Collaborationand offshoring using real devices is done seamlessly through the MobileCloud
· Hardware based solution that enables all of the mobile E2E ALM activities without the need to jail-break/root your target devices.
· Provide management with detailed, high quality and rich media reports using Perfecto’s enhanced reporting suite that includes video and image-based reports.
Microsoft is now able to provide development teams a unique, cloud-based solution for mobile application development, testing and monitoring through the integration of Perfecto Mobile's industry-leading MobileCloud Platform. This end-to-end, cloud-based solution for mobile ALM enables enterprises to seamlessly extend their existing TFS environment to mobile, enabling them to develop higher quality apps and deploy them with confidence.