As we settle into autumn, we’re taking the time to start some new traditions. This is LogiGear magazine’s first issue on SMAC. SMAC—social, mobile, analytics and cloud. We will be doing more issues in the next few years on these topics since so much of the product world is moving to this development stack.
There are many ways that we can talk about SMAC. To get a better understanding of what our testing job is like using these technologies, we will cover many of these in this issue. We talk about SMAC being the natural evolution of mobile testing. Since mobile has evolved into a platform, products are being introduced rapidly. From enterprise apps, games, banking, brokerage and Financial Services with many using Internet of things devices: mobile no longer means mobile phone; it now also means mobile control device.
We also know now that the number of APIs available to be incorporated into products continues to grow exponentially. Most organizations, including test teams, saw this on the horizon and were hopefully preparing for this inclusion in their product lines.
The biggest challenge I see for test teams is how quickly the majority of our work has moved to the cloud. Many tools are not ready for cloud use, and many teams don’t yet understand the differences with testing in the cloud, or testing cloud services, or cloud stored data. It may take some teams awhile to see the ramifications of moving the testing environments and production environments outside of the organization’s control into the cloud. This will impact in a very positive way, how easy it is to get access to great testing environments. The biggest selling points for cloud adoption are the full, quick and easy access to any kind of environment you want on demand—staging environments, production environments—all of these are now on demand.
The great unknown in the SMAC stack is analytics—- at a minimum for test teams the use of analytics will impact how testers design tests. Introducing various technologies like A/B testing and dynamic product design will make test case design more fluid and just in time (JIT).
This is truly an amazing time to be working in product development, from mobile controllers, to the Internet of Things, to the vast array of easily accessible web service/APIs; all this product development rapidly delivered using DevOps development paradigms makes getting new, innovative, and exciting products into customers’ hands quickly—with the benefit of connected hardware things—the most exciting time I have ever worked in software development. With testers in most organizations being the last line of defense for quality before your product gets in your customers’ hands—using analytics for product in test design the importance and value of testers in development organizations has never been so great.
Learn a lot about these technologies: they will be here for a while! Have fun.
In this issue, we feature the second part of our Continuous Testing series. Alister Scott has also returned as our Blogger of the Month to tell us about eight lessons he’s learned in Mobile App testing, and Daniel Knott warns us about the ten mobile app testing mistakes to avoid. This issue of TA corner features how to use TestArchitect in your mobile testing strategy, and Leader’s pulse discusses how to get your test teams the skills and strategies they need to test in this new wave of SMAC. We also have two infographics for you, one that is essentially a SMAC 101 infographic (what to test, and the how) and a history of IT and how it relates to SMAC.
