mobile testing

Android Debug Bridge (ADB) is a tool that is extremely useful for testers working with devices running the Android operating system. Despite its not particularly attractive interface, ADB has the widest functionality that allows effective interaction with gadgets.

Let us probably start with the widely known system and its store. In Google Play there are a lot of apps for everyone and everything. Some are with the immediate launch, which means that they mustn’t be installed on the device. Applications can be free and commercial. They all function only on devices with Android OS.

This article will examine four main approaches used in mobile application testing: in a cloud, based on emulation or devices, and crowdsourcing.

Testing mobile devices, one can face the problem when there are simply no devices required by the client to test on. Evidently, the first thing to be done – is to buy a device. But what if there is a big scope of devices to be tested on? Or, for instance, there is an urgency to check something on some precise device or platform, but there’s no device like that available? There are several variants on how to deal with such a situation and still perform testing: using emulators and simulators of mobile OS or usage of special services (also called «mobile device farms»). These are the subjects of this article.

Having basic knowledge about the work with various Android devices, you can always optimize your work. Even understanding the work principle of various functions, QA-engineers continue to make small mistakes which often influence time or quality metrics on the project.

One of the required skills of a QA engineer for testing mobile applications is obtaining the error logs or emergency shutdown reports (crash logs). We`ll look through the definition of log and its functions as well as some ways of obtaining the log from the Android devices.

While testing mobile applications and games a tester often comes across such a term as «a log».