mobile

Creating a rich UX for mobile apps has gone from being a nice feature—to an absolute must. Genefa Murphy at HP discusses how agile development that incorporates collaboration between designers, developers, and testers goes a long way in building the apps that truly succeed in today's marketplace.

A new breed of mobile devices with sophisticated processors and ample storage has given rise to sophisticated applications that move more and more data and business logic to devices. The result is significant and potentially dangerous security challenges, especially for location-aware mobile applications and those storing sensitive or valuable data on devices. To counter these risks, Johannes Ullrich introduces and demonstrates design strategies you can use to mitigate these risks and make applications safer and less vulnerable. Johannes illustrates design patterns to: co-validate data on both the client and server; authenticate transactions on the server; and store only authenticated and access-controlled data on the client. Learn to apply these solutions without losing access to powerful HTML5 JavaScript APIs such as those required for location-based mobile applications.

The fragmentation and unpredictability of the mobile market present new challenges and risks for the business-and the development team. Testers must assure application quality across multiple platforms and help deliver new products almost every day. Using his experiences implementing automated mobile testing for clients, Yoram Mizrachi analyzes three fundamental mobile testing dilemmas encountered when enterprises go mobile. First, learn how and when to use emulators and real mobile devices, when to rely on each, and how many devices you will need in each stage of development. Second, understand the differences between testing on local devices versus remote devices in the cloud and how the differences affect test coverage, scalability, logistics, risk, and security liability.

Automating mobile testing faces challenges from a huge variety of devices, resolutions, user interactions, and operating systems. While there is no single solution in the market that can solve all your testing needs, Eing Ong has found a few innovative open source tools that stand out. Learn how Sikuli, ImageMagick, and MOET (Mobile End-to-end Testing) can address the limitations of instrumentation techniques and how you can leverage them individually or together to test your native mobile applications. Eing begins by demonstrating Sikuli's innovative visual technology for iPhone user behavior testing and MonkeyRunner for Android testing. Then she shows how you can use ImageMagick to crop and convert images as well as fine tune image comparisons for image verification.