Tricentis has added the ability to test native iOS and Android applications to its Testim software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
The Testim platform used to be designed for testing web applications, but is now expanding as companies develop and deploy more native mobile applications. Testim Mobile Platform features include codeless creation of mobile tests to eliminate the need to write and maintain Appium, Espresso or XCUITest scripts and the ability to deploy mobile devices with the Tricentis Mobile Agent in minutes set up, configure and manage.
Additionally, applications can be uploaded to the cloud to enable collaboration between test teams when they decide to run tests on real or virtual devices. The DevOps team can also customize tests using JavaScript, branch tests, and run tests from a scheduler or continuous integration (CI) build.
Mav Turner, Tricentis CTO, said Tricentis intends to implement a consistent set of mobile testing services across its portfolio of testing platforms because mobile apps are equal, first-class citizens alongside web apps. The main reason for this shift has been the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led more companies to rely on outward-facing mobile apps to engage customers, partners and employees working remotely, he added .
Testing these applications is more important than ever because the cost of an outage — in terms of business impact — is much higher now that more organizations are relying on software to drive business processes, Turner noted.
The goal is to make it easier to test these applications during their development to ensure quality, he added. The challenge is that many developers don’t have a software engineering mindset. As a result, they need to rely more on testing platforms equipped with artificial intelligence to uncover issues related to things like scalability and security, Turner said.
Most organizations try to shift more responsibility for testing to developers to fix problems earlier in the software development lifecycle. It’s harder for developers to fix problems after an application is developed just because they’ve lost context. Testing platforms equipped with AI capabilities make it easier for developers to identify problems when writing code. Going forward, Tricentis expects to take advantage of generative AI platforms to simplify test authoring with a set of best practices that can be easily reused, Turner noted.
This approach doesn’t necessarily eliminate the need for a dedicated quality assessment test, but allows test teams to focus more time and effort on testing the application experience, rather than identifying lower-level bugs that many developers routinely make.
Over time, the quality of applications should steadily improve as many of the low-level bugs developers make are eliminated. That should improve everything from application security to user experience as applications are continuously updated. Meanwhile, organizations that embed tests into DevOps workflows reduce the number of issues that need to be fixed just before applications are about to be deployed.
