Software Testing Blog

Creating new platforms like Android and iPhone is incredibly difficult, but it’s rare to hear stories about the challenges of building them unless you’re an insider.  There are probably dozens of good tales about developing these platforms that will take years to trickle out from behind closed doors.

So to hear stories like these, we must look back in time at the great development projects of the past.  Today the Computer History Museum announced that Apple has donated the source code for the original MacPaint application so that it can be downloaded by anyone.  MacPaint was a drawing application included with the first Macintosh that by today’s standards seems very simple, but in 1984 was completely revolutionary.  Many of the graphic design tools we take for granted, like the paint bucket and lasso select, were invented in MacPaint.

For developers and testers alike, there’s a lot to learn from the development of MacPaint.  Here are a few good stories:

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Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but I wanted to briefly revisit Apple’s  “Antenna-Gate” fiasco to drive home a very important lesson for companies of all shapes and sizes: Rely too heavily on “lab-testing” and you are virtually guaranteed to get burned.

We recently learned about Apple’s “Top Secret” design and testing lab thanks to MG Seigler of TechCrunch, who was given access to the state-of-the-art facilities just days before he mysteriously disappeared (kidding).

For some, the futuristic lab has conjured up images from the movie Star Gate, although I think it looks more like the Senate floor from Star Wars (episodes I through III). Here’s Seigler with a more technical description, as well as some insight into how Apple actually uses it:

Inside Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA, there are a collection of rooms that house 17 giant anechoic chambers. Basically, they’re rooms where no waves (sound or electromagnetic) can reflect off of anything, so there is absolutely no interference when it comes to wireless testing. Apple places their devices from iPhones to iPads in these chambers to ensure the performance is up to their standards.

So how do they test it? There are four stages. The first is a passive test to study the form factor of the device they want to create. The second stage is what Caballero calls the “junk in the trunk” stage. Apple puts the wireless components inside of the form factor and puts them in these chambers. The third part involves studying the device in one of these chambers but with human or dummy subjects. And the fourth part is a field test, done in vans that drive around various cities monitoring the device’s signal the entire time (both with real people and with dummies).

So where did Apple go wrong? And what can this controversy teach us about the difference between in-the-lab-testing vs. in-the-wild testing? Below the jump are four critical lessons that companies ignore at their own peril:

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The mobile wars are heating up! Microsoft is aggressively luring app developers for its Windows Phone 7 OS, while Android quietly gains market share. Blackberry expects big things out of OS 6, while The Big Apple deals with antenna issues, the yellow screen of death and the (remote) possibility of a recall. Interesting times indeed.

As part of our newly-launched “What Do uThink?” series (more on this shortly), we decided to ask our community which mobile OS they considered to be the best. Here are the results:

1. Android – 38%
2. RIM Blackberry – 28%
3. Apple – 16%
4. Symbian – 12%
5. Windows Mobile – 6%

“What do uThink?” is a weekly poll, where we’ll be asking the uTest community their preferences and feedback on various apps, operating systems and other technologies. To encourage voting, we’ll be awarding monthly and quarterly prizes to randomly selected participants. This quarter, for instance, we’re giving away an iPod Touch. The weekly polls open every Tuesday afternoon and voting takes place in the uTest Forums available to registered testers) as well as on our Facebook page. Got it?

Good. Now back to the mobile OS results…

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Take that Oracle! You just let Apple capture the lead in the 2010 Bug Marathon, otherwise known as Secunia’s Half Year Report (PDF). Worth the read, the 20-page report identifies the ten largest vendors with the most vulnerabilities (in all their products) and ranks them for the first half of 2010 – great entertainment for those who like to track bugs and keep score.

I mean, the World Cup is over and nobody really cares about baseball until September, so perhaps this could help fill the competitive void in the meantime…

Here are the current “standings”:

1. Apple
2. Oracle
3. Microsoft
4. HP
5. Adobe Systems
6. IBM
7. VMware
8. Cisco
9. Google
10. Mozilla Organization

As noted earlier, this is really more of a marathon than a sprint, so it would be useful if we went back a little longer than six months to crown a winner. Thankfully, Secunia did just that as part of their key findings:

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This past weekend, Vietnamese developer, Thuat Nguyen, hacked into 400 iTunes accounts to catapult his apps to best seller status. Nguyen accomplished this by buying his own Books apps — using the hacked iTunes accounts — which boosted his app ratings and launched his apps to the top of the list. The result? 42 of Nguyen’s apps were among the ‘Top 50 Books’ and up to $500 was deducted from each iTunes account.

After tracking down Alex Brie, a developer who first discovered the issues, PC World reported:

“After Brie’s calculations, Nguyen would have needed at least 3,000 hacked iTunes accounts to reach the ranking he had on Sunday in the App Store…[and] Brie speculates that to achieve such high ratings for his apps, Nguyen had to hack into Apple’s iTunes servers and skip the normal security steps, or run an automated scripted program.”

According to Engadget, Apple responded last night:

The developer Thuat Nguyen and his apps were removed from the App Store for violating the developer Program License Agreement, including fraudulent purchase patterns…

I was under the impression that the App Store approval process was brutal. So, how did this rogue developer get through? What additional security measures and tests need to be put into place to prevent account fraud?

Safe to say that mobile app development has greatly outpaced mobile app testing over the last few years. In other words, while the applications and platforms have seen tremendous technological advances (iPhone 4 bugs notwithstanding) the same cannot be said of mobile testing methodologies.

Case in point: The majority of mobile app developers remain overwhelmingly reliant on internal beta testing.

Here with proof is VisionMobile, who recently published a fascinating report on the growing mobile app ecosystem – a must-read for anyone involved in the space (developers, marketers, users, etc). From a QA point of view, the report further establishes that although testing innovations will ALWAYS trail those of development, the gap need not be so wide.

Here’s an excerpt that sums the whole thing up:

Internal beta testing is the most popular technique used by the vast majority (nearly 70 percent) of respondents, with beta testing with users and peer reviewing the next most popular techniques. Only 20 percent of respondents use focus groups or research of their own. Overall, North American developers are somewhat more sophisticated in their application planning, with 97 percent using beta testing as a standard part of application development and with broader use of a portfolio of planning techniques as well.

Yet, small development firms have limited means today to beta test and peer review their applications with a crosssection of representative users. Given the hundreds of thousands of mobile apps, we believe that efficient (crowd-sourced) testing of apps in a global market of users is considerably under-utilized. This presents an opportunity for the few solution providers in this segment – Mob4Hire and uTest.com, for example – but also for network operators, who can generate a channel for testing applications with end users, and provide an open feedback support system back to developers.

Other notable findings included:

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News has been all over the web the past few days about the AT&T and iPad security breach.  If you haven’t heard the details, in short a group of hackers discovered a vulnerability in AT&T’s private web APIs where one could send the ICC-ID from an iPad SIM card and AT&T’s servers would send back the corresponding owner’s email address – no authentication required. Since the ICC-IDs for the iPad are somewhat predictable, it was trivial for the hackers to send in thousands of semi-random guesses and collect any email addresses that came back. Some of those addresses were for people with addresses from domains like faa.gov and us.army.mil.

The hackers claim they reported the flaw to AT&T before sending their discovery to the fine folks at Gawker. AT&T, on the other hand, was not pleased to see their security problems appear in a popular tech blog at all, and had this to say in an email to their iPad customers:

On June 7 we learned that unauthorized computer “hackers” maliciously exploited a function designed to make your iPad log-in process faster by pre-populating an AT&T authentication page with the email address you used to register your iPad for 3G service.

…

The hackers deliberately went to great efforts with a random program to extract possible ICC-IDs and capture customer email addresses.

So who’s to blame for a problem like this? Is it AT&T, or do the hackers themselves deserve some of the blame for the public way they handled their disclosure? Give us your thoughts below.

Apparently once just wasn’t enough.  In the spirit of skinny jeans, New Kids on the Block, Pez dispensers and the VW Bug, the browser wars are baaaack.

Yes, the storm clouds are gathering.  Off in the distance, we can see Safari 5, IE9, Chrome 5 and Firefox 4 in various stages of envisioning, development or launch.  And just like the good ole days, the combatants aren’t wasting any time in taking aim at the competition.  MG Siegler over at TechCrunch outlines the initial skirmish in what figures to be a protracted battle among 800 lb. heavyweights.

For those who haven’t yet waded in and taken a side in this looming battle, here are a few product reviews (or previews) from some well-respected sources:

• Safari 5 review from ars technica
• Chrome 5 review from ComputerWorld
• IE9 preview from CNET
• Firefox 4 preview from Wired’s WebMonkey

We’re just beginning to experiment with the betas here in the uTest offices, but I’m curious to hear if any testers or devs have started using these new versions yet.  If so, drop us a comment and share your thoughts. What’s clear is that the latest round of browser wars will be fought along the lines of speed, tab management & placement, extension management and HTML5 support.

Almost like clockwork, Apple has consistently announced iPhone updates at their WWDC conference every June.  This year was no exception with Steve Jobs himself presenting the much awaited iPhone 4. Just as in the past, this year’s update introduces a number of interesting and must-have features for mobile developers and aficionados everywhere. Here are some of our favorites:

New Display – a Treat for Sore Eyes
Before today, I could not have told you the maximum amount of detail my retina could process in a given inch of space.  Now, thanks to Steve Jobs, I know: 300 dots per inch. That’s important because the iPhone 4 features an astonishing 960×640 display that resolves to 326 pixels per inch. That’s apparently more than what your retina can physically see, a fact that Apple took to heart when they decided to name this feature “Retina Display“.

More incredible is how this compares to the iPad. The iPad is a significantly larger device, but with a resolution of 1024×768 it only has 28% more pixels.

Of course, this also means that Apple developers now have three resolutions to worry about when they’re developing apps: iPhone 4, iPad, and iPhone/iPod 2G/3G/3GS.

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Apple’s recent changes to their developer agreement have unleashed a torrent of anger, hate, and divisiveness on the Internet (which, to my knowledge, has never happened before).  To summarize, Apple announced that the only languages that can be used to develop applications for the iPhone are Javascript, C, C++, and Objective C.  This change was seen as a slap in the face to Adobe who was developing a Flash-to-iPhone app converter that would have made it easy to migrate a Flash application to the iPhone.

Through all of this bitterness, many have argued that Flash is ready for the deadpool – some even cheering its demise.  I disagree.  Actually, I believe just the opposite is true.  Here are 5 reasons why Flash won’t be going away anytime soon.

1. HTML5 is still very immature.
HTML5 is everyone’s favorite choice as a Flash replacement. Read the comments sections on just about any blog or article about this topic, and HTML5 is often hailed as the greatest thing to happen to computing since Apple “invented” the mouse (with Xerox’s help).  The problem with HTML5 is that it’s still an immature and unfinished platform.  While it’s supported by the very latest versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, it’s not yet fully supported in Internet Explorer (although IE9 will bring support eventually). If most of the browsers on the web don’t yet support HTML5, it’s not a fully supported standard.

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