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Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
Author: Shivani Sinha
She is a Product Marketer with over 9 years of diversified experience across content, branding, and product marketing. Her experience ranges from global brands to nimble startups. She is a custodian of Brand & Content, telling stories about the brand that delights customers and provides compelling business value.
Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
Monitoring Mobile App Performance
With the myriad of apps cluttering our smartphone screens nowadays, it has become all the more important to optimize app performance. While going through your daily routine, you certainly don’t want useful apps hanging up or worse still, crashing abysmally.
In this post, you’ll know how app monitoring performance works so that you can get the best out of your smartphone software.
What is application performance management? 10 APM features that we can tick right off our fingers are:
- Troubleshooting of disruption of frequent speed and uptime
- Monitoring of the speed at which transactions are performed by end-users and systems
- Use of a single integrated suite of software tools
- Load-testing
- Synthetic monitoring
- Real-use monitoring
- Root-cause analysis
- Web-performance monitoring, to gauge app speed and uptime
- An end-to-end overview of bottlenecks
- Review of service interruptions
APM is integrated through the lifecycle of an application including the pre-deployment and post-deployment stages. It is therefore important for developers, testers, and business teams.
A slow load can be prevalent due to a host of issues related to APIs, servers, or browsers. APM techniques are what help pinpoint the actual problem.
Basic availability monitoring involves testing IP protocols and network services, but a user needs to establish some optimal performance thresholds and real-time alerts to monitor and manage both speed and reliability.
Tips for monitoring app performance
Performance monitoring must take into account certain things in order to optimize user experience. These include measuring from the user’s point of view, i.e. performance, stability, and resource utilization in real time the way the user perceives them.
The context is crucial too. It’s important to determine how many users were affected by a slowdown, and what action on a specific operating device prompted the disruption. To truly experience a ‘mobile moment,’ you should follow these tips for monitoring your app performance:
Measure Frame rendering time
Only measuring network time doesn’t cut it out for users, who are interested in when the network resumes as well as when it responds.
Measuring response time by the device or operating system allows the product manager to focus on one platform at a time, respond to performance issues, and deploy resources accordingly.
Measure battery usage
It’s crucial to measure the battery consumption of your mobile app, along with data plan impact and memory usage. If the app is responsible for draining your battery, you should bring it in line with best practices.
Frequent updates can also be minimized so that user satisfaction can be increased.
Measure cell data consumption
Recent studies by Dimensional Research have shown that 20% of respondents stopped using apps that were heavy on data usage. This indicates that you should measure the consumption by app version, the total number of users, KBs of data consumed per minute, the amount of data being transferred per hit, and the percentage of data being consumed per hit.
Measure errors
HTTP errors from certain URLs need to be captured. This will help track the number of users who received an error, the actions that resulted in it, number of users with errors on app launch, the percentage of actions that led to at least one error, and the app version.
Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
pCloudy ENGAGE
As per our initiative to engage with enthusiastic and bright-minded app testing professionals in the industry, we at pCloudy held a user meet-up, pCloudy ENGAGE, Mumbai edition for our enterprise customers in Mumbai on 2nd of August, 2018. With so much of hard-work and planning put behind the event, it turned out to be a big success where we could discuss about some insightful experiences and the best practices in mobile app testing space from our customers.
In our pursuit to look for innovative ideas to solve software quality and testing related challenges of mobile applications pCloudy continues to focus on three major themes at pCloudy ENGAGE, Mumbai edition.
Focus on USERS: First hand feedback from the customers is unmatched and that has always been on our priority list. We got many insightful suggestions and feedback to make our product robust and futuristic which made the event even more productive.
Focus on GROWTH: The event was all about mutual help to grow each other’s businesses. We brought forth some of the hidden gem features of pCloudy that can change the game for enterprise mobility. In return we received invaluable feedback and suggestions to better our product.
Focus on FUTURISTIC FEATURES: We have always endeavored to be the frontrunner in the market. With every update release we try to strengthen the platform in line with intelligence to meet the market demands and accelerate delivery.
The keynote speaker for the day was Mr. Avinash Tiwari, our co-founder who spoke about the fast-paced growth in the industry and the evolution of mobile app testing. He also spoke about how Continuous testing and delivery has accelerated the delivery of apps from months to days and has also improved the quality of apps. But, he posed a serious question – seeing the pace of growth and advancement in the app test industry what is going to maintain the quality @speed beyond continuous testing. The future of app testing! Features like – bot test, predictive analytics, parallelism in manual app tests and crowd tests can change the game of next gen app testing.
Next was the turn of presenting the hidden gems of pCloudy – the features that can level up the app testing for enterprise mobility?
- The first hidden gem was the introduction of an important capability for cross browser testing which can make web app testing a breeze. Heeding to the growing demands of our users, we have introduced the Launch and Upload browser feature for our Android users which will give him the freedom to choose the version and the browser that he wants to use. This is going to save their testing time and efforts to a great extent and also give better results for their cross browser test.
- Next hidden gem showed how you can turn your remote device in-hand USB device and work wonders like inspecting object elements using Appium inspector. You can run ADB commands or get debug info like an in-hand device connected and it can run on any open source tool without any integration required.
- The last but of course the game changer hidden gem, Follow Me was introduced which can speed up the manual app test exponentially. It is a first of its kind solution where you can test your app in synchronous mode on one device and it can be replicated on multiple other devices saving your app test time by 50%.
The hidden gems were well appreciated by our user community and some of our customers came forward to share their insights and experiences with all of us.
Special thanks to Anil Dashrath Sonone, Project Manager from Infosys, and Karthikeyan M, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer from AQM Technologies for sharing wonderful insights and experiences as a first hand customer with all of us.
The event ended on positive note followed by cocktail and dinner.
Thanks a lot to you all for making it worth it! We are coming up soon with another edition of pCloudy ENGAGE in your city. Stay tuned!
Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
We are committed to keep you ahead of others: pCloudy is one of the fastest to release support of Android 9 Pie devices on cloud
pCloudy is happy to announce that we have released our support for Android 9 Pie on our cloud. pCloudy customers can use the Android devices with Android 9 Pie for testing their applications manually or through automation.
We request all our users to start testing their apps on Android 9 Pie and share their suggestions and feedback for improvement.
Happy Testing!!!
Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
pCloudy 5.1
At each step of our journey, we aim to make your app testing robust and simpler. That’s why your feedback and requests are so important for us. We tried to incorporate them into a release structure again that makes pCloudy work better and faster for you.
So here, we bring to you the fresh set of release updates that have been addressed and deployed in pCloudy 5.1.
- Simpler Appium Integration Architecture: Here comes the bonanza for our Appium users! We have released a newer and simpler Appium integration architecture to simplify your Appium test execution on Android and iOS devices with pCloudy. The newer architecture make developers’ life simpler with lesser changes in the code. The older architecture demanded using APIs and also changes in your code that required some level of expertise. We addressed this issue and have come up with a simpler architecture where you need to mention some desired capabilities instead of calling APIs or doing changes in the code to run the Appium scripts. And wonder what! it just takes few minutes to integrate your existing Appium scripts with pcloudy. Check yourself here.
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Cross-browser testing made simpler: There are many widely used web browsers, but not all browsers, and versions of those browsers, work the same. A website may not look or function identically on each one, which can lead to lost revenue for an enterprise. We addressed the issue of choosing from the fixed set of browsers previously available.
Heeding to the growing demands of our users, we have introduced the Launch and Upload browser feature for our Android users which will give him the freedom to choose the version of the browser that he wants to use. This is going to save their testing time and efforts to a great extent and also give better results for their cross browser test. To know more about it Click Here.
pCloudy Appium Capabilities
| DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities(); |
| capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_Username”, “Enter your email Id”); |
| capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_ApiKey”, “Enter your API Key”); |
| capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_ApplicationName”, “pCloudyAppiumDemo.apk”); |
| capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_DurationInMinutes”, 5); |
| capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_DeviceFullName”, “Samsung_GalaxyTabA_Android_7.1.1”); |
| driver = new AndroidDriver(new URL(“https://device.pcloudy.com/appiumcloud/wd/hub”), capabilities); |
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Faster Upload of Apps: We received multiple requests to speed up the process of Upload and synchronization of App/Data into the cloud. With some changes in the process, we have now succeeded to reduce the app upload and synchronization time by 42%.
As you know, during app synchronization, the platform automatically synchronizes your data with all the 4 data centers of pCloudy. Earlier, the process was done in a series where synchronization once completed in one data center will then start in the 2nd one and so on which took a few minutes to complete. We have now changed this to a parallel process, which makes your testing 2x faster.
- TouchID for iOS devices no more a blocker: Apple introduced the ability to perform authentication via TouchID to enable secure and effortless access to the device. But it turns out to be a hindrance for mobility teams while testing their iOS apps on devices over cloud. To ease out the process of authenticating TouchID manually every time, you can now bypass the TouchID verification in your apps using our utility. The bypass TouchID feature will be available for iOS devices version 10.0.0 or above. To know more about it Click Here.
Note: This feature will for now be available only for iOS and won’t support Face ID.
- Integration with Slack: Since many of our customers are moving towards Slack, there was a huge demand to integrate Slack with pCloudy to enable their broadly distributed teams collaborate well. We noticed this change and hence we integrated Slack with pCloudy. It will now be easier for you to share bug related data and artifacts like Logs, screenshots etc through our Slack integration. To know more about it Click Here.
Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
Struggling with your Appium test automation?
The much awaited bonanza for Appium users is here. We are up with a newer and simpler Appium integration architecture which can simplify your Appium test automation execution on Android and iOS devices with pCloudy. The newer architecture make developers’ life simpler with lesser changes in the code. The older architecture demanded using APIs and also changes in your code that required some level of expertise. We addressed this issue and have come up with a simpler architecture where you need to mention some desired capabilities instead of calling APIs or doing changes in the code to run the Appium scripts. And wonder what! it makes you save 50% of your app testing time.
Watch the video to know more about the new simpler and faster pCloudy Appium architecture.
Pre-requisites
- Appium Script
- APK or IPA file
- pCloudy Account
The basic steps to replace your local Appium driver to pCloudy Appium Driver are given below:
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- Upload the apk/ipa from your local system to pCloudy. Check this link to know steps to upload an app for test.
- Set pCloudy capabilities
- pCloudy_Username: Enter the email ID with which you have registered on pCloudy. For reference, check this linkExample: capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_Username”, ‘{e-mail-id}’);
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- pCloudy_ApiKey: API key is important for user’s verification. You can generate the API key from Settings page on device.pcloudy.com. Check this link to get your API key.Example: capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_ApiKey”, “{api-key}”);
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- pCloudy_ApplicationName: Enter the application name for the apk/ipa file which you already uploaded in the MyApp/Data.Example: capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_ApplicationName”, “pCloudyAppiumDemo.apk”);
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- pCloudy_DurationInMinutes: Enter the duration in minutes for which you want to run the test.Example: capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_DurationInMinutes”, 5);
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- pCloudy_DeviceFullName: If you know the device manufacturer, device name and version then enter the full device name.Example: capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_DeviceFullName”, “Samsung_GalaxyTabA_Android_7.1.1”);
Note: If you don’t know the Device full name then you can enter pCloudy_DeviceManufacturer and pCloudy_DeviceVersion in the code and it will automatically run command on those devices.
Example: capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_DeviceManafacturer”, “Samsung”);
capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_DeviceVersion”, “5.0.1”);
- pCloudy_DeviceFullName: If you know the device manufacturer, device name and version then enter the full device name.Example: capabilities.setCapability(“pCloudy_DeviceFullName”, “Samsung_GalaxyTabA_Android_7.1.1”);
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- Use pCloudy Appium endpoint as ” https://device.pcloudy.com/appiumcloud/wd/hub “
- Create the Appium driver object and perform the execution
Device capabilities and code snippets to run Appium on Single Android Native App:
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Device capabilities and code snippets to run Appium on Multiple Android Native Apps:
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Device capabilities and code snippets to run Appium on Single iOS Native Apps:
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Device capabilities and code snippets to run Appium on Multiple iOS Native Apps:
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Device capabilities and code snippets to run on Single iOS-Browser App:
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Device capabilities and code snippets to run on Multiple iOS-Browser App:
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Device capabilities and code snippets to run on Single Android-Browser App:
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Device capabilities and code snippets to run on Multiple Android-Browser Apps:
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Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
pCloudy Among Top 3
We are proud to announce that pCloudy has been ranked among the top 3 Test Automation Software products based on the user satisfaction. With this, we have got another feather added in our cap after achieving the 50k milestone. It has become possible only because of your constant trust and support that motivates us to keep growing stronger.
Check out this list of the top Test Automation Software products based on user satisfaction. As per G2Crowd, the product’s satisfaction score is calculated by a proprietary algorithm that factors in real-user satisfaction ratings from review data. Check yourself.
Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
Achieved 50,000 Registrations
3 years back pCloudy came into existence to disrupt the mobile app testing eco-space. We are proud to say that today we have achieved 50000 registrations in such a short span of time. More than 50,000 users have registered with pCloudy, and over 20,000 of them signed up just this year. It would not have been possible without our users’ constant trust and support.
Do you know what makes us proud?
What really makes us proud is to see that we have trusted customers now spread all over the world!! It’s an just an indication of what’s yet to come, we are geared up for way more! As we look ahead, these results give us the inspiration to continue working towards making mobile app testing seamless and future-ready.
Now, let us talk about all the fun, excitement, surprises and rewards that unfolded throughout the day. And the best part was there were surprises for both customers and employees.
Moving towards the surprises for customers, thank-you gifts and cards were sent to our loyal customers as a token of our gratitude. We also sent tokens of appreciation to all the new users who registered on our platform on this day.
That’s not all!!
We also had a special gift for the 50,000 user who registered on pCloudy yesterday. The winner of this special gift is Srinivas Chitturi. Many congratulations to the lucky winner!
Moving on to the fun events planned for pCloudians, I am sure each one of us had a blast throughout the day. Surprises started to unfold as soon as we entered office. The entire office was decorated in blue, white and red balloons which actually gave each one of us a happy feeling.
Next, I reached my workstation and wow it had the most wonderful comment for me kept in front of a beautiful desktop plant with a gratitude message from our Co-founder Avinash Tiwari -“Thanks for walking 50,000 miles with us”. What else could you have asked for! It was the most wonderful feeling any employee could expect.
The organizers of the event did a wonderful job in keeping the next event in line, a surprise which made all of us a bit curious about what’s coming up next. Avinash addressed all the pCloudians with the most motivating and goal-oriented speech. Hey! it was neither boring nor a long speech so everyone was hooked to it till the end. All of us came to know about the journey of pCloudy and the goal each one of us has to focus for the coming year.
And, the most important about the raises and hike. Now you know… why everyone was hooked to his speech till the end.
Some of the oldest pCloudians were facilitated for walking these 50,000 miles facing all the ups and downs with it.
Now that pCloudians were motivated, we got the most interesting thing to do. We recited the pCloudy anthem. Do you want to know what it is? It is about pCloudy values and goals.
It was followed by cake-cutting and fun-games.
Each one of us was asked to create graffiti on either “Walking 50000 miles with pCloudy” or “Tea time talks at pCloudy”. No wonder we have some hidden talent among us. You yourself have a look at it.
There was a team activity – Poster making competition which was again thrilling as teams were asked to make a poster in 30 minutes on any of the 4 topics – pCloudy’s core values, The way we work @pCloudy, The most wanted @pCloudy and Advertise your team.
The posters that came out at the end of half an hour were worth appreciating. Artists or non-artists all made the best use of this opportunity to showcase their talent and came out with some hilarious perspective of working at pCloudy. All the posters were outstandingly imagined that we rolled on the floor laughing. And, our jury had a difficult time deciding the winner and so all were declared as winners.
Last but of course not the least in line was the game – How well you know your colleagues. There were chits with some unique feature about each employee and the pCloudian who picked up the chit had to identify the colleague. It was the best as all of us had our sides split laughing on the comments made in the chit. And the best part was the comments were funny without offending anyone. The day ended with all of us attacking on pizzas and beverages.
It is definitely a milestone worth celebration and motivation for many more celebrations like this…
Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
iOS 12 Now Available in pCloudy
We are committed to keep you ahead of others: pCloudy is one of the fastest to release support of iOS 12 beta devices on cloud.
Shivani Sinha | Posted on | 2 min Read
pCloudy’s Team Outing
After relentlessly working for days and nights, we are proud to have successfully launched pCloudy 5.0. And it is special and very close to our hearts!
But, as they say ‘winning is only half a thing; having fun is the other half. We pCloudians believe in this philosophy and so after hard work, it was time for us to have fun.
We place a high value on balancing work and personal life, and hence we try to host at least one family outing every year. It gives us all a chance to let loose, have fun, and meet the people most important to our teammates! This year we decided to visit an eco – resort near Bangalore – Our Native village. Two of our colleagues, Suraj and Pradeep took the initiative of making all the arrangements.
It was a bright Saturday morning and everyone boarded the bus from office at around 10 on 21st April. Our excitement knew no bounds and after greeting each other we started our day with playing ‘Dumb charades’ in the bus. We made two teams and gave the weirdest movie names to each other which was funny to act and acting on it in the moving bus made it even funnier. Nobody realized that we had already covered the 2 hours distance and were about to reach our destination.
We reached the eco-village resort’s gate and the adventure started to unfold. ‘No entry’ was written in bold on the gate and we couldn’t see even a single human being around. Some people started to share ghost and thriller stories there. Then, the bus driver suddenly spotted a lean and short-heighted gatekeeper sitting at the corner-most place. He opened the gate, took our details and let us enter. Now the most adventurous part – there was no pitched road, and you could only find farms on both sides till the point your eyes could see. No man, nothing. Each one of us started to wonder if we have reached the right destination or is the bus hijacked and what not. After moving for around 2-3 kms, we finally saw a poster directing towards the resort. We all had a sigh of relief and the people who were most scared acted as if they knew that this is going to come.
We all entered the resort and were welcomed with garlands. We found the resort to be truly a replica of an Indian village. We could see swings made of tires, bullock carts, rabbits, chickens, turkeys all around us. After settling down, we rushed to have lunch which was well prepared with a good range of buffet.
We made different groups and played 20-20 cricket, badminton, basketball, shooting, snakes & ladders, UNO, chess; you name it and we played. Kids spent most of their time on slides, trampoline, swings or running after chicks or rabbits.
The real fun began in the evening after we had our snacks. The list of team building activities started with the ice-breaker activity – Fire in the mountain, followed by Big fish-small fish. It was a wonderful game, where each one of us had to act the opposite of what we say. Reflex action can be fatal sometimes.
Next in line were activities where we were asked to form 2 teams and named our teams as Iron man and Spiderman with Hansil and Suraj as the team captains. The anchor used to call out to collect a particular number of some random items and the teams should help their respective captains collect those number of items in the shortest time. This game actually made some of our male team mates take off their t-shirts and do a catwalk.
Another group activity was passing on the hoola-hoop to your team members holding each other’s hands and without touching the ring. The last activity was on the team selecting a song which they had to sing at their highest pitch and keep on dancing on the songs played until it stops with full zeal. Although each one of us got breathless but in order to make our team win, we played till the end. And guess what! The spiderman won, I am so excited because I was in that team.
Here is a list of quick snaps:
A grand welcome can take away all your worries. Here are a few giving candid pose.
You are “busted”. A mind boggling game to check your reflex action.
Throw the ball and hit the target! Everyone’s favourite game teaches us tactics!
pCloudy’s girls gang enjoying bullock cart ride! Ethnicity is the new modern!
Being photogenic while giving cheesy pose has its own relevance. A quick snap with pCloudy team and their closed ones!
