Single Sign On

Single sign on is a process of authentication where user can access multiple applications and portals with one set of credentials. With SSO a user logs in with a single ID and password to gain access to a connected system. Single sign on must internally store the credentials for initial authentication and then translate them to the credential required for the different mechanisms.

SAML 2.0
SSO services uses security assertion mark-up language (SAML 2.0) which is an XML standard that facilitates the exchange of user authentication and authorization of data across secure domains. SAML simplifies the authentication and authorization process for the user, an identity provider and a service provider. When the user attempts to access an application, the service provider will send a request to identity provider for authentication.

Benefits of single sign on
SSO reduces risk for access to third party sites (user passwords not stored externally). It also alleviate password fatigue from different user name and password combinations. Reduces IT cost due to lower number of IT help desk calls about password. Reduces time spent re-entering password for the same identity.

pCloudy SSO integration architecture
Sequence of events for integration of SAML 2.0 Authentication

• The user attempts to reach a web application at a service provider (SP i.e pCloudy Set Up).
• The service provider generates a SAML request and redirects the user to the IdP’s SSO URL with the generated request.
• The IdP authenticates the user and generates a SAML response.
• The user is redirected back to the SP with the SAML response.
• The SP verifies the SAML response.
• The user is successfully logged-in to the SP’s web application.

Note: pCloudy has included this feature in Enterprise set up Private Cloud and On-Premise Cloud.

SAML assertion
SAML assertion is the XML document that the identity provider sends to the service provider, that contains user authorization. There are Three types of SAML assertion:

Authentication assertion – It proves identification of the user and provide the time the user logged in and what method of authentication they used.

Attribute assertion – It passes the SAML attributes to the service provider. SAML attributes are specific pieces of data that provide information about the user.

Authorization decision assertion – It says if the user is authorized to use the services or if the identity provider denied the request due to password failure or lack of rights of the service.

SSO solves the problem of managing the increasing number of users across an ecosystem of application and services. It is a step forward in the optimization of pCloudy integrated architecture.

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Trends We Witnessed at STC 2018

The biggest Software testing Conference in India, QAI STC 2018 came to an end on 7th December with the most insightful and pragmatic discussion that can disrupt the software testing eco-space. The focus of the event this year was on the theme – Quality by Design: Convergence of Testing, Lean, Intelligence and Automation.

We were the title sponsors this year and so got a bigger platform to showcase the NEXT we are bringing in mobile app testing world.

There was an array ideas displayed, experiments and experiences to explore challenges and suggestive techniques and best practices to successfully to overcome the common challenges.

With the top minds in software testing coming together to share the latest trends, tips on stage and through conference networking opportunities, STC this year too has succeeded in bringing forth excellent insights about future of testing in rapidly changing times. More than 30 top companies participated in this one-of its kind Expo where we have witnessed some of the monumental key developments that would shape testing landscape in the coming years.

Over 500 software testers gathered and more than 12 empanelled speakers graced the expo for 2 days. Attendees heard from experts like: Avinash Tiwari, co-founder, pCloudy, David Parker, Director, Smart Bear, Rajini Padmanabhan, V.P, QA Infotech, Anand Vaishampayan, Director – Cloud Application Migration Services, IBM, Dr. Shankar Ramamoorthy, Customer Success Officer, Harman Intl., Anupama Jayakumar, Director, Schneider Electric to name a few.

Avinash’s keynote session on “Will AI be another Tesla for software testing?” became a huge hit as he set the tone correct talking about trends like AI and Predictive Analytics that can disrupt the mobile app testing industry.

In between the sessions, the pCloudy booth was flooded with people. Our team of five did their best to answer questions and get feedback from those who are already using pCloudy as well as folks who were new to pCloudy.

 

Here are the biggest lessons that we learnt at the STC event this year:

1) Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are setting up new standards in mobile app testing market:

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in testing, tools, processes and methods have shown a significant improvements in search results, recommendations, forecasts, and other predictions.

Testing practitioners are recognizing the potential for advances in AI and ML to be leveraged for automated testing—an area that still requires significant manual effort.

Last year we came up with something which was quite new to the market, our AI-based test bot for Mobile App – Certifaya. This year we see this trend catching up.

There are quite a number of new tools focusing on NLP driven Automated Test case generation to AI driven self-healing automated tests. Good to see competition in this space! The race has just begun.

2) Predictive Analytics is going to disrupt the software testing ecosystem:

Another major learning at STC event this year has been the growing importance of Predictive Analytics in Software Testing. We are in the age of Analytics where the test data captured are translated into actionable insights for future improvement. These solutions proactively identify problem areas in the testing processes and indicate the way forward to achieve a high-quality software product. Predictive analytics uses mathematical algorithms and machine learning technologies to forecast outcomes of software testing procedures. This technique uses current and past data to generate insights and locate potential points of failure in software testing outcomes. This enables the development and testing leaders to proactively address issues early in the lifecycle, and hence faster and easier. The combination of test automation and advanced analytics will enable software development and testing managers to spend more time on strategic activities that drive greater business value over a longer term.

We succeeded in setting the tone right at STC this year.

Our use cases on AI and Predictive analytics became the talk of the town.

Surely, AI and Predictive analytics are going to disrupt the mobile app testing space.

3) Digital Transformation and its impact on testing:

Most of the testing teams are already witnessing the impacts of digital transformation initiatives such as DevOps adoption and scaling Agile. From achieving quality@speed, to tooling, to team structure, to application architectures, almost everything has changed. Enterprises are already adopting shift left approach to keep pace with the growing demands from digital transformation. Shift left testing is an approach to software and system testing in which testing is performed earlier in the lifecycle (i.e., moved left on the project timeline).
Here, at STC this year, another major trend we came across was the growing importance of omni-channel testing. With digital transformation, Customers today are exploited by choices that are never ending in the actual sense of the word. But the customer expects to receive the consistent user experience across all platforms. Omni-channel User Experience Testing helps tune your digital applications and customer experience across functional tests, compatibility, usability, and app security tests.

4) No more Quality Assurance; it’s all about Quality Engineering:

Another major trend seen at STC this year was the focus from Quality Assurance towards Quality Engineering. Today, the goal of Agile is to persistently test, dissect and enhance quality throughout the development lifecycle, as opposed to only towards the end of the cycle. In this environment, mere ‘assurance’ through process monitoring will not help achieve high quality standards. Engineering quality into the management, development, operation and maintenance of IT systems and enterprise architectures is the only way organizations can ensure end-to-end quality the current environments demand.

The principles of “Shift Left” has heavily influenced the transition to Quality Engineering. Test and development teams work together in a continuous integration model and it is very important to design code which is testable and easy to integrate. This in turn allows for quick localisation of a problem and to assure individual parts are working before a significant amount of software is combined or integrated together. Dheeraj Sinha talked about how this digital transformation is changing the role of QA, the skills required, the methodology, processes involved and taking it to an all new different level. He aptly quoted- “The focus of QA shouldn’t be to find defects but to enable others to find defects.”

Share the experiences and learning you had at QAI STC event this year in comment section. Don’t forget to like us on LinkedIn for more updates and the latest information about us.

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Problems in Mobile App Testing

 
Mobile market has shown a phenomenal growth over the years and guess who is responsible for such tremendous success- undoubtedly, it is the mobile application market and evidently its progress appears to be indomitable even in coming years. As per the research, mobile applications are expected to generate around 189 Billion USD revenue figure by 2020 merely by means of app stores and in-app advertising.. As this stream of Mobile application gets strengthened, the competition to make each app unique and effective grows even stronger. The real challenge is to maintain the competitiveness by keeping up with this fast changing industry. With so many variations in the mobile devices, it becomes a challenge in the mobile app testing to succeed in ‘All-Device’ scenario.

Here are the most common challenges faced in the mobile application testing:

1. Multiple Devices
2. Networks
3. Choice of tools
4. Screen Sizes
5. Types of Mobile Apps
6. AI Test Automation

Things to consider before tool evaluation:

• Type of apps: Apps can be native, hybrid or web. While the trend is inclined towards hybrid apps but the tool of choice should be competent enough to support other kinds of apps.
• Cloud Testing: Implementing a test automation cloud empowers teams to perform testing on any automation external testing framework .Moreover, the test results can be accessed from any location worldwide.
• OS Support: Most of the apps are developed for IOS and Android but the scope can expand to Windows, Firefox OS, etc., anytime as the customer base increases. So, the automation tool should be able to support all platforms.

A good mobile app testing strategy would include a right mix of testing on real devices, user testing and bot testing all at a single platform.

pCloudy provides a biggest cloud platform for automated and manual testing of mobile apps on real devices. It has its own cluster of real devices hosted on cloud to test IOS and Android Apps. Visit pCloudy to choose your plan for availing the best MAT services.

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How Does Facebook Test its Apps?

 
Using REAL mobile devices.

You must be like “Noooo…, really?” with a sarcastic look on your face.

Well, Facebook using real devices for testing is actually not surprising at all. But, what is really surprising is that there are several mobile app development companies who still do NOT use real devices for testing. Isn’t it enough to test mobile applications on simulators or emulators? Definitely No! If it were, then Facebook would not have invested on its expansive state-of-the-art Mobile Device Lab in Prineville, OR.

Facebook’s journey to the data centre started off with their first setup – The Sled model. The Sled model had drawbacks like inconsistent Wi-Fi connectivity which led them to build the second version named – The Gondola. The Gondola had a lot of issues with tangled USB Cables so they built – The Slatwall. The Slatwall took up an entire room, and we were able to deploy 240 devices, but to accommodate 2,000 phones they need to scale to nine of these rooms, this wouldn’t work. So they decided to move the mobile device lab into a data centre in Oregon.

Currently, the lab in Oregon hosts 60 custom-built racks, each of which holds 32 devices. Four Linux-based OCP Leopard servers are used to test Android apps, while eight Mac Minis are used for iOS apps. Each OCP Leopard server is connected to eight Android devices, and each Mac Mini is connected to four iPhones. Almost 2,000 devices can be run simultaneously for testing new iOS and Android versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp. Each rack also has its own Wi-Fi signal and an EMI enclosure to keep the Wi-Fi local to its rack, according to a post by Facebook developer Antoine Reversat. This not just ensures that Facebook apps functions properly on new and old devices, but also in various network conditions.
 

Why does Facebook require a Mobile Device Lab?

Facebook has a growing 1.6 billion users worldwide. There are tens of thousands of different mobile devices in the market, and Facebook wants its apps to run seamlessly on all of them. Taking into account the variation in hardware, mobile operating system, aspect ratios, and network condition of these mobile devices is an increasingly complex operation.

Additionally, the developers at Facebook make thousands of code changes every week on each mobile platform. This means they also need to be aware of the performance implications of a code change on both high-end and typical devices, as well as on a variety of operating systems. “Given the code intricacies of the Facebook app, we could inadvertently introduce regressions that take up more data, memory or battery usage”, writes Reversat in a blog post. It is crucial to ensure new versions of Facebook’s apps don’t crash or run into performance problems when engineers make updates.

The Rack based Mobile Device Lab is a system built to maintain and improve the development speed while minimising the number of regressions in dimensions of performance, such as speed, data usage, battery consumption, and memory footprint. “In practice, performance issues can be detected in either a lab environment or the real world. Both environments have pros and cons. In the lab, it is difficult to build a controlled environment to reasonably mimic the real world, so catching most perf issues and predicting perf wins before they make it out into the wild is harder. Data that’s gathered in the real world is truer than data gathered in the lab, but the signals can be very noisy. This can make it more difficult to fix a problem or more difficult to figure out the root cause of an issue. It is also less desirable because it requires data collection from user devices. We have worked hard on building tools for lab environments with a belief that such a system can catch most issues, if not all of them, and provide a significant benefit.” writes Zheng Mi, an Engineering Manager at Facebook

The lab is also integrated with configuration management tool named “Chef”, developed by Facebook to deal with the management of hundreds of thousands of servers is used to monitor and maintain a consistent device state during the tests.

The lab also houses the social network’s one of the most ambitious artificial intelligence projects: the Big Sur. It is Facebook’s most advanced Open Rack-compatible hardware specifically designed for AI computing at large scale. Leveraging NVIDIA’s Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform, Big Sur is twice as fast as its previous generation, which means you can train twice as fast and explore networks twice as large.

When Facebook can assemble its own fleet of devices for testing purposes, why can’t you? Want to own a mobile device lab like Facebook’s? pCloudy can help you.

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Chrome Developer Tools

Introduction

Testing a Mobile Web App can get knotty, especially when there are issues like obfuscated HTML/CSS/javascript code, improperly implemented HTTPS, browser inconsistencies, page load performance and so on. Moreover, few things like can be extremely agonizing while striving to support as wide a range of mobile devices as possible. So how do you overcome these issues? Using a Web Developer Tools or debugging extensions make debugging your web application easier. Here we’ll talk about the most popular one – the open source Google Chrome Developer Tools.

The Google Chrome Developer Tools is a consolidated environment built into Google Chrome Browser. It is used for web authoring, debugging, monitoring, optimizing, and understanding web applications or websites. (Sourced from Google Chrome DevTools)

Here are some of the key Chrome DevTools features

• Inspect and edit the DOM and CSS of your website in real-time
• Run code snippets from any page
• Debug Obfuscated code
• Set advanced breakpoints and debug JavaScript using graphical debugger
• Troubleshoot Security issues
• Analyze run-time and page performance to improve the speed of your app
• Trace reflows and repaints as your app loads

The Chrome DevTools provides almost all the gears required to inspect, debug and monitor the performance of a Web App/mobile web. It also provides additional capabilities to simulate Mobile Devices to test and build mobile-first, responsive web sites. You can even debug web content on a real Android Device from a development machine. But, is it enough to test your Web App on just one or two devices?

Remote debugging using Chrome DevTools in integration with pCloudy’s Mobile Device Lab

Device fragmentation is a very real problem when testing Web apps on real devices, particularly for UI and functional tests. The number of devices with unique specifications and proprietary build variations has increased. At an advanced level, to fully test your Web App’s responsiveness and performance on real devices you will need to experiment your site on various platforms, across a number of device form factors. pCloudy’s Mobile Device Lab offers complete integration with Chrome DevTools to test your apps on real devices. This integration allows you to test Web Apps on a myriad of android devices with different sizes and configurations.

Here’s how most App developers test their Web Apps

Inspect and live edit your site’s design and content

Test and edit your site in live mode by inspecting all the HTML and CSS in your page. In the Elements Panel, you can live-edit a DOM node by simply double-clicking a selected element and making changes.

You can even live-edit style property names and values in the Styles pane. Examine and edit box model parameters.

It is also possible to edit the current element’s box model parameters by making changes to top, bottom, left, right values for the current element’s padding, border, and margin properties using the Computed pane.

Remote Debugging on real devices to fix errors in the code

Debugging Obfuscated Code: Make your code readable and easy to debug even after you’ve combined, minified or compiled it. You can easily change the formatting of your minimized code by clicking on { }.

Test the and optimize the performance of the Web App

The Network Panel allows you to see how your page renders, and time taken to render from start to end. To do this click into the “Network” panel, click on the camera icon and refresh the page on the device.

The Timeline panel helps you to record and analyze all the activities in your application as it runs. It’s the best place to start investigating perceived performance issues in your application.

To make a recording of a page load, open the Timeline panel, open the page that you want to record, and then reload the page. The Timeline panel automatically records the page reload. You can also record page interactions on the page and view the performance details through the recorded timeline.

Here are some more details you can view using the Record Timeline

• Record the Timeline to analyze every event that occurred after a page load or a user interaction
• View FPS, CPU, and network requests in the Overview pane
• Click on an event within the Flame Chart to view details about it
• Zoom in on a section of a recording to make analysis easier

Conclusion

“Using the right tools for the right job” is an old aphorism that applies to all domains including Software Development. As we’ve seen, Chrome Developer Tools has several features that helps you develop better, debug faster, and measure efficiently the performance of your website or application. The features discussed here are some of the most common ones used by developers, designers and testers to write, debug, monitor and optimize Websites and Web Apps. Using these features in integration with Mobile Device Lab like pCloudy can transmogrify the entire process of creating, testing and launching Websites and Web Apps.

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Gartner’s Market Guide

Delhi, June 23, 2016 – Smart Software Testing Solutions (SSTS), a leading provider of Mobile App Test Automation Tools, today announced that it has been identified as one of the Representative Mobile App Functional Test Automation vendors in the Gartner’s Market Guide for Mobile App Test Automation Tools⁽¹⁾.SSTS was named in the category of commercial vendors with functional test automation and device cloud capabilities.

According to Gartner, ‘’the need for automation in mobile app testing is driven by business time-to- market demands and digitalization initiatives. These push mobile app development teams to adopt agile development approaches to deliver high-quality mobile apps faster. This rapid pace, combined with a broad and changing device ecosystem, creates a challenging environment in which to maintain a high level of quality. Without automation, it will end up crushing all but the most trivial app efforts.’’

“We believe our inclusion as a representative vendor in the Gartner Market Guide validates why the world’s best-known brands rely on SSTS, to drive their Mobile Test Automation,’’ said Avinash Tiwari, Director, Smart Software Testing Solutions, explaining the unique position of the company in the Indian market.

pCloudy is the flagship product company of SSTS (Smart Software Testing Solutions). Avinash Tiwari opines that the market in India is becoming more and more receptive of automated testing solutions and cloud based testing platforms. More and more organizations are feeling pressure to make releases more frequently. Moreover, creating right test infrastructure for mobile Apps is a key concern for organizations. pCloudy is in a unique position to serve both the challenges.

If you have a Gartner Account, you can download the report by clicking on this link.

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties,expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

⁽¹⁾ Gartner, Inc. ‘’Market Guide for Mobile App Test Automation Tools’’ by MaritessSobejana, Adrian Leow, 25 April 2016

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Choose the Right Testing Platform

 
As a mobile app maker, how sure are you about the success of your app? A small failure to recognize bugs can cost you thousands of dollars! A small mistake can turn you into a big failure among the users. Now, the question is, how to choose the best platform for testing.

Every mobile application is created differently from the other and the right platform to test can be the most important reason for your app’s success.

Choosing the right platform among the various competing ones require a set of clear evaluation.

• The nature of the targeted audience for your app. This will define the device matrix you should be targeting for your App Testing. Does that platform provide right device matrix for your testing needs?
• Cloud based vs in-house setup – Does you testing process allow Apps to be allowed on outside cloud? Does your App have functionalities which work with in a secured network?
• Type of Testing required for your App – Whether your current testing is manual or automated? Does your App require non-functional Testing?
• Reliability and Scalability of the platform- Can it scale with your needs? Can the platform integrate with your existing tools and frameworks?
• Return on Investment

pCloudy provides the necessary tools for convenient, effective and immediate mobile app testing. Our device is based on cloud and it enables continuous development and testing on real devices. Our unique debugging feature recognizes potential errors that will significantly reduce costs and time. Our platform provides single-click access to end numbers of real Android and Ios devices.

To experience the best with your app, we have developed three different types of cloud environments for you.

Public Cloud

With pCloudy’s publicly accessed cloud, you can perform tests directly from your browser. You won’t get confused to choose between manual or automated because both are available in our public cloud environment. We allow our users to test on a comprehensive list of real IOS and Android devices. You can also test your app over various network conditions like 2G, 3G, 4G or Wi-Fi. You can either configure your own browser or choose from our wide range of pre-installed browsers.

Private Cloud

This option is similar to our public cloud environment, except it comes with additional benefits of personalized security and dedicated access. Here, we would provide you a host of devices in our enterprise grade data center and you can choose your own device. If you have a geographically distributed team, then they will have secured devices over a browser. We make sure that your data is safe on our platform, as we allow only authorized team members to access.

On-premise cloud

In this option, we provide you with the necessary hardware and give you the freedom to set up your own secure device lab. You will have complete control of your own on-premise lab.

In addition to have exactly the same features of our public cloud, on-premise model contains supplementary benefits. On-premise cloud gives you the freedom of plug-in with your existing set of devices and provides you access to a geographically distributed team. Manual and automated- both the testing techniques can be used and with a simple plug-in, you can access it from any rack. Also, there is no limit for the number of devices which can be linked!

At the end of the day, the developer has to choose the best platform for his app. But choosing the right one saves so much of hassles.

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Test Your Mobile App on Different Devices

 
The Technology involved in mobile devices is changing rapidly. Mobile phones have literally personalized the choices in our lives, experts forecast that the future devices will be the remote controls of our lives.  The services or functions are run by apps in specified platforms. And each platform has its own set of parameters to run an app. Mobile phone or device manufacturers are going through a breathtaking pace of change over the years and keeps on innovating new ways of doing things!

Why Apps fail?

Above data clearly show that handling Device fragmentation is one of the biggest challenges for App developers. Android has more fragmentation issue compared to iOS. Because the number of mobile vendors, is comparatively higher. However, even iOS faces certain amount of fragmentation issue. As there are different software versions and devices. And different devices run different iOS versions.

Mobile browsers can be challenging too! There are end numbers of browsers like Safari, Opera, Goggle Chrome and Dolphin. And each one of them has different versions for different platforms!

“So, what’s the right choice? Buying every device available in the market?”

Not necessarily, right device matrix is the key to success.

You can choose one of the two approaches to arrive at your device matrix

Device diversity Approach

• Decide the device matrix based on key parameters like OS versions, screen size/resolution, manufacturer/device family (Android), operator, CPU, and input method
• Objective is to maximize the variety of devices

Market segment + Device popularity approach

•  Choose devices with the highest market share
•  Objective is to maximize market coverage

Once you have the right device matrix, Device Cloud is the best option to get quick access to your device matrix.

As a tester, you must consider the ever increasing number of physical devices. The most important implementations should be automation, quality assurance, security and device compatibility. Also, ensure that the software scripts cover the core functionality of the application, so that it can run across all the platforms.

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