 I'm really excited about this topic. It's a lot of fun. And for the spirit of the tester, it's an important theme for us to think about because we're going through a massive shift in technology right now. You may not realize how incredible this shift is. It reminds me of the early days of the web when we were slowly moving towards getting this access to information to everyone. Well, now we're getting access to information in our pockets. We're having computing power in our pockets. And for this talk, not only is it okay to have these devices, I encourage you to have a device in your hand and think about the things we're going to talk about. So I'm going to ask you to take your device out, please. Hold it up. Tablet or smartphone, okay. And if I look out and I see just part of your face, that's all right. If you want to tweet all the way, go ahead, that's what this topic's all about. So first of all, I want to talk about what these devices are. There's a lot of confusion about what we're actually carrying around with us, what we're actually sleeping with under our pillows, what we're staring into in order to restaurant and ignoring our friends in real life, IRL, as we're conversing with everyone else virtually. I want to talk about some of the things that make mobility mobility. We have clean, simple designs. One screen at a time. We don't have as much room as we did on other devices, such as PCs. And we have touch and gesture interfaces. This is a fascinating space how we can get the technology to work for us. So it's more intuitive. It's really interesting if you put a baby in front of a tablet. Just about every gesture other than a swipe, they will just automatically pick up. And once they see you swipe, they automatically do it. And they can work their way through applications and teach us about the technology incredibly intuitive. Well, we're moving from just, you know, from working on an actual device and touching and interacting with the device to being able to do gestures in the air. And we're seeing new technology in that space. And we have voice control and other natural types of inputs that are getting us away from the shackles, from the chain, the ball and chain are on my ankle of the keyboard and the mouse. I am free to interact, to be in this world where we have a blurring of the virtual and the physical. And this is absolutely fantastic. But it's also fascinating because unless you are distributing applications within your own organization and have a special license to do that, to get applications out to the rest of you, you have to go through a store. We're not used to this with web applications. We're used to just, you know, we push it out there when we feel like it. Well, store distribution is interesting because it can get a large amount of penetration and markets that you're targeting. But there's also controls on store distribution. Someone has to approve and say, you know, you need our standards so we can distribute this application for you. So we lose some control there. But it's interesting how now we're seeing all these mobile features coming into PCs and we have app stores that are for PC apps. And we're also seeing a decline in the manufacture of chips and in technology for PCs and a massive growth in the technology to support not only the manufacture of the devices, but the usage of the devices over the internet and through cellular networks. So we see huge growth in mobile traffic and data usage. And to facilitate that so that we want more, better, faster, there's huge investment in the underlying infrastructures on behalf of telcos and governments and different organizations all around the world. And this is where the money is. The smartest minds in the industry are moving towards this. And as testers, you're here learning about this. This is our future. And being part of our spirit as a tester is to learn about new technology, become enmeshed with it and own it and be able to add a lot of value to the teams that we're going to be working with. So I gave up doing anything on the axes here because anything that you want to measure when it comes to mobility is growth right now. Chipsets, mobile traffic, iPhone 5 sales, people stopping use of one particular map and trying to use another map instead might resonate with some of you. Enormous growth and influence. What are these devices? What are some characteristics about them? Well, they're portable. We use them virtually anywhere. I have my device here. I'm not getting any network connectivity. If I was, I might be interrupted. And in the past, when I was doing a talk, it was a really bad thing. Oh, no. But now I just bring it into the bit, answer the call, embarrass the friend, and we have fun with it. We take these things everywhere. Mobile device because you know where it's been. Think of all those lost productive hours when we're in the restroom. We're on a bio break or wherever else. Suddenly we can use this towards doing work and being productive or surfing the web, playing Angry Birds. It's awkward, but a lot of people do it. I won't ask you to raise your hand. But how many of you sleep with one of these devices beside you with an easy reach? Be honest, lots of hands. Those of you in the virtual world, feel free to raise your hand as well so you can feel part of it. We won't judge. We know you're part of the deal. They go with this everywhere. Well, we have a smaller screen size as well to worry about. So that has enormous implications on design. We have a huge shift from larger screens with PCs and web apps, and screens are getting larger and larger with more resolution. We're in with web applications. If you work for an enterprise company or a large e-commerce company, a large organization, it's not uncommon. If you were to imagine we're going to slice up this screen, the top, that's one department's world. They own that. Now this part here, that's someone else's world. This is someone else's world. That's someone else's world. Well, that's fine with web applications, but when you have one screen at a time, smaller screens, you have to really adjust how you fit things onto the devices. And we have touch-first, touch-friendly gestures and ways of interacting with things. That's a big change. Now we're actually seeing that the PCs are going, oh, we're losing sales. Let's put some of this mobile stuff into the PCs. And we have a blending of hardware, software, and services. The things that make this truly mobile and mobility, notice I'm moving, that's mobility, being on the move. The first part of the root of this word is about movement. So when you're thinking about testing, movement is incredibly important to incorporate into your testing work. These devices have a convergence of technology. Camera, radio, which is the telephone part. Web services, surfing the Internet, speakers, entertainment, using radio frequencies to control other devices like such as a television. And we're seeing all this technology and it's absolutely mind-boggling what goes into just the device itself. Now we're seeing not just the PC world starting to use mobile technology, but my television now has mobile technology stuffed into it. Well, this is cool. All the manufacturers think we can make more sales. We can have better customer service, better line of service if we have some of these features people are addicted to with their phones. Because admit it, we're addicted to our smartphones and tablets. But another really fascinating aspect where I'm seeing growth, and some of my friends from BMW are here, mobile technology is going into the dashboard of our cars. You can put a SIM card in and you can get access to cellular networks and you can have some of the same features and affordances in your vehicle, coordinate that with your smartphone or tablet. Fascinating times we live in. Well, apps. Everyone talks about apps. Apps, apps, install our app. I'm making an app. I'm going to maybe Google or Microsoft will buy it and I'll get rich, see how many we can sell. Apps are the big thing. There's over half million, sorry, half billion apps on Apple's App Store alone. I have over 100 apps on my device. How many do I use regularly? Not many. How many times do I install an application and I start to use it and I don't like it very much and I just delete it? How long does it take to delete an app off your device? Shout it out. A second, two seconds, three if I doddle. So this is how people evaluate our applications. They look at it. Is it easy to use? Do I like it? Does it say what it needs to do? Does it do what they say that it does? Okay, maybe I'll keep it. Let's go on here. But if it really makes me angry, press down, delete it. It's an emotional thing. I want you to think about emotions and how when we, there's a blurring of the physical and the virtual. If I'm sleeping with a device under my pillow or next to me or I'm taking it into the most private areas of my life, the emotions that are attached with an application going wrong are very deep and visceral and people get angry. They get upset. I don't like this. This frustrates me and this is a different thing than what we're used to. We go over to a PC. We sit down. We're comfortable. We have an Ergo chair and we have, you know, I'm working at the PC. I'm in a different emotional state. So think about emotions when you're testing these applications because that is what our customers are gauging their decision on. How am I feeling about this? Is it giving me the right type of experience? Should I use it? Should I keep it? Or do I delete it immediately? However, apps can make people so upset that they will not only just delete it, they will rant on social media and they will rate your app on a store and give it a one-star and if you get a whole load of one-stars, that can be absolutely devastating. When you go to an app store, an application store, you see the title of the app, you see a bit of a screenshot and then you see the rating, boom, in your face. It's the biggest thing you're going to see and if you have a poor release and a bunch of one-stars, you may never recover because when we like something, we go and five-star it, not very often. We revel in failure and misfortune and we get upset. We use the hash fail tag on social media. It's a slow news day. This gets picked up by news networks and this has happened to a lot of companies where they made a mistake in their mobile or in their customer service and people will look for this on social media. Look for the hash fail tag. Oh, this is a good juicy one. There are 555,000 followers and it can be... Once it gets to a rantable offense, your app is so unusable or it's so horrible that people will actually go out of their way to rant about it and promote it. That's absolutely devastating. So we don't have the control in the small groups of people that we're used to. We have people with a huge public platform to say nasty things about us if we get it wrong. So let's talk about some challenges we have, mobile testers. People with the real world used anywhere, anytime. Our customers don't use these devices in a test lab under ideal conditions. They use them sitting on a park bench waiting for the train in an airport. They have varying network types and wireless signal strengths when we're on the move. Things can be different from over here. I may have a connection. Oh, it's signals getting weaker. Over here I have no connection. How do you think our application deals with those types of movements? We also have network congestion and wireless interference. If you talk to an old school wireless person or a mobile person they will call the devices we use at radio. It's because they're using radio waves. Just like Grampus transistor radio except you can try it if you want for the LOLs but if you hold up a transistor radio and speak into it nothing's going to happen but it uses the same technology. The transistor radio gets fuzzy. There were certain days when weather was a little bit odd and Grampus radio was and you still listen to it and it drove you nuts. Well, our cellular communication and data and internet access are affected by that type of interference as well. Moving between physical locations a transistor radio doesn't work very well when it's surrounded by steel. Neither do these devices. Different offices, different buildings have different characteristics but in the devices I want you to think about why would I be able to repeat a bug or not be able to repeat a bug excuse me if I'm doing this and then I go back to my desk and I go to type it in I set the device down and I try it again. That has to do with movement. Understanding people's motivation and emotions is absolutely key. Why are they using our app? What problem are they solving? They need to come into something that isn't as usable as a PC when it comes to comfort and being able to type a lot. What's their motivation? What's their goal? And then what are their fears? And do we address both their motivations and fears? So I have to tell you say goodbye to the black box. If all you do is treat this device as a black box and test the way you always have you're going to have a lot of intermittent bugs that your user community has no idea why. So I recommend the type of gray box testing where at least you're aware of all the things that are going on within the devices. It's not enough to just treat it as just an app like every other app we've tested. So I want you to think about something and I want you to take your device. Have you ever been to a concert now? In the old days we used to hold up a lighter. Now I have to do it virtually. Everyone take your device. Let's pretend we're at a concert and I'm Justin Bieber or Nickelback. Everybody come on, get your devices. Come on it's early. Wave. People in virtual land, wave your device. Good. So let's explore about what is happening while we are doing that. Well if you go to ifixit.com they actually take the devices apart and it's fascinating to see all the bits and bobs. We have hardware. We have a screen or we have a case to protect all the innards that can handle shock. We have a high resolution touch screen. We have computers. We have boards to plug things into. We have antennas, multiple antennas for all those different wireless things or one that uses the tries to support all of them. We have a vibration motor when you have it in silent mode and it buzzes or it uses for games. We have a microphone, speakers, camera, battery. And we have all this firmware and hardware that to manage these different devices and different things. To signal out and filter out noise. Some of you have come to me and said you know I test with low battery. Is that a good thing? Yes it's a good thing. Well why might the application behave differently when the battery is low? Well the same reason it does when the device is hot or if you're under different lighting conditions because the devices are designed to optimize themselves to save power and energy and when you reach an area where the device is struggling it will do things to help dissipate heat. So when it's hot many devices will slow the CPU down. They'll slow the processor down. They'll try to free up memory. It'll try to shut down services like cellular networks and things that use more power. And the most power that these things require is for the screen, lighting up the screen. So you have a sensor, a proximity sensor that senses whether you're nearby and you have a light sensor and it will try to dim. See it dimmed. It's trying to help me and save me battery time in life. There's a lot of complexities around that that have an impact on our testing. If you get a performance related issue and you can't repeat it, well maybe it was in power saving mode. Maybe it's in optimization mode to find out more information. Sensors are fascinating. There are sensors. Just to be able to tap on a screen and do something, that technology absolutely fascinates me. To make this work so it doesn't smear up with my greasy fingerprints when I'm inhaling my food while I'm at the restaurant. Movement sensors. So we have sensors that sense their inputs. So if you ever play a game and you tilt, that means something. This means something. This means something. Different sensors are sensing that movement and I can tap into that with my application that I'm working on. We have location services. We can use global positioning satellites. Doesn't that blow you away? When I was a lot younger when Lee first discovered me back in the 80s GPS was something that the military used. Someone's uncle's friend twice removed, had GPS and now we just take it for granted and we get upset when we're jogging and it gets it wrong and our trip for our work out isn't quite right. So you can use that. We can use the location of a tower. We can use the location of whatever Wi-Fi beacon we're connected to. We can use a web IP address. We can use device IDs. We can use a bunch of different combinations but it's really hard to get it right. There's a lot of stabilization and filtering. There's a lot that goes into that device to make it usable to handle. I have a tremor and so I shake a little bit and the device can handle me doing a lot to it. So what's out there? That's what's a little taste of what's inside the device. What about around us? Well around us we have the electromagnetic spectrum. We have waves and different types of particles going through the atmosphere. We take advantage of those with GPS. We have cellular towers, Wi-Fi locations, device IDs, all these different things to help us find that information, as I mentioned earlier. But how do we do this? We utilize wireless technologies. There's Wi-Fi which is around us. We Star West, Star West 2012 if you need it. We have other types of wireless communication. Bluetooth, often used to connect to other devices. We have NFC, field communication, which is huge in other parts of the world, especially for mobile payments. And we have cellular technologies. So when you see Edge, 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE, things like that in your device, that just describes a family of standards. So whatever wireless provider you're currently connected to has some combination of technology that meets the standard of 3G. And some of them will barely get there and some of them will have more speed. And they well, they may understate how fast and powerful their networks are, just like car manufacturers. This is all marketing, right? But we have inconsistent signal strengths. We have different carriers, have different types of activity and have more people, subscribers on a particular tower. And the transitions really, really important. How does your app handle moving from strong Wi-Fi to weaker Wi-Fi? How does it handle moving from one Wi-Fi to another? How does it handle moving from Wi-Fi to particular cellular technology and moving in and out of dead spots? Because when we're mobile, this is the type of things that we deal with. And when we develop applications, we often assume, just like the internet nowadays, not in the mid-90s when I was working, starting in this world, we had a lot of problems, these kinds of problems as well. But we think, we treat it like a commodity that's always on, always available, full bandwidth, no latency and we design our apps that way. So we jam all these images and large files down the pipe. We don't handle errors with different types of changes between networks or different signal strengths. And I'm going to pick on airline applications right now a little bit. Because they're often one of the ones that are the biggest sinners when it comes to assuming I have a strong network connection. The ticket, after I've bought the application, my ticket appears on my device with all the apps I've used, and that depends on an internet connection. Okay? What kinds of buildings have the worst type of signal strength and the most varieties of signal strengths? Airports. So I go in, I'm paperless, I have my ticket up, I go up to the counter and I show the device and she goes to scan it. Sir, there's a problem with your ticket. Okay? What's wrong? And I look at it, it's just a little prompt that says it's found a Wi-Fi network. Oh, we'll just click cancel and she scans it. What's the big deal? It's just barely obscuring it. Okay. Maybe she's having a bad day. So I go over to security. First person at security scans the ticket. Okay, no problem. I go in, get to the line, next guy wants to see it and, uh, oh, Kate bring it up, unlock the screen. And I've lost network connectivity again. I have a prompt that's up and they're very suspicious. You have something obscuring the ticket, please deal with your phone. Okay, cancel the Wi-Fi connection again. There it is, scan it. All right. And I do the dance because I have big belt buckles and shoes and I take it all and put it in the train. And my laptop, oh, the laptop. Oh, do I have? Okay, I put it all in there. And then I don't trust the X-ray machine. So I power my phone off. I put it in the bin. It comes out the other side and they want to see my ticket again. So I turn it on and searching, searching, searching and there's nothing worse than holding up the security line, right? Oh, terribly sorry, terribly sorry. And so eventually I power the app off, get going, no network connection and where's the ticket? It's gone. It was in the cache. The cache has been cleared. I have no ticket. So eventually they're frustrated and say, all right, fine, it's okay, you got this far. But coincidentally you have been selected for secondary screening. So I go off, do that. Then I come out, gather my stuff, put my belt on, miss a few loops, tuck my shirt in and get my stuff together. Has anyone stolen my laptop? No, okay. Go sit down, wait for the plane to load and fire up Wi-Fi, start surfing the web, rant on social media about the TSA and the indignities I've suffered and go to get on the aircraft, take it again. Well, that's fine. I've loaded it up and show it to the agent, go through the concourse, get up to the plane and then someone wants me to show it again. I'm inside an aircraft. I'm not allowed to have. You're all paranoid about this stuff. I've already put airplane mode on. So airline application developers everywhere, please stop torturing us. Stop assuming this strong persistent network and help us. This is a question I get asked a lot. Well, how do we pick what we test? Because notice movement is important. Moving network transitions light, weather, even a thunderstorm outside if you're using a cellular network that can excite particles, can excite electrons and can cause problems. So you can't just rely on emulators. In fact, you're going to want to start with devices, use emulators to complement what you can't do in real life. So I have some example strategies. A shotgun. This is a mass market. You're going to have to fire up your internet machine and you're going to have to search and look to see who's got the most recent stats that you can try to help find information from. There's different people who have developed test labs. So go through, find the problem child devices, find popular devices, but there is no single source out there that has all this information that you're going to need. You're really going to have to research. Or you can do a singular. This is a little bit easier. We're only supporting brand X operating system Y. Okay. And then you can complement what you're doing by outsourcing. You can use remote device handset services or crowdsourcing, but you're not going to get a lot of those funky things with movement and transitions and things with a remote device handset service because they have handsets that are stable that you control remotely over the web. Crowdsourcing, you can get some basic testing done. Or you can use a proportional strategy. So you do some research. You find a pie chart and okay, we've got Android. We've got BlackBerry, iOS, and we've got Windows Phone. So I can take this and I can proportionately get devices and support on those particular devices to get some type of a picture, a small picture maybe a handful of devices in my test lab that matches that. And again, you're going to have to do more research about which operating systems are the most popular currently and it changes all the time. It's difficult to get really up to date information, but all you need to do is just do better than your competitor who probably isn't doing any testing who isn't thinking about this, is just using emulators and yep, good enough. So you don't have to be perfect. There's also project challenges that we have to deal with that I've never had to deal with before in 15 years. Some of them anyway. With extreme time pressure. Used to get weeks and months with web applications. I can get days or hours on mobile applications. I think that there's this psychological idea. This is this size, this screen, so my decision makers look at my laptop, well your laptop screen is, the smartphone screen is about one six the size of your laptop screen. Therefore the project is one six the size of the other one. But we have a massive testing burden because we have all this platform proliferation and they're very complex devices. A lot of people think, well this is just a PC in your pocket. It's not. If it was a PC in our pocket, we think it was lame and we wouldn't buy it at all without the sensors, without it would just be, well it's much nicer on a bigger screen and a bigger keyboard. One of the things that hit me on projects when I started leading smartphone and tablet projects was fatigue due to ergonomics. You can feel physical pain and your application design may be causing pain. Watch for the pain in the testers. They may not be able to tell you because, you know, I'm a big boy and I fight through it. But I wasn't able to get as many hours of the day out of doing more hands-on mobile testing as I have on PCs with applications that were designed for the web or for a PC. When I was trying to replicate and help debug a freeze up due to a touch screen, some of you have seen me do this before where I would rotate the device and I'd enter in different types of information, I could rub my fingertips raw doing the testing. So I had to start scheduling so that people weren't doing this five days a week they weren't out and about, they weren't doing all this kind of testing because they would just burn out. I also had an entire team, our entire mobile development team got sick when the swine flu crisis hit us a few years ago. And management were really surprised. Is this some sort of job action? Are you going skiing today? Are you all playing hockey? They didn't believe us, but it was because we're handing the devices around and we had to come up with policies and procedures for storage and cleaning them and things like that. There's a massive testing overhead and some of the technologies are really appealing, like web applications or hybrid applications because we have a unified code base. But you're not actually gaining anything in the grand scheme of things. It might be easier from a technical perspective, but you're trading off one set of problems for another. With hybrid applications, especially some of the people I've talked to have spent 80 to 90% of their project time in testing and debugging and fixing activities because it's very difficult to get the support that you want. And the tools are immature. It's like the early days of the web. Everyone's promising the world. It's hot. All we need to do is prefix whatever we have with mobile. It's like Agile, just prefix it and mobile wash it or Agile wash it and it'll sell. So it'll come that the tools don't do what we need them to do all the time yet. So hold the tools to account. Make sure they meet your needs before you shell out the bucks. If they help, that's great. If they don't help, we're forging new technology. We're forging a new future for ourselves as testers and the tools will have to reflect it. Also, our workplaces will have to reflect it. People will say to me, well, what do we do? A lot of this stuff doesn't seem to fit well with test cases and test management systems. What do I say to different people? The problem is we're kind of stuck in the past. A lot of the things that we're dealing with are 1990 solutions to 1980s problems. That's a lot of what our world is. The mobile world is completely different. So workplaces and work environments are changing and we need to adapt to that. So it demands a fresh approach not just to our testing, but how we manage the projects and how we look at the projects and think about work. So that's tough. Some people get overwhelmed by all of that. Oh, there's a million scrillion devices and it sounds hard. It sounds difficult. Well, it'll get forced on us eventually and the flip side of a challenge, I love the challenge. It gives me so much energy. I have to tell you, I was getting so tired of hearing agile this, web app that, blah, blah, blah. Same old thing for 10 years and now all of a sudden with smartphones and tablets, it's like, cool. It's new and different and this is a great opportunity. It's scary. It's difficult, but hey, we get to be involved with something really important. So here are some opportunities. And usability testing and app usability is paramount in how these applications survive in the market, whether you're doing an enterprise internal or a public app. Usability is the chief thing that you need to worry about. In my experience in 15 years and on hundreds of projects at dozens of companies, usability tends to come in where? First or last? Well, that's just subjective, Jonathan. You're the only one. How many times have you heard that when you've logged usability? Well, we have to flip our thinking. People have Twitter, they have Facebook, they have all these different types of social media platforms to stand on. They can absolutely crush your application and cause huge problems. So get involved in usability testing, learn about it, learn from their user experience field, and they're learning about mobile. There aren't standards yet. Everything's kind of topsy-turvy and changing, but read the developer guidelines that Apple has provided. They're wonderful. Read the developer guidelines on usability that Microsoft have developed. Read the ones that Google have developed for Android. The best and brightest minds in this field are, most of them are working really hard at coming up with this, and they're providing and if you read these guides, it will blow your mind and how that you can approach testing, and you can spend a career sinking your teeth into some of this stuff. It's absolutely vital, and it can be a kickstart, it can be a career path to help you learn something new when you're thinking about where I'm going to go as a tester. The constraints are difficult. They are what help us innovate. There's an itch that I need to scratch. This tool doesn't do what I need. There's no tool out there. No tool exists. Let's build the tool. We do not innovate when we're comfy, wumpy, listening to someone tell us everything we want to hear. Yes, you're handsome and you're pretty and you're smart and you're doing everything right on your project and you're an amazing person. We need that once in a while, but you know, haha, look at me just puffed out. Do I I don't feel any indication any motivation that I need to change or do anything at all. Constraints are what help us innovate. They're what force us to move forward as humanity. So we get new toys. New tools allow me to demonstrate. I have two tools, so I don't tend to test with just one when I'm out and about. I like to use different devices, so I need the devices for testing, so guess who gets administrators and other people to stand in line to get the latest and greatest tools for us? Not the development team anymore. The testers. We need this for testing and so suddenly there's this huge input towards hmm, QA folks testing folks, what do you need for testing? Because we don't want the one-stars, so we get the cool hardware. I am using tablets and I'm using a new device that I'd never be able to afford on my own salary and I'm using it in the office and I'm having a great old time trying out shiny new things. There's new different operating systems and different paradigms on different families of devices from different providers. The design approaches are absolutely fascinating and it's putting a strain on development methodologies. A lot of the development methodologies that we're using now, as I said, we're designed in the 1990s. Many of them were designed in the 1990s dealing with 1980s problems and I've had to work on teams that were really productive using popular development methodologies and they run into constraints because mobility doesn't fit, like a store submission not working. Uh-oh, we've had great velocity on our sprints if we're scrummies. This is working really nicely and boom, we didn't encounter this, now how are we going to cope with that? So some really novel things are coming from the people who are less worried about whether they're following the right methodology or not, who are worried about building something amazing for their clients and then you look at what they're doing and go hey, that's kind of cool, that's new and different. And we're getting new tools to support development and testing. They're coming out all the time, I can't keep up when I was doing my course my two-day course on mobile testing in June I found a couple of really cool tools and I was, you know, mentioned them over the summer and now as of this week one has changed its name and the other one I can't find anymore. It's just absolutely dynamic there's fabulous ideas that are coming out and in test practices, techniques and approaches, as I said, no more black box no more sitting in ideal conditions, you have to get out in the real world you have to incorporate movement and you have to figure out how do we do this efficiently we can't go wandering around all the time so you have to come up with optimization strategies and it's fascinating to see how people manage to hybridize this with what they're doing before and management and governance changes we aren't in control of the distribution we don't have the public message anymore distribution is in the hands of the store providers and the public message our marketing message is not in our hands it is in the hands of you it is in the hands of the people so we have to be very careful that what we say and do matches with what we deliver that's a big shift but we should always have in testing it's fun, fun, fun, fun it's, this is the most fun that I've ever had in my career is to play with these devices I get technology, there's new technology I get to move around, I get to do different kinds of things, I get to be creative yes, you do get to do this at work I can be at the coffee shop I can be at home, I can be on the train on the plane, I can be anywhere out in the real world finding important issues that mean amazing amount to our development team to help them create a great customer experience because I'm out and about, I'm doing things at home, sitting down, lying down how many of you lie down and read and you get your device about halfway through and it starts to rotate back and forth oh, I wish my favorite e-reader could lock in one mode so that it wouldn't move around on me doing chores, watching TV this is where people can find productive time and the workplace is slowly changing more people are working from home and when you work from home you fit these things in during your day rather than standing around in a water cooler walking to the restaurant you have time while you're doing chores oh, well, I'm waiting for the washing to be done let's see, oh, weird why did the app crash? oh, let's see oh, no network connectivity and my battery is low let's try to replicate that my wife who's here is part of a group, a knitting group and they like to use tablets and to read knitting patterns and so they will have their hands busy while they're knitting and Tracy, who I mentioned earlier is a knitter, she started the group and she told me about a test that she does with her iPad she sets it down sits and knits and the toe swipe so you heard it here first thank you, Tracy, for the toe swipe test this is how people use the devices, this is a paradigm shift this is a big shift from what we're used to we do not dictate, they dictate and do it on the move as I mentioned and then away from home different locations have an enormous impact on how our applications might behave so when we get to do this I manage my teams and incorporate this into our work and are you sure you want me to go to the coffee shop and don't you think I'm going to just fool around all day? no I trust you you're going to have to be accountable for the work so show me what you found out you tell me if you found nothing tell me if you found something but you're going to have to tell me about the conditions what was the weather like, what network conditions how did the application respond under those conditions and utilize that time and another tour that I have created a tour is a way of working your way through an application and learning about it and evaluating it is the emotions tour really powerful thing try the app when you're really ticked off something fascinating that occurs when you're ticked off what do you do to the device is it this or is it this you're integrating with the sensors differently depending on your emotion you have a lot of sweat on your fingers that has a big effect on usability or the touch targets in the application small or there are things that are really numerous so under ideal sterile lab conditions it's fine but someone who has sweaty hands the device is a tremendous amount so I taught my course at a music company and one of the people in the course was a drummer and he said I have a hard time using my tablets because rather than pressure sensors they use capacitance sensors because that's the electricity we give off and he's a drummer, a hand drummer what hand drummers put on their hands baby powder, corn starch, things like that to reduce blisters so he has to lick it off and then try to catch up so the emotional state tour is a fun one, you can pretend and I encourage you to pretend that you're some different type of user one of my favorite tours is the annoying family member tour everyone here probably has an annoying family member that every time you have a holiday you go and spend time getting the viruses off their pc everyone's enjoying a meal and you're down in an office no matter what you say, they always mess up their pc, they get a new smart phone and you get this frantic phone call from their landline I don't remember my passcode so pretend that you're that user and how would they use the app it'll blow your mind how a perspective change thinking about how real people will use it can have an impact another one is the teenager user teenagers are way faster on these devices than I am and they get impatient and they context switch from the email to facebook to twitter to something else to sms and back again is it loaded yet and so using things the way and pretending that you're those people can be a perspective change is incredibly powerful so people say aren't you worried that I'm going to be on facebook or twitter the whole time maybe you should be on facebook and twitter the whole time and have it interrupt you and incorporate those social interruptions into application usage because that my friends is the real world social features are a cornerstone of successful mobile applications and we're seeing this come into the enterprise we're saying people they're spending 20 hours of a day on social media all this lost productivity time how do we harness that towards something where we want to get some work done and they're finding that for the same reason if I post on social media and say I need a good karma can can anyone recommend and 15 people give me recommendation I go with that person same thing in business we can spend a long time with request for proposals and evaluating when all we need is that information coming to us so incorporate social text interruptions and social media interruptions into your testing push notifications phone calls this is a fascinating one with these devices because there's so many combinations you can map out I'm in the application I get a phone call I blow it off I'm in the application working get a phone call I answer I return if I blew off the call I can I get a voicemail do I listen or no yes cancel cancel go back to the app amazingly the application will handle some of those interruptions well and they'll handle others poorly the other thing you can do with testing what I call apps with appetizers to deal with my fragmentation problem and getting testing on a bunch of different devices I annoy my friends at parties and wherever else and find out what new cool hardware they have if they have devices that I don't have in my test lab then I go hey do you mind coming out for a few drinks and a meal with me and you know we'll get about 8 or 10 of us sit down at a table I'll come up with some really simple exercises to go through through the application and get them to install the app and we'll have a you know maybe a half hour of fun kind of a bug bash over you know some nosh and bevvies and I get some great feedback and find problems I never would have seen I'm well known in the neighborhood for when I'm with my techie friends there's a line of devices up on the table and everyone's looking who are these guys and we're oh squealing with delight when we find a bug you can also leverage this through social media virtually there's test bashes and weekend testers that will set up formal types of activities where people from all over the world will sign up and test an application and provide their results so you can get involved with those or maybe I had my own website and I had to update it because it was getting old so we used a responsive design which is a new technology for web applications it not only changes size but it changes its characteristics so that it's mobile friendly well I have friends all over the world because I travel all over the place and I just messaged them on social media said test it out on your devices and for some strange reason people in Sweden had problems and so I got really good feedback and we were able to make sure that we had some workarounds in place because people in Sweden weren't getting what they needed to get never would have known that without incorporating can also incorporate and leverage people that you work with if they're if you're in a larger organization and people who are in sales or marketing with their great teeth and hair as Lee mentioned asked them to run through some simple types of exercises when they're on the road and give you feedback about what went wrong and when you tell people to get into your network conditions and to the weather to movement then instead of getting a report which is what I often get now from the field we have an intermittent bug and they've learned we've we've beat it into them give us specific steps what you were doing and you know what happened and everything but they don't know about sensors they don't know about location services and all these other technologies and how movement and weather and whether they were transitioning or walking transitioning between networks things like so you have to train people to think about a lot of other things when they're out and about but it's not that hard because you incorporate the movement you show them have them do it another key for mobile applications is gaming and entertainment there's a movement called the gamification of work and what they are looking at is that people will spend time playing games doing you know repetitive activities just to you know to build up a character online so that they can reach a certain level or they'll just go around and get trinkets and merch and bling for their character and they'll spend a lot of this time doing something that we normally would find boring repetitive but there's an intrinsic value there so the gamification of work movement is looking at how do we gamify some aspects of what we're doing in our apps or in work to get harness some of that intrinsic motivation and a big part of why mobile or mobility is so addictive is that it's pretty with high resolution graphics and it just looks interesting and it looks good and it's funny if you look on the evening news you'll notice rounded corners and you know sort of Appley or Samsung or you know whoever some particular designs that are really well known in the mobile space are starting to infiltrate graphics in other areas I noticed this with the web when we had rollovers where you put your mouse over something and it would change colors and all of a sudden the graphics on the news start to change that way well that combination of animation sensor interaction and all of that fits into this experience where it's very entertaining and we can go beyond and so we're on the precipice of all as I mentioned earlier of alternate ways of doing things that are entertaining like the Xbox connect where it responds to gestures that you just do in the air people are studying how do we because it's hard to type on the devices it's hard to do different things how do we get more natural ways of people interacting with the devices and it can be quite fascinating how this can affect our testing and how we really are forced or going to be forced to move and do things differently we're not wired to the keyboard anymore so watch for this type of thing we can enhance testing with them we can let people know hey wait a minute we don't have a very good polish on this it's too busy it's just a copy of our website and here are the developer guidelines that say how you should be doing it and here's the store submission guidelines that say why you will be rejected unless you follow this so we can enhance it it's also great for logging bugs and I tested this out earlier and it doesn't work so I'm going to have to simulate using Siri but if I was to start a west mobile app which I will do here and let's just say I found a bug so here we are interesting so with all this movement and everything else how do I describe how do I describe that in words in a bug report not very well if a picture says a thousand words a video says a million so what I can do which is really cool is utilize one device saying there's a photo of the bug or I could have someone else take a video of it and this is incredibly powerful because it's so easy the devices have these cameras built in they have I can tweet it if I want to but I can text it to the developer I can email it I can say Siri take a photo and Siri will respond that she took the photo and then I can say Siri email Joey McAllister with the photo Siri will send the photo off to me it isn't just a toy we can use these toys we can use these affordances to help us do better as testers especially when we're on the move and I use these I have my tether to my programmer when I'm out and about and I send them updates we use the technology so that they can get on board with things and find out problems and often will if we can work one on one it's like remote virtual pairing and they're getting information from me in real time and making suggestions and trying to figure out what went wrong another thing that we do because I love media is we gamify some of the tasks I'm from Canada it can be cold several months of the year who wants to go outside and test in the cold well testing in the cold on these devices can have an effect just as testing in the heat so well too bad I say and crack the whip no I don't do that we gamified it we reward people we give them shout out so we give them cred for doing some of the tasks and aren't as much fun but what we really love to do is to reward them when they do something with video who did the best bug video of the week let's go through some of them over lunch and I'll supply lunch and drinks and we'll look at them and we'll learn about all these cool things and hey who wins the prize and what's the prize you get the parking spot or you get something else and you can make this fun you get some of the more difficult activities and to use these devices that aren't so pleasant on other devices which are a lot of fun on these ones so if you haven't already done so and you're interested in this and this follows the spirit of where you want to move forward from this conference when you go back on Monday I want you to as deeply as you can understand mobile users devices and ecosystems how do I understand mobile users I watch what I want to do is look around me when there's people and I see mobile users when I'm in the airport I'll watch I'll talk to people that's an interesting device what are you doing don't be creepy don't be obnoxious but people will they're more than happy we spend a lot of money on these devices they go with us everywhere they're a personal part of us and people love to talk about themselves and by extension the devices so I learn I watch how they use things a lot of the people in the car club are older and their mechanics and their welders and fabricators they don't have lily white doctor's hands like we do and we're on keyboards all day there's grease stains, arthritis watch what angles do they approach are they able to see things how do they interact with things fascinating to watch move beyond the black box the black box is dead move beyond it turn those challenges so it might scare us into innovation because everyone else is scared too everyone else is overwhelmed everyone else is saying oh that's too hard I don't want to do it but all you need to do is go and do something it doesn't have to be perfect incorporate typical mobile usage into your testing use your enterprise app the same way you use the apps that you like to use that's where you're going to find the important bugs and above all have fun it is fun it's interesting it's part of a big change now and get on board ride the wave it's an absolute blast