Pushkar and I were two recent PhDs with an idea for mobile game testing. We had an idea, but no customers, and no clue about the demand for such a service. Our first step in the discovery process was to share our thoughts, visions, and knowledge within the app testing space as a way to start becoming thought leaders in this growing marketplace. Along the way, we discovered three systemic issues that led to the creation of MoQuality as an enterprise mobile app testing provider. This article is the story of our early entrepreneurial journey ...

Exciting things are happening at MoQuality. Every day, more people are discovering the advantages of testing their applications on Barista. By automating the testing process, we are helping developers run more tests across more devices, identify and fix more errors, and save countless hours of their time.

So I thought this would be a good moment to look back at the first research prototype of Barista. Although we have come a long way and are still constantly working on new improvements to the platform, many of the foundational principles have remained the same: We wanted to build a tool that made testing applications simpler, faster, and more effective ...

Although mobile devices are constantly becoming faster and more efficient, battery drain is an issue that seems to continually plague app developers. The reason is simple: Users are attracted to dynamic apps that offer impressive visuals, extensive functionality, and that run fast. Unfortunately, many developers don’t know how to deliver this while also keeping their app from draining users’ batteries. And since battery life is the one resource that is shown on the screen constantly, using too much can ruin even the most useful apps. ...

Everyone wants a mobile app of some sort these days, and they want it for every major platform. That’s great news for developers who need the work, but mobile app development comes with plenty of complications you don’t get when developing software for Windows, Linux or MacOS.The most obvious problem is that the machine you do the actual development on is nothing like the device that must actually run the software! So how should you approach software testing in this tricky context? That’s a great question! However, the answer needs some explanation. ...

DeepMind was able to show that deep learning networks can be effectively used to train agents to play games. This is significant because the input their learner takes in is the game screen and a set of controls the agent can perform. In previous work in this area, researchers had to hand extract features which helped the AI agent learn the game. With deep learning that process is automated in the deep learning network. The network learns important features and learns policies that lead to a good score ...

A cat has nine lives, but your software doesn’t. I imagine Jenny will say something like this. Jenny started her career working as a support engineer. As a support engineer, she learned that software is not simply something that does its job but it makes their life better. ...

It’s well known that mobile games are resource hungry apps. That’s why they become the best candidate for testing underlying system performance. Google has made lots of improvements in the Android 8 Run Time over Android 7, so we decided to test it out with two popular games, Flappy Bird and Super Mario, in order to have a better understanding of what makes the Run Time on Android 8 so much better ...

I gave a talk at GTAC 2015 on using robots for Android App Testing. The talk got a lot of interest and I presented on the same topic at AndroidSummit, Connect.TECH and several meetups to share my ideas with developers and get feedback on their thoughts. Most of my audience were fascinated by the idea of having a robot test your app for increasing coverage and identifying all failures (crashes) in the application ...