Last Friday, someone in the office came back from San Francisco with an IPAD!

Commotion followed!

The prized little gadget passed several hands in less than 2 minutes. But once it landed into the lap of a fellow QA, the testing fun begins!  Yousee we have an iPhone application in the middle of development, and what a cool way to see if the same iPhone apps will work with its big brother closely named iPad.  And no, I won’t tell you the results of of that test.

But one I thing I can tell you is this — holding an iPad for the first time is simply magical! Everything you touched moved so fast, even watching a simple YouTube video was never the same.  Surfing the web becomes a lot faster and much better!

So how does an iPad affect our job as software tester?

Here are my random buggy thoughts :

  • The iPad is not a “FAD”. It is the best technological advancement in recent years, it is here to stay as it opens a new era in computing.  Technology will now be available to the average user, gone would be the days when only the geeks know how to save a file. With this in mind, we need to seriously consider usability testing.
  • Accelerometer App testing. We will be testing from every angle ( portraits and landscapes) every rotation response time, without a mouse and keyboard !  It will be fun at first, but not sure how physically tiring this may be ;-)
  • Memory usage and memory leaks. More apps and web pages compatible with iPad will be developed and tested. These will come in the form of digital books, games, digital newspapers, magazines, websites, email, videos, gadgets and every imaginable application that caters to every age group, gender or nationality. There are close to 200,000 apps in the Apple Store that will continue to grow exponentially with the global release of  iPad.
  • Connectivity, performance, scalability and load testing would be crucial. Its portability means we can now be connected anytime, anywhere. This means faster loading web pages and apps. But how does your application scale up when the connectivity is slow or low.
  • Compatibility testing. I am sure software companies would like to see their application working well with  regular desktop, laptop, netbook, other android phones, iPhone, iPod, Ipod Touch and iPad ! By the way, if you wanted to see how your website will look within iPad, you can go to this website http://ipadpeek.com/
  • Security testing. We can purchase anything, anywhere as long as there is a connection. We can login into any secured site at our convenience.  Do banking,  trade stocks, pay bills etc while riding in the bus.  Securing these sites would be of great concern.

By the time you read this part, I am now convinced that testing an iPad application will really be not much different from any other product. There may be some new skills or tool sets needed, but the most important tool is always the mindset and attitude of the tester to accept challenges with enthusiasm. Almost anything can be learned if you are willing to give it a try.

Cheers!

Tess Rupprecht

Some links which you might want to check :

http://www.testiphone.com/
http://iphonetester.com/
http://furbo.org/2008/08/06/beta-testing-on-iphone-20/
http://code.google.com/p/google-toolbox-for-mac/wiki/iPhoneUnitTesting
http://www.devworld.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Xcode/Conceptual/iphone_development/135-Unit_Testing_Applications/unit_testing_applications.html