Fred Beringer

SOASTA and the IBM SmartCloud

Fred — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 08:39:26 +0000

Did you know that IBM SmartCloud was part of the SOASTA Global Cloud? The SOASTA Global Cloud allows us to help customers from 39 locations across the globe by giving us access to more than 375,000 servers! Thanks to Cloud providers such as IBM, Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, GoGrid, RackSpace, Radix, etc.

Tom Lounibos gives a brief introduction about the IBM and SOASTA relationship and what it means for customers.

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Join the SOASTA TouchTest Movement next week!

Fred — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:03:19 +0000

It’s been 2 weeks now that we’ve announced TouchTest and the feedback is really amazing! I think we’re really on to something here. The Beta is going extremely well with great excitement from engineering team across the world really looking at making our platform the best solution for mobile test automation.

I’ve been demoing our technology at least 3 times a day for the past 2 weeks with my agenda filling quickly! So I thought I’d organize a TouchTest gathering for everyone involved into mobile apps development and testing in Europe and beyond!

During this webinar I will discuss and demonstrate the new CloudTest capabilities including:

Precision capture and playback of ALL continuous touch gestures including pan, pinch, zoom, and scroll on iPhones, iPads, iPods and Android mobile devices
Touch-based UI testing from INSIDE the app, replacing brittle optical recognition approaches, enabling validations based on variable values and internal app state changes
Control of test devices via IP address, eliminating the need for tethering, jailbreaking, or contracting with expensive 3rd party services
Private Device Clouds that support affordable testing with real devices in your lab or across the globe

Do you want to join the TouchTest Movement? Join me February 23rd 2012, 12pm-1pm GMT

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Hola Barcelona! Meet SOASTA at the Mobile World Congress!

Fred — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:33:46 +0000

I’m kicking off 2012 conference season with what should be one of the top conference I will have the opportunity to attend this year. The Mobile World Congress is THE place to be if you’re involved in the mobile world. The annual attendance is generally between 50,000 and 60,000 people! Theme for this year is perfect: Redefining Mobile.

As mobile takes more and more importance into the life of consumers and become a primary focus for Enterprise business, we at SOASTA are trying to stay ahead of the game and provide the best testing products to address this ever growing market. As you know, we’ve announced our new mobile test automation solution a couple of weeks ago and so far the feedback is INCREDIBLE! We’ve held our biggest webinar in our history for the occasion and we’re looking for a repeat 2 weeks from now at a convenient time for our European customers. I’ve been doing demo of our new technology all last week and it really opens up some very interesting discussions and open a realm of opportunity for developers and testers. The fact that we don’t rely neither on simulator/emulator or OCR makes complete sense for them. They’ve been abandoning these inappropriate approaches for a while now and are looking at investing into what looks to them the only way to properly test their apps. Being able to test INSIDE the app, record every single events, actions, gestures received by the application is very, very appealing. Being able to use validations they’re familiar with because they’re CloudTest users is also a definite plus. They’re also very excited about the concept of Private Device Cloud (and by its possible public extension!). As you know, when testing with TouchTest technology, your devices don’t have to be tethered. It means that I can run a test on a device located on the other side of the world for example. Now imagine, a company having 3000 employees and developing mobile apps. Before TouchTest, to validate your application on a broad number of devices, you had to either buy the actual hardware or rent some VERY expensive lab provided by third party relying on OCR. Wouldn’t it be nice to leverage my employee smartphones to run my tests? When you think about it, they all have different smartphones you app should support (whether it’s iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, etc.), they’re all connected to different carriers … They’re a very good representation of your market! Because TouchTest doesn’t require your devices to be tethered, you can tap into this pool to not only run functional tests on all of them but also capture performance information during execution! Oh, and you don’t have to mess up your employee’ smartphones because TouchTest doesn’t require jailbreaking. How about that for redefining mobile test automation? Definitely a game changer the industry was expecting.

What’s also very interesting to notice is that every single customer we talk to about mobile test automation, is also interested to hear about our solution for load and performance testing. Validating functionally the application running on an actual device is one thing. Making sure that the full ecosystem the application rely on, whether it is the customer’s backend/infrastructure or third-party, is probably as important in 2012. Being able to reproduce actual traffic whether it is coming from desktop’s browser or actual mobile devices is today a reality every customer wants to take advantage of. Having one platform covering the whole end-to-end test requirement is key to them.

My goal at the World Congress will be to discuss our new technology with application developers and testers to get their feedback and ideas. Meeting with companies to understand their challenges testing their apps and show them that they don’t have to go back to the dark ages (aka manual testing) to ensure the robustness of their deliverable. I also want to discuss with potential partners who wants to provide the best technology to customers and are willing to be part of the best ecosystem today for software testing. In the past few months, Correlsense, AppDynamics and OpTier have join our rank to provide the best services to customers and I’m confident I’ll have some great conversation with partner with a compatible DNA so we can strengthen our platform.

I will also formally meet a number of Spanish customers during a business breakfast and roundtable organized by our partner Testabil. There are still a few seats left so if you’re interested to participate, drop me a note at fberinger [at] SOASTA [dot] com! It would be great to meet you!

This is going to be an AWESOME week!

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SOASTA TouchTest – The day after

Fred — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:06:19 +0000

Wow! What a week! We’ve announced our new AWESOME product TouchTest this Monday and things got crazy really quickly! I’ve been talking about it yesterday all day long with testers and potential customers, and the feedback is truly AMAZING! Then when I had finally some time to catch up with what was said about TouchTest, I ended up spending quite a bit of time reading everything that was being said about TouchTest. Check this out!

Fast Company: There’s an App for that App

When apps were simple, only accessed by users numbering in the hundred or thousand and not particularly critical (in terms of usage, whether it was business use or for more sensitive situations like in medical environments) then the way the interface worked wasn’t incredibly vital. But as the app economy grows up, people are relying on apps more and more to help them communicate, to run their businesses, to interact with customers, to diagnose medical conditions, and other much more significant uses. In these situations, having a precise and responsive UI is vital to helping the app work, or to keep and delight a customer, and so on.

Information Week: Cloud Platform Stress Tests Mobile Apps

Other companies have been providing similar software testing and management services for enterprises, notably Mercury and Rational Software. And the acquisition of these companies for significant sums in years past, by HP and IBM respectively, underscores the value of such services to businesses.

ReadWriteWeb: App Testing Catches Up With the New Era of Gesture-Based Input

This can all be done without tethering, rooting or jailbreaking a device. TouchTest controls the device through software and accesses them through their IP address. Basically, TouchTest is Internet driven. Organizations can build a “private device cloud” with devices inside their data centers or in remote locations. That means that the number of devices needed to perform large scale testing is greatly reduced.

TabTimes: Pinch, zoom, touch: CloudTest release gives devs insight into mobile app performance

Aberdeen Group analyst Jim Rapoza said a growing number of companies are looking for better tools to test mobile app performance.

The Droid Guy: Developer’s Soasta Offering Mobile App Performance And Functional Testing Solutions

Through a multi-track, almost Garage Band like interface, TouchTest is able to log every input function of an application, every gesture, every reaction, save it in tracks to compare and recall with other results. While in testing mode the user can watch the test results in real time or play them back and compare them.

This is really, really exciting for us at SOASTA. We really have the feeling that we’re changing the way people will test mobile apps and it is a FANTASTIC feeling.

I’ve been playing with TouchTest the past couple of days and I’ve promised you some additional demo of the product. So here it is! A test for a mobile application I call the “dancing squares”!

If you want to try TouchTest for yourself, please apply to our beta program! And if you want to learn more about the technology behind TouchTest, I’d recommend you join our webinar on January 26th!

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Mobile Test Automation the SOASTA way with TouchTest

Fred — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:20:47 +0000

2 weeks ago I’ve spent a week at SOASTA HQ for our 2012 kick-off. A good opportunity to meet old friends, and make new ones! As you know, in December we’ve raised an additional $12M to expand our business and awesome people are joining the revolution every day! On the menu was a recap of 2011, plan and objectives for 2012 and of course a little bit of partying and dancing (first ankle tear for me in 2012! But I think I’ve scored some major points on the dance floor )

But during this week there was a true seminal moment, not only for me but for the whole team at SOASTA.

The engineering team led by Tal Broda unveiled what they had been working on for the last 2 months, day and night. I knew they were working on something yet again very disruptive but the secret was well kept and I couldn’t wait to see it for my own eyes. Imagine the scene: On the stage, a combination of ipad and iphone (iPad 1 and 2, iPhone 3G, 4 and 4S). The lead developer for this project (Tana Jackson, 23 Ironman under her belt!) had an ipad in her hand, untethered. She launched a demo application with colorful cubes displayed on the screen and started playing with them: Moving them, making circles, making them bigger, smaller … All the typical gestures you can expect from an iOS app. And in CloudTest, the magic happened: All these gestures were recorded in real-time in a typical CloudTest clip. But best of all, all the recorded gestures could be then replayed perfectly on the 5 iOS devices sitting on the stage. MIND BLOWING!

How in hell was that working? If you’re familiar with mobile test automation, you know that the market is today split into 2 types of products: Those relying on simulator and emulator and those on optical recognition. Both approaches are far from perfect: With simulator, you’re very far from reproducing the true user experience as it should occur on a real device. And with optical recognition, you have not only to invest a good part of your budget to afford it but the maintenance of test cases is a nightmare as you’re working at the pixel level … 4 pixels off and your test is broken. Most of the customers we’ve talked to are facing the same challenges when it comes to mobile test automation: They’ve tried a lot of open-source and commercial products before going back to … manual testing.

So just like in 2008 when Tom Lounibos, SOASTA CEO, addressed the challenges of load and performance testing to allow company to test at scale their web application, today SOASTA wipe away the challenges of test automation for native mobile apps. No more simulator or emulator, no more crazy expensive optical recognition mechanism. Nope, you’re going to be able today to test INSIDE THE APP. Record events from the app as they occur on the device. All possible gestures: Tap, doubleTap, swipe, scroll, pinchOpen, pinchClosed, etc. You will record their speed, velocity and acceleration and replay them on your mobile devices. And since the new mobile capabilities are part of the CloudTest platform, you take advantage of everything you’ve been using when executing load testing or functional test for web application ie. All the visual programming language, creating transaction, validating every steps of your test cases etc. If you’re familiar with CloudTest, then you’re all set to test mobile apps!

This is a short demo I’ve recorded so you can get a better feel of what CloudTest is:

This is what we’re announcing today:

TouchTest technology – this is the core of the announcement. TouchTest is our unique capability to record and replay ALL mobile gestures with full precision from inside iOS and Android mobile applications without tethering to or jailbreaking real mobile devices for functional and performance testing of mobile apps (Windows & others to come). There is nothing like this – all other approaches are incomplete, brittle, and unstable due to their external OCR and physically hardwired approaches. As we operate inside the app, we support native mobile, mobile web and hybrid mobile apps.
Private Device Clouds – because there is no need to tie down or physically or electronically “break” into a device, any employee or developer’s mobile device, anywhere, can be used as part of a private device cloud used for automated functional tests during development or as user experience devices for performance testing. Our customers with 5 or 500 developers all over the world can now be part of a private mobile test cloud when and as needed. Our platform connects and manages all the devices.
iOS and Android labs – we’re packaging our offering for mobile functional testing into labs targeting mobile development shops and orgs focusing on iOS and Android app development (more mobile labs will follow)

2008 marked a giant leap for load and performance testing when SOASTA first introduced CloudTest. 2012 is as big of a leap applied to mobile test automation. I feel so honored to be part of this adventure … I feel like the guys working at Apple in 1983 on the Macintosh … We’re trying to make a dent in the software testing universe and it looks like we’re making a BIG one!

We have a webinar coming up on Thursday dedicated to TouchTest. DON’T MISS IT! You’ll get more explanation on how the whole technology works.

To wrap up this post, this is what Tom tweeted last week. This is what the SOASTA team is all about … Kudos to all who makes it happen!

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Future UIs will bring challenges to Software Testing!

Fred — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:12:23 +0000

This video was taken at the TED conference in 2010 and presents the future of User Interfaces. The presenter, John UnderKoffler, is the guy who built the technology behind “Minority Report” 10 years ago. You can find emerging application for these kind of UIs from logistics, Financial distribution, military, etc.
Today’s UIs rely on Basic Touch (button), multi-touch (several actions) or gesture based (swipe, pinch, etc). But soon we’ll see interface based on voice (Siri like), 3D navigation, bendable phones (Nokia) and hovering gestures (Seen in this awesome demo)

If you think about it for a minute, you can easily imagine what kind of challenges these new UIs will bring to testers. Today, we’re still in the stone age when it comes to automating the test of apps on our smartphones or tablets. Think fingers and eye balls with a strong dependency on emulator, simulator and optical recognition which is definitely not the way to do it! Heck I don’t want to update all my test cases when one of my UI elements move 4 pixels … This is both crazy and scary! Are you already involved in testing mobile apps? Are you already struggling with automation? Watch this video and start shouting for help!

A video well worth 15 minutes of your time.

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Enterprise Mobility, a new era of opportunity!

Fred — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:17:50 +0000

This is an interesting infographic pulled by [x]Cube Labs showing the state of mobility in the Enterprise. Reducing cost is the major reason for mobility adoption (63%) to put in parallel with the growth of Enterprise apps in the Apple App Store (+186% in 2010). Interesting to see the revenue projection as well: $40B for developers in 2016! That’s a HUGE Market!

This is definitely a new era of opportunity for software development and of course software testing!

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The Valley is partying like it’s 1999! SOASTA makes the news!

Fred — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:26:04 +0000

The crew of NBC Bay Area was in the SOASTA’s office yesterday to shoot a small report on some of the hottest Startups in the Silicon Valley. In case we needed a reminder, 2012 looks really strong especially for Cloud Computing companies. A good indication? It’s getting really tough to hire top notch developers right now in the Valley (We’re actually hiring software engineers right now!) and the money is flowing in the right direction (SOASTA raised $12M this month. We’re looking at expanding internationally and continue to bring AWESOME innovation into the software testing world, as early as first quarter of 2012. Stay tuned!)

Enjoy the show!

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Installing SOASTA CloudTest Lite – Even my mum can do it!

Fred — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:59:21 +0000

Ok, the title is a bit misleading as my mum is technology challenged but I’m sure my sister could do it! Seriously, yesterday I was describing the CloudTest Lite installation process to a software tester as he was not used to receive an installation package as a virtual image. The first time I installed CloudTest Lite, I was not used to it either! And actually wondered if it was the right packaging option for such product. Yes, I questioned my own engineering team! Shame on me. And as always, they blew me away as I’ve never looked back.

I can’t today imagine installing this kind of product in any other way. Let me explain: This is a web based product so it needs an application server to run (JBoss), a web server (Apache) and a database to store the results (PostGreSQL). Do I really want to install all these individual components on my local machine? Probably not. Testing is all about finding bugs, not spending time installing and configuring a product. You don’t want to spend time understanding why your database is not starting, or why you can’t access your web server etc. You want to push a button, be done with it and start testing. That’s exactly with this idea that CloudTest Lite was packaged. We’ve included everything you need to start testing in less than 10 minutes in a virtual image. You don’t have to mess up your local environment or read a bunch of installation and configuration document.

You don’t believe me? Watch this video and if you’re still not convinced, go through the process yourself and get your own opinion! I’d be interested to hear your feedback!

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What apps are in every developer toolkit?

Fred — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:17:23 +0000

This is an interesting survey done by bestvendor.com. They’ve interviewed 500 developers from companies of less than 100 people, asking them their choice of tools for their development environment. It’s interesting to notice that some categories are clearly dominated by one product: Eclipse is killing everyone else, MySQL is the obvious choice, Git has become in no time a strong leader … I’m very sad not to see any software testing tools/frameworks in this developer’s toolkit. They seem more important than website analytics for developers … I would also have been interested to see the preferred choice for continuous integration … My guess would be Jenkins but you never know.

It would be interesting to see similar survey for testers! I can bet we would start seeing CloudTest Lite on such infographic. And you know what? I’m 100% confident we’ll see it appear as #1 in one category for 2012. I can’t say more but our development team is cooking something truly awesome … !

Click on the picture for the larger version.

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