Hello! My name is Anastasia Sharikova, I run the testing department at Bookmate and run the Yet another QA telegram channel .
I am sure that many, when they came to the position of QA Lead, expected complex and interesting tasks of building processes, setting up an autotest system, setting up functional and non-functional testing, and in the end, tasks for managing employees. But in the end it turned out that all this is there, but it is combined with such everyday things as calculating salaries, determining the budget for a department and other problems related to finance - and often there is no escape from this, especially in small and medium-sized companies. However, being mindful of these topics is a great way to further improve the quality of your product and find and prevent problems early on.
Most QA / QA / QA managers, whose employees work with mobile applications, at some point face the challenge of updating the fleet of mobile devices and deciding what to test on in general for employees. And if for seasoned specialists this is not a question at all, then it is often difficult for a beginner to navigate this issue, and today I will try to talk about what you can rely on in your choice and what difficulties and pitfalls there are in purchasing devices for testing.
This article will focus on the selection of devices for manual testing, since the selection of farms for autotests has its own characteristics, and it is better to talk about this separately.
Of course, at first glance, the topic may not seem so important - they say, why bother, you can take the most popular ones, and at a higher price, and test the rest on simulators and emulators. But in reality, a huge number of bugs of all types can be caught only on a real device, and besides, manual testers usually also need to work on something to check daily tasks.
Why is it better not to skip these tasks entirely to other departments, such as purchasing, if any? Because they usually do not understand the features and metrics of your specific product, and there is a chance to miss something important.
In most cases, our task is to create a universal set of devices that will cover the maximum selection of combinations of axes, manufacturers, models, screens and types of smartphones and tablets, and to do it all within our budget.
The main parameters affecting the selection
- External analytics: here both international collections for the most popular devices (such as, for example, deviceatlas.com) and trivial options such as sorting in the Yandex.market for the most popular devices can come to our aid. Here it is important not to fall for the bait of the “best” phones, because the opinion of experts is often very different from the opinion of ordinary consumers. The main thing is to remember which country and CA your product is oriented towards, and be based on this condition.
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It is always important to remember about the features of your specific product and its target audience and try to avoid subjectivity - even if it seems to you that the iPhone 11 Pro is the crown of Apple's creation, it will not bring you much benefit in your work if the audience of your photo processing application is schoolchildren. to whom the parents gave the sixth or seventh iPhone. The same works in the opposite direction - if you know that wealthy people use your service and it will be installed mainly on the latest iPad Pro, then you will have to fork out for it, otherwise you will expect trouble.
It is especially important to note about the countries of use - almost all countries have their own "chips", so the audience of the application for the conditional India on average will differ from the users from Scandinavia.
Important features and chips on the example of iOS and Android
Of course, the article does not cover all the complexities and features, but I will try to mention the main ones:
iOS
- Compared to android, there are few devices, and they do not come out very often, the same with the axes that must be taken into account.
- It's easier to keep an adequate average set of screen types - and remember that some have retina, this can be important for some types of tests. But, of course, not always. Nevertheless, the main layout bugs can be found on a combination of four or five iPhones from the fifth to the eleventh. And don't forget the curtain!
- Consider which iOS versions you support and try to make them evenly distributed across devices.
- Don't forget about the magic of Split View mode and try to keep at least one device that supports it
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- Remember that despite the traditional attitude towards android as cheap phones, in recent years their flagships have been comparable to Apple's flagships, or even more, and they often have such experimental features as beveled screens, clamshells, and more.
Where to buy?
I hope that the reader of this article is lucky or lucky, and this question will not touch him - he will only put a task in Jira for purchase and in a couple of days will receive a fresh phone. But what if you work for a company where you need to make this decision yourself? There are several options:
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An important financial point - it is often better to take a device with a view to a long term of use and a simple repair, more expensive, but to last for a long time, and not cheaper, but you will have to change them every three months. But sometimes, on the contrary, it makes sense to buy something bad, because, again, in my experience, the worst bugs are caught on the most nightmarish phones and tablets.
Learn more about the OTUS QA Lead course.