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Does Your Application Pass the Test?

Does Your Application Pass the Test?Imagine yourself pitching your killer mobile application to the largest carrier in Europe. You are high up in some glass office tower. The room is full of suits, all of them looking expectantly at their handsets as they download your application. There are a few beeps and then…nothing.

Blank screens, blank looks, and you staring blankly out the window as you fly back home, wondering what went wrong.

Mobile application developers have access to enormous markets, but they've also got to prove their products do exactly what they claim. And the ugly truth is that applications don't work seamlessly across multiple platforms on multiple handsets. An application that works perfectly on a particular phone in New York may fail on the same phone in London.

So Many Carriers, So Little Time

Seven hundred carriers operate around the world. Each of them supports dozens or even hundreds of the 12,000 handsets currently on the market. Carriers are anxious to have the best applications available for their customers, but they need them to work on every handset they support. Every single scenario needs to be tested and proven successful before a carrier reaches across the table and says "We've got a deal!"

Comprehensive quality assurance testing is key to launching any successful mobile application. But the only way to ensure your application will function properly on a specific handset supported on a carrier's network is to physically go within range of their network and try it out. It's ironic that the mobile industry — free of wires, communicating with satellites, keeping the world in touch — still requires physically moving people around the globe to download some software and push a few buttons to see if it works. But that's the reality, and it doesn't make the already complex testing phase any easier.

Professional testing houses exist, but they are always limited to testing on the networks which serve their physical area. That's great if you want to sell your application to carriers in a specific region, but it leaves the rest of the globe off limits. Who's got the time or resources to travel the world to test their new application? Mob4Hire founder Paul Poutanen didn't, but he sure tried.

At great expense, he flew his development team to San Francisco, purchased every phone supported by his client's carrier network, subscribed to the phone service, and spent three days in a hotel where the team ran their application on every single handset.

"At the airport on the way home, I see a guy talking on his cell and I realized that if only I knew him, I could have simply stayed home and asked him to test my application on his phone," recalls Poutanen. "It would certainly save all the time and costs for travel, handsets, and paid subscriptions to networks I'd never be using again."

Poutanen began to consider how crowdsourcing could be applied to mobile application testing. What if that one person at the San Francisco airport was part of an enormous, informal community of testers? Technically savvy people live everywhere in the world. If they were tapped into a network of application developers, it could be an ideal meeting place for both communities.

Poutanen went on to launch Mob4Hire, a brokerage house where application developers post their testing requirements online and testers with active handsets in the right geographic area bid on the job. Developers gain access to qualified individuals who can their testing work for them, at a fraction of the cost of traditional location-based testing. Savvy early adopters, who already own their handsets and subscribe to their local carrier, get try out new software and get paid to do it. The result is true mobility testing, free of any tester bias, with 1300 handsets ready to be tested in 55 countries on 134 carriers.

Here's how it works: Testers receive the application wirelessly and the testing instructions are picked up at the Mob4Hire website. They conduct the test and report back with a test report. The test could be a simple ping to see if a particular carrier blocks the application, or it could be a complicated plan requiring many hours to complete. Once the testing is completed, the developer has five days to assess the quality of the report before payments are processed.

Quality control is maintained through an online rating system. Testers are rated based on their timeliness and the quality of their response. Developers are rated on how clearly they outline the job in the bidding process and the quality of their test plan. The bidding process and rating system are built into the Mob4Hire system to ensure quality and fairness.

Crowdsourced testing also provides a valuable new avenue for market research. After all, just because an application works well enough to pass carrier certification doesn't mean it is necessarily a good application. Crowdsourcing puts an application in the hands of early adopters, the same group that often gives the early thumbs-up or thumbs down to burgeoning applications.

In addition, large application developers who have testers in-house will find a revenue opportunity within this testing model. When the in-house testing staff is idle, the company can bid on testing projects from other developers and generate additional income. Suddenly a significant cost center becomes an active source of revenue. Interestingly enough, many of the handsets in Mob4Hire's database are in the hands of professional testers – a fact that speaks well to the quality of the crowdsourced testing idea.

Application developers can speed up their development process immediately by adopting this testing model. For more information about Mob4Hire and crowdsourced testing services, visit the MOTODEV Fast Track Center.