Is your team building Windows 8 Modern App for customers? As part of QA team let me assure you it’s a good thing to be in that project! But we ready to get exposed to new things to test, its lot of interesting stuff for QA community to learn and quickly come to terms of changing software trends.
Testing a Windows 8 Modern Applications is interesting and happening space. Having tested couple of these applications made me write this post to share some of the things which are different and need more attention than normal testing approach.
As much as tester is required to understand the intended functionality of the Win8 apps, they need to understand Win 8 Modern App principles themselves thoroughly to really test a true Win 8 app than just any HTML5/XAML application.
Watch here about Windows 8 Modern Application guidelines, you will find many bugs by just validating against these guidelines during tests.
Testing data in your application would be specific to requirements, however some of the important things to consider during different phases of development are listed below in tabular format. This list focuses on QA tasks which are important or different than conventional application testing.
| QA Tasks | |
| Requirements | Ask do we really need Win 8 Modern App? |
| Why not other solutions? | |
| Who is the Customer base ? Do they have or will have Windows 8 in future? | |
| Influence the requirements which are really appropriate to show in a Windows 8 App | |
| Get Performance (concurrent/simultaneous) requirements | |
| Security requirements, who can access, how to download/Install and data related security | |
| User Experience Requirements | |
| Design/Code | Go through material available online to see if design is in right path? |
| Why HTML5 or XAML as solution technology for Windows 8 Application? | |
| UX design is most critical to review | |
| Validate UX and Design against Modern app principles | |
| Plan for Automation early, Microsoft Test Manager(MTM) 2012 part of Visual Studio 2012 offers in built automation functionality | |
| Plan for White Box testing, structure based testing and Code Coverage for your testing aka Test Coverage against Code | |
| System Testing | Other than normal things which are part of test strategy below are some important things or different things which comes into equation when testing a Windows 8 App |
| MTLM for exploratory testing for modern apps | |
| Test in Landscape, Portrait mode | |
| Performance Testing: Visual Studio Load Tests with Unit Tests added to them are useful | |
| Windows8 Application Tool Kit is good tool to run against your app | |
| Touch and Click, test for both operations | |
| Application Bar | |
| Navigation Bar | |
| Resolutions supported | |
| How does App works when projecting to a monitor or screen? | |
| Logging for all errors/crashes are very important, as Operating System itself is evolving, so log every Crash you see with detailed logs to track | |
| Will App work like Outlook meaning can it sync from different computers? | |
| Live Tile / Notifications | |
| Uninstall/Install | |
| Immersive Content | |
| Snap feature | |
| Different Hardware like desktop, Slates, Tablets, Surface, Monitor mode, extended display, 32 bit/64 bit | |
| Tile size, all options you get when right click app tile | |
| Various Charms and gestures supported | |
| Keyboard support, can user do everything in application without Touch as well | |
| Application Permissions like sharing, document library etc.. |
Hope this would help QA community to test Windows 8 Modern Apps better and delight customers!
Happy New Year and Wish you happy reading.
-Naren
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