Expedia Tests Mobile Android Apps

Expedia Tests Mobile Android Apps and tools for automation. Enterprise companies such as Google have significant support platforms for such testing tools. Mobile application testing and automation is still relatively a new field forming within the software engineering industry. Google terms this as "test engineering".

Tony, Donohoe, Vice President of Technology for Expedia recently discussed at AppsWorld beginning of this year about the benefits and pitfalls of automation. Expedia implemented QA automation to support mWeb and multiple versions of their Android and iOS applications with on device testing and integration into a continuous delivery pipeline. Expedia builds software based on testing and learning. QA automation of native application can be used to speed time to market. The company supports test automation as a complex area with many variants involved.

With mobile development, integration is required which typically involves a service layer code. Ensuring the right framework which is well supported is important. Having an innovative framework is important to mobile. The faster the testing of mobile apps, the better. With Expedia, mobile apps have many variants which is a time consuming process. Through automation, Expedia was able to automate from one week to one day of testing.

Google Developer’s recently shared how mobility and testing is used in quality assurance, and how the industry as a whole has implemented test engineering (with specific examples of how it is implemented at Google). The company placed particular emphasis on the Iago open source load testing library, which he wrote to enable Twitter's engineering teams to perform load tests before deploying code to production.

The conference last year covered implementation details of some of these tests (including source code) and how complicating factors such as OAuth and arbitrary Thrift protocols are managed. Companies in enterprise such as Expedia began  investing in Mobile Web and iOS/Android apps in early 2012. At the same time Test Engineers started developing test automation solutions to build quality and testability. According to Google, Chrome has expanded to Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, and most recently, Android and iOS.