Windows 8 Modern App Testing

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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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