Push & Pull
Prep Your QA Mobile Devices for rapid-fire testing using Slack.
My name is Cedric, and I am a Quality Assurance Engineer.
When I rolled into my latest QA gig I got the standard tour, met the team, received my orientation, picked up my gear, readied my desk for operations and then I popped the question. A question I feared getting an answer to.
Where are the QA Mobile Test Devices?
Moments later, I found myself looking down at a tan, three-drawer, standard office file cabinet. I inserted a key handed to me moments before by my manager. I unlocked, then slowly began to pull open the bottom drawer.
”Oh, the humanity.”
I was staring down at a tangle of tablets, smartphones and USB cable debris in what can only be described as evidence of a test device genocide.
It’s a now-familiar but always saddening QA device reality. For most companies, Mobile testing is an ad-hoc affair. A typical test device will be at 0% battery power, it won’t be signed into the local WiFi, and it will be 3 major OS updates behind. When it comes time to test, you’ll have some prep work to do.
“Mise en Place” is a French culinary term for “everything in its place”. I learned it in cooking school years ago but I apply it to everything I do. In a kitchen, this translates to doing your “prep work” before you start cooking. Get all of the ingredients you need out and measured, then start cooking.
In QA, get your gear organized, powered up and updated, then start testing.
I start with a multi-port charging hub to maintain QA devices entrusted to me. It’s not terribly expensive, but it’s absolutely essential to ensuring your devices are always ready for testing.
You can get one of these bad boys from Amazon or find one appropriate to your needs. And of course, any HUB would be completely useless without device charging cables, so go ahead and order some extras.
Once my gear updates are complete, I like to download and install Slack on each device and use it as my secret sauce test delivery platform.
I create a “QA Devices” Slack user account and invite it to my work Slack channel. Then I install Slack and sign in to that “QA Devices” account on all my test devices.
Now I can reach all my QA devices at once with a single Slack message.
I send endpoints, URL’s, software downloads, and whatever else I’m QAing to all my devices, where I can then rapidly test use-cases then screenshot and document the outcomes from multiple devices.
I can screenshot an error state from any device and simply post that screenshot in a Slack Message reply back to my original message.
Data goes from me to many devices and from the many devices back to just me.
TRUST ME when I tell you the speed at which you can get detailed results from a plethora of devices posted back into bug tickets or pull requests will make your teammates dizzy.
Protip 1: You could sign-in to all the devices with just “your personal” Slack account but this would allow anybody who tests on the device full access to your personal Slack account communications history. Not a problem if you’re a one-person team.
Protip 2: If you have a Gmail account then you have access to “infinite” email addresses using that one account. Thus, you can use your personal Gmail account name“+1, +2…” to establish a new “QA Devices” user. (ex. myusername+1@gmail.com, +2, +1234@gmail.com) This is easier and faster than having IT create a custom “QA Devices” user for you.
