Reduce mundane mobile testing work with Ghostlab

As a mobile tester, you are constantly spending your time with phones. And not typically on one phone, it is a mix of iPhones, Nexus, Samsung etc. For me typically this runs about 20 hours on these tiny keyboards and screens per day.

Some of the mundane tasks I find myself doing

1. Open browser, type in a URL
2. Sometimes these are very long (think query paramters and flags)
3. In the website fill in forms
4. Do actions repeatedly
5. Do this not just on one phone but on Nexus and if needed on an iPad

Yes we do have automation but as noted elsewhere, physical devices offer the best fidelity to end user scenarios.

With one software license(yes its paid!) ghostlab solves these problems for you. Their website have better documentation but here is in gist what you could do.

Setup

1. First devices, well yeah you need to have your devices charged and few of them.You can also get a stand from venomco to ease in your setup — check the images at their site
2. Next all the devices and your mac should share the same WiFI. The way ghostlab works is by creating a sort of proxy in your internal network (eg: 172.22.44.33:8005) and every device connected to that IP is now a client.
3. Start GhostLab app and go through the sample application they have Ghostlab Testing Page. They will show all its capabilities

• Extra goodies

1. Couple of cool features that I liked a lot are
2. ability to open up browsers from inside the app, this will eliminate the manual chore of opening a browser and typing URL. Ghostlab autodetects browsers in your system. For this press on the button as below.

Another cool aspect is the ability to inspect dom on ‘all’ the connected devices. This will be super helpful, when live editing DOM to see how changes reflect on a different device.

Even when I am not doing responsive testing, I find this tool very useful for letting me type in with my keyboard instead os fingers on tiny touch screen.

Happy testing!