News

HPE Expands Mobile App Testing Suite

• By David Ramel
• August 18, 2016

The reach of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) mobile app testing suite has been expanded by hooking into the device testing farm housed on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

The AWS Device Farm provides a stable of more than 280 different iOS, Android and Fire phones and tablets that developers can access to test the functionality of their apps.

The AWS integration is among a host of new features in the new HPE Mobile Center 2.0, announced earlier this month.

Designed to help organizations quickly build, test and distribute high-quality mobile apps, Mobile Center 2.0 leverages a bevy of testing products and services, including some from HPE and open source tools such as Selenium and Appium in order to cover more user scenarios. Those other HPE products include HPE Haven OnDemand, which provides machine learning APIs and services, and HPE Fortify on Demand, a security testing tool.

"HPE is expanding Mobile Center capabilities to provide users with a predictable and repeatable mechanism for testing, monitoring, and improving any mobile app," the company said in a statement. "The integration with HPE Haven OnDemand and HPE Fortify on Demand provides development teams with powerful capabilities that leverage machine learning from testing data and user feedback to help guide the application development direction, with security built in from the beginning. In addition, developers can use HPE Mobile Center in concert with open source tools (e.g. running Appium tests on iOS with a PC), providing businesses with the freedom to use a wide range of frameworks and processes for building quality applications, quickly."

The HPE testing suite can be used to test devices on-premises or in the cloud and helps developers optimize their apps for running in hybrid environments by testing on virtualized devices.

In addition to the AWS integration, other key features of the updated solution listed by HPE include:

• Replication of real user experiences -- Generates accurate and authentic results -- from remote restarts, to record gestures and replay interactions -- by imitating real-user testing conditions and tendencies.
• Simplified test automation
• Amplifies the Selenium and Appium framework with enterprise-grade features such as user, app and lab management.
• Maintains the ability to asses multiple apps within the same test.
• Reduces the dependencies for a Mac machine and controls the Springboard when running Appium tests on iOS apps.
• Mobile performance optimization -- Provides an accurate picture of the end-to-end mobile performance by combining virtual users and real devices; runs simple, elastic and realistic tests from multiple geographies across various real-world network conditions.
• End-to-end mobile security -- Assess the security of source code, binaries and the mobile app to underscore vulnerabilities across the client side.
• Real-time monitoring -- Monitors the application proactively from multiple locations on original devices to identify issues before customers.

"Creating high-quality mobile applications that work seamlessly on every end-user device is a tall order, given the constant proliferation of device types, operating systems, mobile environments, and use cases," said HPE exec Raffi Margaliot. "HPE Mobile Center 2.0 leverages HPE's unique strengths in machine learning and security to provide developers with deep intelligence that guides them in building high-quality and secure applications. By integrating with open source tools, we allow developers to leverage these powerful capabilities while operating in the application frameworks and processes of their choice."