New Perspectives on Excellence

Adam Creamer

Feb 26, 2024

Reading Time : 4min read

Our recent Kobiton-sponsored Mobile Testing & Experience Summit (MTES) brought together industry leaders with unique perspectives and specialized backgrounds to discuss ways in which we might all prepare ourselves for a changing mobile-first application development testing industry. One of my favorite presentations was with Frank Moyer, chief technology officer at Kobiton.

CTO Frank Moyer is an AI visionary with over 30 years of experience, consistently elevating product capabilities and championing quality assurance (QA) in SaaS environments. At Kobiton, Frank spearheads the integration of artificial intelligence into mobile testing, marrying next-gen technologies with unparalleled user experiences.

“Our goal at Kobiton is to help the market get to mobile excellence and that journey is hard. But why?”
Frank Moyer, Chief Technology Officer at Kobiton

It’s because, he explained, today there are over 30,000 combinations of device types and software versions within the marketplace — and that number’s only growing.

“Just last week, I had the pleasure of being in India with one of our customers,” Moyer said. “They had deployed Kobiton to three different device labs around India, (with) over two thousand devices on Kobiton. It’s imperative that they test as many of these device types and OS version combinations as possible.

“So, that’s one of the reasons mobile is hard,” he told us. “The second is that the environments that real devices run on are fragile.” Wifi connectivity has long been understood as one of the biggest challenges.

Then, there can be disparities depending upon testing environment expectations.

“Unlike with browsers, automation script creation in mobile requires infrastructure,” he said. “I can right now go into Chrome, and inspect and create an automation script by inspecting the elements in my browser,” Moyer explained. “I can’t do that without some sort of inspector.”

Yet another challenge, he added, is a lack of standards within the industry. “It’s the Wild West when it comes to mobile browsers! There are W3C specifications for how HTML should render in the page; but there’s no such specification in mobile,” Moyer said. “So how it’s implemented by Apple for iOS is different than how it’s implemented for different device manufacturers in Android. And even within Android,” Moyer continued, “each of those device manufacturers implement it differently.”

Addressing assumptions that mobile testing is as easy as browser testing are frustrating, he told us. “It’s a lot harder to do this in the world of mobile, then it is for the browser,” he said. “There’s this dichotomy: this contention between expectations on the browser side, and expectations (that it) should be equal on the mobile side.”

The good news? You’re not alone in mapping out your journey to mobile excellence, Moyer said.

“We’re releasing a new way to look at how to get to mobile maturity. And our mobile maturity model allows you to get access to a knowledge base. That knowledge base has a set of best practices, and it has a roadmap to advance towards mobile excellence,” Moyer told us.

“It’s not a tool for selling,” he clarified; “It’s a tool for helping you define your journey to mobile excellence, and getting to the next phase in mobile maturity.

“What are best practices when it comes to mobile software development?” he asked us, adding that we need to consider both development and testing perspectives.

Additionally, there are overall test infrastructure concerns, but then automation factors may or may not surround it, he said. And, it all comes down to security.

“In our world,” Moyer told us, “we’re trying to help our customers get to mobile. It’s talking about different best practices you can implement — to ensure your app and your app infrastructure is secure.”

MTES 2024 is coming April 23, 2024 register today!

Check out our previous MTES recaps:

To enjoy the full program, watch MTES on demand.