Comprehensive mobile quality gets a whole new name: The Kobiton Intelligent Quality Suite

More than just testing

We’ve been spreading the news about Kobiton’s “more than just a device provider” approach to Mobile Experience. This has brought up some great insights and questions around exactly what it takes to ensure that the Mobile Experience you provide for your customers to be the “first and best” to market. As we have looked at market forces, major Mobile challenges, and what teams feel they need, the ability to ensure comprehensive Mobile Quality has come up time and time again.

However, this means more than just providing a run-of-the-mill “Mobile Testing” experience. At Kobiton, we have always strived to be the most inclusive Mobile Experience platform on the planet, and we took this approach to the “Mobile Testing” portion of our platform. The result?

Enter the Kobiton Intelligent Quality Suite.

The three major pillars of quality: Functional, Performance, and Visual

To make sure that you can build a high-quality mobile experience for your customers, we built an Intelligent Quality Suite that offers solutions around the three major points of Mobile Quality: Functional, Performance, and Visual.

Don’t let anybody tell you how to automate

At Kobiton, one of our core values is Flexibility. So, when we built our Intelligent Quality Suite, we took the “Anti my way or the highway approach” and provided solutions that allow you to empower every team to test for everything.

To us, this means that testers, developers, performance engineers, etc. have the ability to account for all of the major points of quality mentioned above, but that they can do so with whatever approach best suits them-whether that be manual testing, scriptless test automation and/or test automation using a scripted approach.

No matter what, you can use Kobiton to bolster your mobile testing strategy.

Harness the power of the NOVA AI Engine and make scriptless for Mobile a possibility

While there is an entire blog dedicated to the Kobiton NOVA AI Engine and everything you can use it for, I did want to quickly outline exactly where and how it fits into your Kobiton Intelligent Quality Suite. 

If you’ve been keeping up with Kobiton over the past few years, you know that we had been working diligently on our scriptless solution for Mobile testing teams. The first stage of this scriptless test automation was Kobiton Intelligent Test Automation. To date, our customers have been using it to go from manual to automated quality more than 10 times faster than if they were to start with a scripted solution.

However, as the AI behind ITA became smarter, and as we built out even more comprehensive Mobile Quality solutions, ITA evolved into the Scriptless layer of our Intelligent Quality Suite, powered by the NOVA AI Engine.

Kobiton’s NOVA AI Engine is your new secret sauce. It’s the reason that the scriptless Capture and Execution approach to Mobile Test Automation is possible. Looking at other attempts at scriptless Mobile Test Automation, the major failures centered around the lack of a stable and intelligent AI at the core. With no HTML equivalent for Mobile leading to stability issues, these early attempts failed, and vendors ultimately hid their scriptless solution away since they “couldn’t get the AI right” (I am actually quoting an unnamed vendor here).

That’s where your team can differentiate from the rest.

The Kobiton NOVA AI Engine, while other components of the platform will utilize it, is the “engine under the hood” of your scriptless capability.

When you decide you want to create scriptless Mobile Test Automation, it’s our “AI at the core” that watches in the background and captures your entire Exploratory Test, is able to convert that process into an automated test, and then is able to navigate that test across your library of real Android and iOS devices while adapting to changing elements and identifiers so that your tests don’t break.

You can even export the entire test as a 100% open standard Appium script. 

But that’s not all.

With NOVA, you can do a whole lot more than just generate and execute your test. NOVA is smarter than that. As your test is being executed, information is being gathered around where there are functional crashes, visual anomalies, and, eventually, we will also point out areas of performance discrepancy. You’ll be brought to the exact area where these issues are so that you can easily look through and remediate them, eliminating the need to dig through endless screenshots and logs when trying to identify what broke, where, and how. 

Just think: all of the time it used to take to identify and map elements, write the script for a few manual processes, and create new scripts and/or tinker the first one to work across multiple devices can now be compressed down into the time it takes to perform the manual processes themselves and then choose which devices you want to test against. We’re talking months, if not years in some cases, compressed into a matter of hours. And, with the ability for our AI to point out both functional and visual issues, you’ll catch even more defects than before, while also saving extra time that you used to spend digging through test logs or screenshots.

In summary, the “AI at the core” is your new secret sauce, and it is why you’ll be one of the teams pioneering Continuous Testing for Mobile the minute you start using it.

Scriptless is great, but some teams want to code. We want to empower those teams as well.

As scriptless test automation has become a focus in the testing industry (speaking about desktop web here, as nobody else has really figured it our for mobile yet), many vendors spend their time trying to convince teams that they need to abandon their script-based approaches and jump ship to a no-code strategy.

At Kobiton, we will never tell you how you need to automate. 

We believe that teams can greatly benefit from a scriptless approach, but we also know that some teams find success with open-source and scripted solutions. These teams need a platform that will make their scripted test automation more productive, and that’s exactly what we provide. 

There are several ways that using Kobiton can make your scripted automation work better for your team. One is simply just having reliable real devices available to run your tests. Check out the statement below from one of our current customers:

“Without accessible and reliable real devices for running your tests on, as well as solutions that provide visibility into test sessions and issues, test automation is just “running.” It’s not providing value for the business. With Kobiton, we’ve solved for this with their real device cloud and device lab management solutions.” – Head of Quality at a leading Health Services provider

I also want to focus on the visibility portion of this. At Kobiton, we provide multiple avenues to gather information around your test results, such as test logs, screenshots, video, and, perhaps most exciting of them all, our Session Explorer. While I won’t dive too deeply into it here, it’s our Session Explorer that makes diving deeper into your test possible, and it makes sharing exact moments of success or failure, as well as glimpses into payload for performance, with the rest of your team a breeze. For more information on the Session Explorer, check out the video below:

https://videos.sproutvideo.com/embed/ea9ddfb31c1be6c063/2a73c2dd9bdaf45e

Scriptless automation that makes scripted better

Sure, that title might sound oxymoronic. But, I assure you that it’s not. While many teams are using our NOVA AI-driven scriptless automation as a replacement for scripted automation, we also have highly technical teams who are using our “Open Appium Export” capability to bolster their already Appium-mature teams and test strategies.

In case you haven’t heard of our Open Appium Export capability before, our scriptless test automation solution gives you the ability to convert your scriptless test into an exportable Appium script.

From here, your teams can use this script however they want. They can use it as a “base script” to add assertions if/then statements, parameters; they can easily plug it into their CI/CD process, or they can even sell it. After all, it’s your code. You should be able to use it however you want.

Bake compatibility and usability into everything

While the three main pillars of a high-quality Mobile Experience look like Functional, Performance, and Visual quality, you still have to:

• Make sure that this comprehensive quality exists across all devices, operating systems, form factors, etc.
• Make sure that your high-quality app is actually usable for your customer or end-user

These two components are often talked about as their own categories of testing:Compatibility Testing and Usability Testing. With Kobiton, we empower your teams to bake compatibility and usability into everything you do. 

Because our AI engine can take your scriptless test and easily run it across your list of real devices and point out areas to remediate, you’ll have already baked-in compatibility from the moment you chose your device bundle. And, with Kobiton’s unlimited user policy + easy cloud access, we already have customers that use our solution to bring business users, end-users, and content contributors (for apps that center on content delivery) to the table to validate the actual usability and user experience of their mobile app or website.

Wrapping up: even more to come.

While the introduction of the Kobiton Intelligent Quality Suite is the introduction of the world’s most flexible and comprehensive Mobile Quality solution, there is still so much more to come. For example, next-up on our roadmap is the ability for our AI engine to drive scriptless Performance Testing. We also plan on adding even more ways for our AI to make your scripted approaches more productive. 

At Kobiton, we make a commitment to innovation seriously, and we look forward to continuing to deliver premium solutions for organizations who are serious about providing the world’s best Mobile Experiences for their customers.