Extending the reach of its mobile testing framework into the DevOps realm, Perfecto Mobile today released its new MobileCloud Developer Toolkit with support for the open-source Eclipse IDE, Jenkins and Selenium tools.
One of the integrations available in the MobileCloud Developer’s Toolkit, MobileCloud for Eclipse, embeds Perfecto’s platform UI right in the Eclipse interface, enabling developers to create unit tests and kick them off right from the IDE, said Carlo Cadet, director of product marketing at Perfecto Mobile. It offers record and playback capability, as well as logs and reporting, and he said it is the first solution to embed real-device access from within Eclipse.
MobileCloud WebDriver is Perfecto Mobile’s implementation of Selenium, and it takes the testing solution beyond the browser. Cadet claimed Perfecto Mobile has the first WebDriver implementation that supports native and hybrid mobile applications as well as browser-based applications.
Finally, MobileCloud Jenkins Plugin enables automated acceptance testing on real devices as part of the nightly build process, Cadet said.
As the company extends its reach more broadly through the software development life cycle, he indicated that defect tracking is “high on our list” of integrations for future releases.
“Organizations are using the leading open-source tools as they build out their DevOps stack,” said Cadet. “We’re enabling tools that are not mobile-ready to be mobile-ready.” The toolkit brings testing into organizations via Perfecto’s scalable platform, he added.
The company does this, Cadet explained, by removing the emulator from the equation, which also reduces testing time. “There has been a fundamental shift left in testing, with smaller releases and greater [release] frequency,” he said. “With this platform, developers don’t have to test against an emulator and then test again against the device.”
Even though emulators are usually included in a phone IDE, there are situations that it cannot represent, such as radio condition and battery condition, Cadet said. “There is a symbiotic relationship between radio and battery” that can impact how an application performs, he said. By testing against the actual device, and by allowing the battery life to run down during the test, developers can see the impact of those shifting conditions on the application.
