One use case that software companies have adopted is off-shore technical development. For example, a development team in the US develops a game and hands over their QA and Support to an off-shore team in, say China. Sounds like one would just send the code over, have the Chinese team download and install it on their local device and start manually testing. While this sounds not so bad at first, imagine have dozens if not hundreds of devices, and dozens if not hundreds of titles to test. This doesn’t seem to be a cost-effective and scaleable problem. Added to the difficulty is the fact that some of the applications and services are dependent on the carrier network, which is not local and available in China. Why not access a bank of handsets that the team in China can access and virtualize on their PCs and test remotely?
This would allow greater scaleability, effective use of resources, and allow more global companies the ability to develop and test from anywhere to anywhere. As an added effect, monitoring from locations on devices for things like messaging, content downloading and mobile services could be enabled to measure performance and availability. Any IT manager, who manages an e-commerce website, such as Amazon.com or Buy.com understands that for each minute the site is unavailable, the calculated loss of revenue is a significant impact on revenue, reputation, and overall customer satisfaction. The same translation would apply to mobile commerce of downloading ringtones, games, or access services such as Gmail or Yahoo Mobile Instant Messenger. The increase dependence of mobile phones and all the services that are brought to the device will need both thorough testing and monitoring if critical mass is to be achieved when growing this channel. Subscribers have already begun to expect high availability and fast results, not to mention rather seemless compatibility across networks and devices.
So where are we in 2006 when it comes to mobile monitoring and testing? Well, unfortunately, I believe that we are just at the beginning of the web when lots of companies were just happy that sites were up, accessible and traffic was surfing their respective sites. But we are quickly expecting more as competition increases and subscriber demands become greater. The alternatives of using emulator to simulate applications will not be enough to truly grab the subscriber experience that delivers that “last mile” or 100% accuracy that developers strive for. From the looks of both Mobile Complete and Keynote, both are growing their customer based both from mobile operators, content developers and portals. Hope this bodes well for the mobile industry, it certainly cannot afford to stumble on the billions of dollars and billions of subscribers all making their mobile device one of the most important thing they carry on their person.
