Xoriant Mobile Farm

The Need for Mobile Farms

Digital revolution and mobile penetration has grown rapidly over the years and will continue to rise. Moreover, the growth in the consumption of applications is fueled by the rising number of mobile application users. Hence, to thrive in the hyper-competitive market, businesses need to ensure their apps are appealing, thoroughly tested in terms of quality, performance and functionality within the shortest delivery cycle. However, the need to deliver robust and high-quality mobile applications may pose certain challenges for the mobile application development and testing team. With the plethora of mobile platforms, platform versions and handset models available in the market; compatibility testing presents a huge challenge for robust delivery. Additionally, geographically distributed teams find it difficult to handle device allocation and testing. To streamline communication and coordination among remote QA and development teams, many organizations also rely on automation tools such as an auto phone dialer for instant connectivity and updates.As a result, to ensure a quality product, mobile application testing teams are only left with the option of adopting cloud-based mobile farms. Cloud-based mobile farms are expensive and sign off on a limited number of platform versions/handsets. Xoriant effectively addresses the obstacles of mobile application developers and testers with its customized web-based platform – Xoriant Mobile Farm (XMF).

In addition to device farms, many organizations now leverage a virtual Android phone environment to create a cloud-hosted mobile environment, enabling scalable testing, secure remote access, and improved device isolation for distributed teams.

How does Xoriant Mobile Farm (XMF) Fix the Problem?

Mobile Farm is Xoriant’s customized web-based platform that supports multiple Android and iOS devices. This platform is designed for use at an organization level and supports AI mobile testing–driven optimization of device usage. Before testing mobile applications in the Xoriant Mobile Farm, every mobile project team is required to pledge a certain number of devices to the farm. Thus, organizations can leverage a wide variety of platform versions and handsets irrespective of the project or the geographical location.

What makes Xoriant Mobile Farm different than other Mobile Farms?

The key features of Xoriant’s web-based Mobile Farm include –

• Cost-effectiveness and open source solution as it is based on Smartphone Test Farm (STF) that supports Android devices & WebdriverAgent which supports the connection of iOS devices.
• Xoriant Mobile Farm is customized by the testing and development experts to offer extensive features like authentication, reporting, device booking slots and reservation to provide easy access to users.
• The platform is easily portable and can be used for Mobile Code Development, QA Testing & Automation testing.
• Enhanced device availability and remote access to geographically distributed teams that reduces device procurement cost.
• Provides coverage in test scenarios where emulators and simulators do not offer all the real device features.
• Enables you to gain statistics on device usage, availability to track and forecast the future device requirements.
• As Xoriant Mobile Farm is cost-effective, it becomes a perfect alternative to expensive device cloud farms.
• Test teams can utilize idle devices across various geographical locations.
• Device search is made easy and convenient with phone numbers, IMEI and ICCID. Also, for devices that are connected, offline/unavailable.

Design Diagram & Technical Implementation:

Xoriant Mobile Farm Web Portal is an interface to check all the connected devices that are physically connected to the Node Server in any server room or Lab. Any actions carried out on Xoriant Mobile Farm Web Portal with respect to the interaction with devices (E.g. Booking, Using, Checking Utilization etc.) are communicated via the Node Server using HTTP Request to Rethink DB and back as a JSON Format and HTTP Response.

Usage:

As shown in the screenshot below, there are different devices with platform versions, models available for use in one web portal. These devices can be booked and used as per the user requirement irrespective of the physical location of a user.

Future Developments in Xoriant Mobile Farm:

Xoriant has also planned to introduce a series of improvements in the existing Mobile Farm. Our XMF future developments will support:

• Actions like Voice Commands, Accelerometers and Fingerprint scanners that can be used through the farm.
• Support for Blackberry and Windows devices.

References:

1. Github.com
2. Github.com-facebook-webdriveragent