Setting a Mobile-First Strategy

Back in 2014, Gartner predicted that by 2017, there would be 268 billion mobile downloads generating a revenue of $77 billion. Sure enough, mobile usage has overtaken desktop, with nearly 2 million apps in the Apple store and 200,000 more on Google Play. It’s clear that businesses need a mobile-first strategy, where the priority shifts from desktop web design to mobile apps – and getting them to market ahead of the competition.

This opens the Native v Hybrid debate, which can lead to differing opinions between IT and the business. So let’s take a look at the benefits and challenges of each and then examine how you can bridge the gap to create 5-star apps that users genuinely love.

Native or Hybrid Apps?

Native applications developed specifically for iOS, Android or Windows, can certainly take up more time and resources than creating hybrid apps, where code is wrapped inside a thin native container. But native apps look and perform the best. They also win hands down at security and user experience.

However, if your biggest concern is cost-effectiveness and a fast time to market, you may be leaning towards hybrid. While users won’t know the difference between a native and a hybrid app, code wise, they will certainly see and feel the difference

Bearing in mind that 60% of users will abandon your app if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds, businesses can’t afford to compromise on user experience just to get to market ahead of their competitors.

Native apps have a wealth of benefits including:

• Code that runs faster and offers better performance
• Easy integration with the device’s functionalities like camera and microphone
• Fast and simple addition of new features
• Enablement of push-notifications to promote buy-in and engagement
• Access to Android and iOS tools to solve coding issues

The ideal scenario is the best of both worlds – a cost-effective, cross-platform, high-performance native app delivered to market quickly. To this end, Microsoft’s Xamarin platform is an excellent tool that allows developers to write 100% native apps and reuse a huge percentage of code across different platforms through a single programming language: C#. It enables a single mobile team to be more productive than siloed teams building multiple apps on different technology stacks.

Testing for the Best User Experience

Xamarin Test Cloud provide an automatable way to do UI Acceptance Testing of mobile applications across thousands of different devices in the cloud, which means you can be certain that you are delivering a high quality experience on all the latest platforms and operating systems.

You can also interact with your app as your users do, performing taps; double taps; swipes; rotations; long presses and pinches. And you can build custom gestures for advanced user interaction.

It provides:

• Complete test coverage
• Comprehensive testing on thousands of different devices and operating systems
• Automation to accelerate your journey to continuous integration
• Total support for all native and hybrid apps built in C#, Objective-C, Swift, Java, React Native and Apache Cordova.

Want 5-Star Apps?

A 2016 “Total Economic Impact commissioned study of Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin conducted by Forrester Consulting[4] provides some interesting figures of the potential ROI over three year period, for an organisation building multiple apps with Xamarin:

• Reduction in development costs of £1,000,000
• Maintenance and upgrade efficiency gains of £640,000
• Cost avoidance of £5,050,000 by mitigating the need for platform-specific talent

If you’re just beginning your mobile app journey, Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin and Xamarin Test Cloud provide an excellent foundation for embedding quality and usability into your apps, while more mature organisations will reap the benefits of significant cost savings and an impressive ROI.

If you would like to learn more about Xamarin and how going native will enable you to build quality into your apps from the outset, then join Sogeti’s webinar Build High Performing, High Quality Apps – with Xamarin on 6 September at 11-11.30 BST. Register here: https://www.uk.sogeti.com/xamarin-webinar

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In an attempt to gain control over the influx of new applications, the report found a 9% y-o-y increase in IT spending budgets directed towards testing and quality assurance. Of this budget, almost half (49%) is dedicated to maintenance work, focused on trying to ensure applications are suitable for business use. Relatedly, budget spent on new transformational work has decreased by 1% as companies begin to reign in their spending to focus on coping with the continuous transformation of applications.

A seamless customer experience is a key driver for QA testing

This year’s World Quality Report found that companies are continuing to invest in securing the integrity of their systems, with more than four out of five (81%) citing security as the main purpose for testing. This heightened awareness of security is driven by digital transformation and security testing has become critical to business assurance for many organisations. However, the role of the customer experience is now almost as important to companies with 79% identifying this as a key consideration for their quality assurance testing. This marks a notable shift for organisations who have come to realise the growing importance of providing customers with a smooth, seamless experience whenever they come into contact with the company’s properties.

Acknowledging the renewed intent on IT investment, Govind Muthukrishnan, Senior Vice President and Testing Global Service Line Leader observes: “This year’s World Quality Report shows that we live in a fast moving world where customer experience and flexibility are as important as keeping pace with digital transformation using agile QA and DevOps. Today, we see that organisations are making significant investments in test environments and test data – test ecosystems – and are focussing on end to end automation of not only testing but also the test ecosystems. however, organisations must move beyond automation of testing and test ecosystems to an integrated and intelligent QA lifecycle that can deliver synergy in business assurance.”

Shorter lifecycles demand greater agility

This year’s report also revealed that with spend on quality testing and assurance increasing, a higher proportion of that budget is now dedicated to DevOps and agile principles, with more than half (59%) of respondents saying at least half of projects within the organisation use DevOps principles and 47% use virtual test environments. While organisations attempt to modernise their testing practices and procedures, they also have to deal with the increasingly shorter life cycles of programs and applications, which is forcing an increase in demand for testing hardware and infrastructure: an increase of 5% from 2014 to 38%. However, despite the decrease in spending on new transformational work (down 1%), almost one in three (29%) are intent on developing Testing Centers of Excellence (TCoE) within the next two years.

New roles being created to meet testing demand

The maturity of the quality assurance market has seen the function become a critical business operation. With an increasing number of organisations now adopting DevOps and agile, there are a number of new roles being created to match the growing importance and size of the market. Roles that never previously existed, such as software development test engineers, are now appearing and the demand for these positions is only likely to increase as quality assurance becomes more central to the operation of organisations.

“Technology disruptions such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and mobility are leading to faster business transformations than ever before. Companies have to pivot quickly in order to stay ahead of the curve, compete and conform to the new style of business,” said Raffi Margaliot, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Application Delivery Management, HP Software. “This year’s World Quality Report highlights how quickly IT leaders are responding to these mega trends that are rapidly changing our industry and the steps they are taking to keep pace with the demands of their users without compromising application quality and user experience.”

Research methodology

The World Quality Report, which this year interviewed 1560 respondents from 32 countries, is the only global report for application quality. It has been produced annually since 2009. Now in its 7^th edition, the 2015 report adopted a hybrid methodology of data collection using both computer aided telephone interviews and computer aided web interviews. Based on analysis of five respondent groups: CIO, VP Application, IT Director, QA/Testing Manager and CDO/CMO, the report surveyed respondents from across the globe through quantitative interviews followed by qualitative deep-dive discussions.

A full copy of the World Quality Report 2015 can be downloaded here.

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