Testing for Today’s Most Popular Apps…The Holy Grail of Testing?

March 23, 2011 by Simon Berman

I’ve been in the testing business for many years now and I’ve come across a lot of grandiose claims by test tool vendors with regards to features and capabilities that just sound too good to be true. And in many cases, they are.

When it comes to today’s world of smartphones and tablets and the explosive growth of web and mobile applications, it’s mind-blowing to see the sheer quantity of apps out there. If you look at the number of apps available today on just three of the leading app stores (Apple, Android and Facebook), there’s over a million applications, with tens of thousands of new ones every single month.

Recreating Apps in the Lab
So if you’re a service provider or enterprise looking to test and validate your products and services to ensure your policies for QoS and security are going to give your customers the best possible experience, how on earth do you go about recreating these apps in your test environment? Well, your testers aren’t going to build the tests manually (it’ll take forever) and you’re not going to wait for your friendly test tool vendor to develop them either (it’ll take forever).

Well if I were to tell you that there is a solution to this, I’d certainly understand it if you were cynical.

Transforming pcaps into Tests
On previous blogs we’ve described our approach to test creation which relies on technology that automatically transforms any pcap into a reusable test asset for functional, scale or security testing whereby the original flows are recreated in a stateful and faithful manner. In fact, many of our customers were quick to adopt our pcapr community to take advantage of the over 60 million packets out there to help them with their testing.

Building a Community for Sharing Application Tests
We’ve now taken this to the next level. The recently launched Mu TestCloud is the industry’s first community repository of ready-to-run tests comprised of today’s most popular apps. Essentially what we and our partners have done is to take captures of these apps and, using Mu Studio, covert them into test scenarios. All you need to do is download the tests to your Mu Test Suite and run them!

Check out the Mu App-ID space which contains tests across many different categories including things like:

  • P2P (BitTorrent, Gnuetella)
  • Video (Netflix, YouTube, Hulu)
  • IM/Chat (AIM, Jabber)
  • Voice (Skype, Google Talk)
  • Games (Mafia Wars, World of Warcraft, Angry Birds)
  • Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
  • Business apps (Oracle, Google Docs)
  • Etc.

Mu TestCloud contains thousands of ready-to-run tests of popular apps

Mu TestCloud contains thousands of ready-to-run tests of popular apps 

And just like our product releases which we have on a monthly basis, we’ve done the same thing here with these tests. Building the tests is easy (you can do it yourselves if you have the pcaps and you need to test right now) and we have a bunch of partners out there cranking them out by the hundreds. Currently we’ve got close to 1,000 apps on Mu TestCloud and we’re rolling out hundreds of new ones every month. We’re also making sure we have the latest and greatest versions of the most popular apps like Skype, which has a new release almost every month.

So, if you’re looking to quickly recreate the applications you’re seeing in today’s production environment, look no further. This may just be the Holy Grail of app-aware testing.

Categories: Android, Cloud, DPI, HTML5, iPhone, IPS, Scale, Studio, Testing
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