Enabling Testing of Apps through AI is pushing the frontier of our Digital Life

By: Avinash Tiwari, Co-founder, and Director, pCloudy

The Bot Explosion:

Bots are everywhere now. Learning our needs, choices, and perspective. A thing of the future, found before in moving pictures is now a reality on our mobile phones. Be it, Siri, Alexa or Cortana, for millennials specifically, adoption has seen a massive spike in consumption. Or take Facebook, where since last year, the company has launched more than 100K chatbots.

 Using Bots in Software Testing

In the world of software testing, the idea is pretty straightforward. You know there is a defined output value for a given input. You enter values, explore an application, and compare the obtained results with the expected one. If it’s a match, all well and good, if not, there must be a bug. Still, you must know what the output should be.

Today, Machine Learning models are based on neural networks- layers of algorithms that are adjusted through a learning process. This method learns the model of an app using machine learning. The model so learned is then used to generate user inputs that visit the unexplored state of the app.

 What’s the need for Mobile App Testing world?

We are living in a world of exploding App consumption. For instance, as per a recent prediction by Intel, the ecosystem is going to grow to 200 billion IoT devices across the world, with wireless technology capable of talking to each other for functionalities; and currently, almost all consumer IoT applications use mobile apps as the primary interface for its users.

Because we are now faced with the reality of the situation- manual testing practices are not going to cut it. There has been a need to automate app testing since years now. It doesn’t change what we as testers do but changes how we accelerate the process, saving time and money while maintaining accuracy.

AI Bots and intelligent technology are the newest recruits to the workforce in the world, including app testing. In fact, these intelligent technology is made up of cognitive software bots that do our bidding in seconds- the question is who gives them the direction and the problems that need to be solved?

For our platform, for instance, bots run the tests covering several installation & uninstallation and functional scenarios along with random events on the app, that too, on multiple devices. It is a neat way to do a sanity check within minutes when earlier it would take much longer. All this without writing any scripts. Just upload the app and sit back and relax.

AI bots are tough, stable and can crawl through an app automatically and navigate through its path like any human would do, collecting loads of relevant data for the app. An overarching mechanization of the test coverage allows for app teams to have access to a virtual workforce, with a collective intelligence, greater speed and the ability to scale that the best of app teams are not able to provide now.

 End Result is critical

Businesses are churning out more apps due to the growing smartphone adoption in our economy. Which means that, in order to not be deleted by the user in less than 2 minutes of installing the application on his or her phone, the app should pass through thorough qualitative tests. These apps cannot lag, crash, have bugs or glitches, drain phone memory or battery and work anywhere in the world from a smartphone.

This calls for a transformation towards accelerating our conversion cycles with the evolving times. At the end of the day, it is that one user who would want to come back to use the application. And it is this one user for whom industries now are working to make his download worth his time. Time is what we are racing against now.