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There was a time, now feels like centuries ago when there was a T.V and a remote. And the person who managed to grab the remote for the hour was the man of the house for that hour. Everybody wanted to see their favorite shows from news to cartoons to daily soaps. Fast forwarding to current scenario, there is no longer a tiff between whose favorite show to watch, as everyone have their personal TV in their hands, yes their mobile phones/ tablets or laptops.
A recent report titled Global Video Insights, which predominantly had respondents from India, Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa, states that 67% people prefer their mobile device as the primary medium for video consumption, be it movies, TV shows or music videos. While 22% watch video content on both television and mobile, only 11% agreed to watch videos mostly on TV.
Today’s consumer exhibit little patience and the providers are under pressure to deliver a seamless experience or they lose a potential client. No wonder, it has become more critical than ever for Video Service Providers to deliver video applications that support consumers watching what they want, on the screen of their choice, at any time of their choosing. Doing so, however, is not without its challenges especially when it comes to testing.
The Challenge in automating mobile video apps
With video consumption on the rise worldwide, it’s imperative for enterprise to pay special attention to videos and video players during their QA testing. At Opkey, we recently came across an interesting problem statement from a leading south asian player in IPTV space. They wanted to use Opkey and pCloudy (our mobile device farm) to help them automate the video content testing of their android and iOs apps.
There were 3 key challenges we analyzed:
a. Automating the Discovery of video content
b. Testing the Video player controls (Play pause etc..)
c. Validating the video content itself
The current tools available in the market like appium or calabash can check that a video player control is available but do not support testing of its content being played. The process of automating the process of discovering the video content and verify that the correct content gets played required talking to external data sources, and fetching information at run time. The list was also exhaustive, so a need for framework was high which can manage all this and report failure if the video failed to playback. All the above mentioned challenges and more showed us a void which required to be filled in, and which we did by creating our own mobility plugin to be integrated with Opkey.
How we solved this problem using Opkey and pCloudy
Opkey is a tool agnostic test automation platform available over web. It also has integration available with pCloudy, which provides mobile lab over cloud. The combination of Opkey SAAS keyword driven test approach which supports multiple testing tools with pCloudy for mobile lab is unbeatable. We have ready to use keyword list for mobile testing, and end user is able to create tests and run them on varied devices over cloud without writing even a single line of code. It also comes with an impressive recorder feature which records the scenario to be tested, creates a test case and voila we are ready to execute the scenario. It captures the different types of controls in a mobile app without any hitch whether it s a zoom control, a seekbar or a text box with equal ease. Once the test is created, you can run it using the Opkey mobility plugin which comes integrated with Opkey SAAS.
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