It's not hard to find them, they are everywhere. They are in every crack and corner, and right in front of our faces. Some scream "here I am", others are subtle and elusive. It is our job to find and eliminate them, and the job never stops.
Of course I'm talking about bugs and performance problems in mobile services that have been deployed to production. Sometimes the product is created in house and your internal QA team does the testing. Other times the whole thing is outsourced and maybe a 3rd party does the testing for you. Or another variation is that a 3rd party creates the product, but your internal testing team has to verify it.
Whatever
the model, the result is the same, your “brand” and company image is reflected
by how well the service works in the end. For the end-user of your service, who
tested it is irrelevant, it either works or it doesn’t. If it is your brand
name on the service, then it is your fault, regardless of the details. In some cases, the problem is minor, as in the first diagram,
where the lead story from a very popular news site is “repeated” several times
in the page. Obviously it’s a bug in the content generation process that
updates the list of stories over the day. No big deal, minor impact. But maybe the problem is like the second graph where your mobile
site is down for several days. Did anyone know about it? Why did it take so
long to fix? Are you selling products or services from your mobile site? What
is the value of a day’s worth of revenue? Will your potential customers come
back if they tried your service and it returned an error? I call this “The New Frontier” because many organizations are
still struggling to identify and deploy tools that can help them verify the
quality of their mobile services. One of the things we often hear is: “We don’t
need mobile testing/monitoring tools because we already have plenty of other IT
tools already deployed….” If that is true, then why is it so easy to find problems just by
casually poking around using your mobile device?
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