Client
LinkedIn is the number one social networking site for companies and professionals alike. The site is available in 24 languages and has over 500 million members globally.
With such a large online presence, it is a huge benefit to know how many of those visitors are on mobile devices, what type of device is being used, and how many users are connecting via the LinkedIn mobile app.
Business need
LinkedIn needed to create a superior quality of its applications in the very rapid release cycle.
Before the Akvelon development team started automating tests for the LinkedIn application, testing was done manually, consuming large amounts of time and producing more errors.
Akvelon provided the most competitive fixed bid proposal for this project and was able to meet all of the project’s deadlines.
Solution
Manual testing is, in many cases, inconsistent due to various testing environments, complicated test preconditions, and the human factor. Given the complexity of the LinkedIn application for Android and iOS (being that they themselves are under constant development) it became extremely difficult for LinkedIn to ensure that new functionality does not break existing logic and that every release consistently provides common experiences for all platforms.
Akvelon worked with LinkedIn on test process automation through the development of a modular, extendable, and reliable test framework based on industry standards like Robotium (Android), UI Automation (iOS), and Hudson (continuous integration server). Akvelon’s main tasks were to extend the test framework and develop test modules used as a building block to compose complicated test suites.
Test Framework is capable of automating UI tests for any Android and iOS application on real devices and on emulators. Testing can be fully automated by running tests with any Continuous Integration server.
Various basic and complex user actions can be automated: screen taps, scrolls, swipes, hardware buttons taps, screen orientation changes, editing text fields, etc.
Both native UI’s and HTML/JavaScript-based UI’s are supported. A wide range of system interactions is supported as well as making screenshots, manipulating contacts, changing connectivity state, and others.
Akvelon applied its best practices for the solution design and implementation:
• In-depth analysis of the business need based on historical data and brainstorming sessions with the company management
• Road-map arrangement: goals, deliverables, milestones, specifications, estimations, and communications
• Software design and development
• System deployment: testing, and solution feedback providing improvements to resolve additional queries
Benefits & Results
As a result, LinkedIn has received two powerful automated testing systems to check the LinkedIn mobile client application for both of the most popular mobile platforms – Android and iOS.
Benefits include:
•By automating the test process for the LinkedIn Mobile application, LinkedIn was able to reduce the amount of hours spent testing
•As new features were added, regression testing took place automatically with minimal set-up time
•LinkedIn was also able to minimize human error and limit environmental (Dev environment) impacts on the testing
•75% of Android and 95% of iOS Test Cases were automated
