At a recent trend outlook session most of the trends presented concerned the mobile web, mobile devices and multiple screens. Our society is becoming more mobile and expects to find services wherever there’s web access, and that’s expected to be just about everywhere. It’s not just the smartphone platform that needs to be considered anymore, there’s the tablet, the television is becoming interconnected, even fridges have internet access and may be a target platform for some companies digital presence.

This is becoming more and more of a challenge for the test department. There’s not just the Windows/Internet Explorer platform to focus on anymore. Even now I’m struggling to keep up with the increasing amount of competent mobile platforms.

More platforms taken into account increases the cost of both development and testing. Test equipment is just one thing to adress; how do we keep up with the development of new platforms while keeping the costs of maintaining equipment to a minimum? How do we focus our testing on the correct machine?

All these new and upcoming platforms and devices increases the need for separation of data and presentation in testing. Data handling, back end logic, is tested separately from presentation while main effort might be put on presentation and front end development.

Putting more effort into front end testing is needed also due to the brittleness of front end code. Back
end code is often, in my experience, well supported by frameworks and code language standards thus errors
are quite well handled in many cases. All the while presentation deals with a lot of manual coding errors.