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Tag: mobile application

Survey Surfaces Multiple Mobile Application Release Management Headaches

A survey of 300 mobile engineers in the U.S and the United Kingdom (UK) working for organizations with 500 to 10,000 employees finds, on average, respondents are spending five hours per release on low-value tasks involving manual steps, coordination issues and approval bottlenecks, translating into 130 wasted engineering hours annually per developer.

Published by Runway, a provider of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing mobile application releases, the survey finds more than three-quarters (77%) said their teams experience incidents requiring delays or hotfixes every three to five releases. Most teams (86%) spend a significant amount of time firefighting instead of building features, the survey also finds.

Despite those issues, however, most respondents said it was either very unlikely (9%) or only somewhat likely that their current release process could lead to missed deadlines, delayed features or negative user impact. Only 17% believe it is somewhat likely that inefficiencies in their current release process would lead to such issues.

Just over half (51%) also view their processes as being “somewhat” efficient, even though 52% also report spending about a third of each release cycle on non-productive or low-value tasks.

Only 11% report that their process is very efficient. Two-thirds also agree that improving centralized release coordination would have a significant (19%) or at least moderate (47%) impact on their processes.

Runway CEO Gabriel Savit said the survey makes it clear that as the overall pace of mobile application development accelerates, the teams building these applications are not becoming more efficient, resulting in higher costs. The challenge is that awareness of the issue is limited because of a general lack of observability and automation, he added.

Much of that issue can be traced back to the tools being employed by mobile application development teams, noted Savit. For example, most teams are relying on general-purpose tools such as project management applications (81%) and communication platforms (68%) for release coordination, including Jira/Asana software (81%), Slack (68%), continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools (53%) and spreadsheets (47%).

Not surprisingly, manual steps (49%) top the list of frustrations, followed by context switching (42%), and cross-functional coordination (41%). Respondents estimated that better communications, processes and collaboration across releases could have prevented 63% of uncaught incident issues.

It’s not clear to what degree these issues are more challenging to manage when building mobile applications but end user tolerance for any type of mobile application quality issue is notoriously low. It’s simply too easy for them to switch to another application. As more individuals participate in the development of these applications in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s only a matter of time before the number of applications being simultaneously built is likely to overwhelm existing processes, making it even more critical to prevent quality issues, noted Savit. The issue at hand now is determining to what degree to revamp those processes now versus waiting for the inevitable crisis, he added.

Ultimately, each organization is going to have to revisit how they build and deploy applications in the AI era. The only thing left to determine is the how and when, as the pace of application development continues to steadily increase beyond what any workflow designed for a previous era of software development can effectively support.

August 12, 2025
Survey Sees AI Playing Larger Role in Test Automation

A survey of 1,028 senior IT professionals and application developers in the United Kingdom, U.S., Germany and Singapore finds nearly half (47%) still use manual testing for mobile applications. More than a third (38%) noted that their organization could save between half and three-quarters (51-75%) of funding allocated to testing per year by fully automating mobile application testing.

Conducted by the market research firm Censuswide on behalf of Tricentis, a provider of a test automation platform, the survey also found that just under half of respondents (49%) reported their organization is already applying artificial intelligence (AI) to application testing. Another 21% plan to apply AI in the next six months. Almost three-quarters (74%) said their organization’s general sentiment toward AI in mobile software development testing is positive.

Respondents also expected AI to improve mobile application quality (37%), increase productivity (36%) enhance end-user experience (34%) and to reduce the number of vulnerabilities and/or bugs (32%) in their applications.

Mav Turner, chief product and strategy officer at Tricentis, said that rather than continuing to rely on expensive testing services, more organizations are looking to reduce costs by automating a wider range of testing workflows within the context of a DevOps workflow. In fact, the survey finds just under a third of respondents (32%) expect their organizations will invest more than $1 million to further automate testing.

As modernization of testing processes continues, the return on investment in mobile application development will only continue to improve, noted Turner.

The survey identifies the primary benefits of investing in test automation, which are increased productivity (32%), increased revenue (31%), increased user retention (28%) and increased compatibility across devices (28%).

The primary obstacles organizations encounter as they strive to achieve that goal are competing priorities (28%), lack of technology and talent (25%), time (25%) and cost (24%), the survey finds.

A full 87% said the quality of mobile applications is critical to their business, with 90% noting that poor mobile application quality costs their business as much as $2.49 million in lost revenue per year. However, just over a quarter (27%) said they believe their organization’s current mobile application development and testing strategy exceeds expectations.

As part of efforts to automate testing, it’s not clear just how far responsibility for testing is shifting left toward developers, but there is no doubt many more are being exposed to the results earlier in the software development life cycle. The goal is to provide continuous testing capabilities without overly disrupting code writing. It’s also becoming simpler for developers to leverage generative AI tools to provide summaries of tests along with recommendations to improve code. The end result should be higher-quality applications that require less troubleshooting once deployed in a production environment.

In the meantime, as organizations continue to become more dependent on mobile applications to drive a wide range of digital transformation initiatives, the cost of testing will continue to pale in comparison to the potential amount of lost revenue that might occur when end users either don’t invoke a specific feature or capability or, more commonly, simply abandon the application altogether.

March 29, 2024
Tricentis Acquires Waldo to Further Advance Mobile Testing

Tricentis has acquired Waldo as part of an effort to expand the scope of the automated testing capabilities it provides for mobile applications.

Waldo adds a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides IT teams with a no-code tool for generating mobile application tests. Waldo uses a virtual environment to simulate iOS and Android devices in a way that eliminates the need for physical devices to conduct tests. Instead, DevOps teams record their applications and then use the no-code tools to generate tests directly from within a browser.

Tricentis CTO Mav Turner said Tricentis opted to acquire Waldo because it makes it simpler for IT teams to generate tests that can be integrated across a DevOps workflow.

There currently is a lot of debate over how far application testing should be shifted left toward developers. In theory, the more developers test applications themselves the fewer issues there should be once an application is deployed in a production environment. However, there is still going to be a need for dedicated testing teams to conduct tests across multiple stages of the application development process to ensure quality, noted Turner.

The difference is more of those tests can include edge use cases that previously there would not have been enough time to conduct, he added.

Earlier this year, Tricentis added the ability to test native iOS and Android applications to its Testim software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform as part of an effort to extend the reach of that platform to applications that run natively on a mobile device.

Testing mobile applications is more critical than ever because the cost of failure—in terms of impact on the business—is now much higher as more organizations depend on software to drive business processes. The challenge is that many of these app developers don’t have a software engineering mindset, so they need testing platforms that automatically create and run tests on their behalf in a way that can be customized for specific use cases.

Over time, the quality of applications should steadily improve as many of the low-level mistakes that developers make are eliminated. That should improve everything from application security to the user experience as applications are continuously updated.

In addition, organizations that embed testing within DevOps workflows are steadily reducing the number of issues that need to be addressed before applications are deployed.

Hopefully, as more artificial intelligence (AI) is applied to the testing process, the number of reasons tests are not run as frequently as they should be will steadily decline. Today, it is still too difficult for many developers to author tests, so they don’t conduct as many as they should. Of course, many of them also simply run out of time when writing the code that drives the application takes longer than anticipated.

One way or another, developers will run out of excuses for not running tests as accountability for code quality increases.

July 11, 2023
The Pandemic’s Impact on Mobile App Security

Mobile device use has continued to grow throughout the global pandemic, surpassing 5.19 billion mobile phone users worldwide over the past year. As a result, companies have been launching mobile apps at an incredible pace to capitalize on the abundance of potential users.

The rapid pace of mobile app development, however, has led to a sudden uptick in privacy and security issues as well. As a result, many mobile developers are starting to recognize the need for a more proactive and streamlined approach to app security by adopting a DevSecOps mindset.

Mobile Security In The Spotlight

Mobile apps have become an enticing target for criminal exploitation because many developers don’t have the time to prioritize security measures like obfuscating their code, encrypting sensitive information or monitoring for live attacks after publishing an app. In fact, the FBI has reported a 50% surge in mobile banking usage, which has led to an increase in banking trojans and other attempts at financial fraud. Moreover, studies have shown that nearly every sector and companies across industries are facing cyberthreats, with 55% saying that being compromised had a lasting impact.

With regard to government responses to COVID-19, the release of contact tracing apps intended to help contain the coronavirus were recently in the spotlight for their lack of adequate security measures. These crowdsourced solutions gave governments more widespread reach for warning individuals that may have been exposed to the virus, but many mobile app developers had to launch them quickly, and security was not made a priority. Some contact tracing apps, like many other mobile apps on the market, failed to protect user privacy because they relied on the phone’s GPS, harvested personal information or sent data to a centralized database.

In an effort to make these contact tracing apps more secure, build trust and gain more user adoption, Apple and Google jointly released an Exposure Notification API. One year into the pandemic, mobile developers can use this API to build more secure contact tracing apps without compromising personal information. While the majority of contact tracing apps have adopted the API, this issue has revealed broader concerns about mobile application security and the need for DevSecOps in the industry.

DevSecOps For Mobile Developers

DevSecOps is an approach to application security that integrates security processes throughout the entire development pipeline. For mobile apps, this means scanning for issues during development, testing, deployment and following up on threats after release. By creating a secure software development life cycle (SSDLC), organizations can leverage automation to improve application security without burdening developers.

A key aspect of DevSecOps is catching issues earlier in the SSDLC, which is often called “shift left.” This is a proactive approach to application security where app developers use code hardening tools to protect their apps and code scanning tools to detect and remediate issues during development. By preventing vulnerabilities from reaching later stages of the SSDLC, the cost and effort involved with remediating security issues is much lower. While mobile app developers have prioritized being first to market in the past, many companies are now recognizing that a shift left of security efforts aligns with this goal.

Besides the development phase of the pipeline, it’s crucial for mobile app developers to implement security processes in the testing phase, as well. Both static and dynamic automated testing tools can detect vulnerabilities in the source code and execution of mobile apps to prevent issues from reaching production. With a DevSecOps approach, mobile developers can integrate these tools directly into the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to minimize the manual effort involved with improving their security posture.

While many mobile app developers have had to learn the hard way by experiencing a security breach, the pandemic has motivated others to take security more seriously. As people spend more time at home and shift to digital means for everyday tasks like shopping and banking, they’re using mobile apps far more frequently. Prioritizing security as well as speed by adopting DevSecOps methodologies allows mobile app developers to better protect their users and intellectual property as well as build greater trust in their apps without sacrificing time-to-market.

Enterprises may have more mature security programs in place, but mobile app developers are quickly catching up. The pandemic has put mobile security issues in the spotlight and motivated app developers to adopt DevSecOps. As mobile apps continue to become more critical for businesses, the maturity of security programs within the mobile app industry will likely improve even further.

April 29, 2021
Node.js Foundation Embraces HTTP/2

The latest version of Node.js will significantly increase the DevOps challenges surrounding the most widely used version of JavaScript in the enterprise. Node.js 8 adds the ability to support HTTP/2, a major revision of the core internet protocol that, in addition to being significantly faster, enables developers to make multiple requests over a single connection as well as set up pipelines for making a series of requests.

Myles Borins, director of the Node.js Project and member of the technical steering committee at The Node.js Foundation, notes that while HTTP/2 eventually will be supported by multiple programming languages, DevOps teams most likely will encounter it first in web and mobile applications built using Node.js.

Borins says HTTP/2 also should go a long way to accelerating the adoption of microservices applications—the majority of which are being built using Node.js.

Node.js 8, available under a Long-Term Support (LTS) license, is 20 percent faster than its predecessors, Borins says. It is based on the JavaScript V8 engine that makes use of Turbofan and the Ignition compilers and interpreters, which equates to lower memory consumption and faster startup time across Node.js applications.

Other new features include an Async/Await capability that allows developers to write more linear code versus relying on callbacks and a series of Experimental ES Modules that provide a standard pattern for writing modular JavaScript code that can run on both the web and in Node.js.

Node.js 4 is now scheduled to be designated for end-of-life status in April, and Node.js 6 will face a similar fate soon after. The Node.js Foundation is encouraging organizations that have deployed Node.js applications to refresh them because security patches and updates soon no longer will be available for the core engines used in Node.js 4 and 6 applications. Node.js API (N-API), a project that enables modules to run against new versions of Node.js, is still considered experimental. That project is being lead jointly by Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, nearForm, NodeSource and individual contributors.

The Node.js Foundation also announced that work has begun on Node,js 9, which is focused on modernizing legacy application programming interfaces (APIs) and implementing a new error system that associates a unique code with all errors in place of relying on traditional error messages.

The Node.js Foundation estimates there more than 9 million instances of Node.js deployed across the web today, so managing Node.js applications across their life cycle has become a significant DevOps challenge. While Node.js is not the only programming language gaining momentum across the enterprise, the Node.js community is highly focused on increasing the robustness and manageability of Node.js applications in a way that should eventually please even some of the most hardcore fans on rival languages such as Java or even COBOL.

— Mike Vizard

November 7, 2017