App user testing : Getting ready for the big move

After 2 months of hard rework and extensive design and recoding, the app reaches the stage where we can test it.
2 months may sound long to some but remember we are family men and we work at night. I've read recently that start ups behave like rock bands and I find it very true, we just don't have the road shows in far away places on week ends.

If you come from the IT world, you know about user testing. Back in the "old ways", user testing would happen at the very end of the project and would be very structured with long user scenarios and so on. The software world has gone very far in industrializing the process and when a product reaches user testing, if the work has been done properly, they are not that many critical bugs i.e crashes that prevent you from doing what you are supposed to do.

IPad app user testing is different. It is closer to web like applications development and what people in IT call Rapid Application Development meaning coding and testing go in parallel. However there are 2 things that you need to know about iPad apps user testing:

- iPads may sound homogeneous but there are multiple configurations out there: iPad 1, iPad 2 and so on, various ios versions and it seems that some apps will generate memory issues. So sometimes the App will crash on one configuration and not on another and finding the bug can be very time consuming.

Let's admit it: bugs are a hassle

- It happens all along the project with 2 stages:
Stage #1: you test it home, some features work fine, some not at all, multiple crashes, several days to fix them. Fine.
Stage #2: you make the tests in real life situation.
Why? Because the Apple development environment happens on Mac and even if the simulator is good, it feels very different on your tablet where you happen to use your fingers and not the mouse pointer.
And also because if you have followed us so far, you know that the umbrella principle applies. If you want to test the umbrella, get out when it's raining and see how it goes.

No test is worth a real life testing 

So we took our iPads in multiple meetings. And we tested and we crashed and we fixed. It was very painful when it crashed during meetings so we really made sure it will NOT happen again. The very good point is that it gave us new ideas on features we could propose to the user.
More importantly we were able to "impress our colleagues" with a report right at the end of a meeting and saved us a LOT of time. Audio records were also a must, you can really write down minutes without any mistake.

When you're done testing your app, you feel indestructible

Lesson#7: Good real life testing should make you feel comfortable for submission

Time now to get prepared for the big show, the Apple submission.