Emil Simeonov and the EZ Mobile Platform

Mobile Tester

A mobile tester yesterday.

While I was at the recent Romanian Software Testing Conference I had the good fortune to meet up with Emil Simeonov, the TenKod EZ Mobile Platform automation toolkit product owner. I took the opportunity to ask him some questions about why his solution is special and how it fits in with the various other automation solutions on the market.

Please can you tell us who you are and what you do?

My name is Emil Simeonov. I am the Product Owner of TenKod Ltd. – the new kid on the block in the field of Mobile test automation. As such I have been working on shaping our product definition, vision and portfolio. I also actively participate in the product development phases.

What were you doing before you started working on the EZ Mobile Platform?

I was working for SAP, like for a little bit more than 7 years. I used to hold 2 positions  – one of a Senior Product Owner and also a Senior Development Architect. The teams I worked with and led contributed to the success of SAP HANA – the famous innovation in the in-memory computing space. I was mostly dealing with its lifecycle management – installation, configuration and update. These are critical areas for each software product with a huge customer base. The vast experience I had there helps me a lot today, when working on the TenKod EZ Mobile Platform.

At some point I decided that I needed a mind-shifting change in life. As nice things usually happen right at this time I got to know about TenKod and decided to make this move.

Where/how did you come up with the idea? How has the product evolved?

Well, first of all the idea has never been mine, it was originated by TenKod founder, Asaf Saar, who was the Area Product Owner of Software Engineering and Test Automation Network lead at SAP AG. Yet I hope that I managed to contribute to its perpetual evolution on a daily basis. It originated out of close monitoring, observation and detailed analysis on the current state of the Mobile test automation industry at the time. At TenKod we have quite some professional background related to LEAN, Scrum, Design Thinking, Agile software methodologies, software development and engineering.

As such it was not that difficult for us to understand and envision all the pain points and issues that Mobile test developers face everyday. We decided that it is the prime time for us to step in and just standardise the Mobile testing experience. Change it for good, so to say.

How do you see the state of the mobile development and testing scene currently? How is your product positioned within this market?

Mobile development and testing are definitely moving forward. Yet this doesn’t mean that everything is already well conceptualised. Furthermore, the automation testing story is just making its first steps towards relative maturity. There is a number of open source and commercial solutions in this space. They all do the job to a certain extent.

The modern open source technology stacks for mobile testing offer compelling features, but are hard to set up and use. One should invest in building the test automation solution that really works well. This may also require programmatic extensions of these open source tools. If one needs to do this again and again with each and every project assignment, well, the testing procedures may easily cross the boundaries of being a mere nuisance and become bad, bad investments. This probably depends on the scale of each project as well.

The commercial mobile testing solutions overcome some of the issues of utilising vanilla open source tools, but most of them introduce other potential issues. Some of them – even more severe, vendor lock-in being the king.

And here is TenKod. Our goals are all related to filling the gaps introduced by open source solutions and bringing the whole mobile test automation story end-to-end – test creation, development and execution in the IDE as well as Continuous Integration for the sake of regression avoidance. It is our core belief that vendor lock-in is no longer an option as open and standards–compliant solutions are more and more recognised and wanted. Respect, Openness and Trust being our core values we don’t stop here. While bringing value to mobile test engineers, we also plan on contributing back to the open source communities as they are our backbone and we are kind of ‘heading’ them.

Why do you think the EZ Mobile Platform is the best solution for your customers?

Now this is a tough one. ’Some things are just meant to be’, would not be an acceptable answer, I guess. Ideally it would take a few articles of mine to fully answer this question. Let me try to sum it up in 3 simple points.

Because of the TenKod team. I know people are keen on just saying such things, clichés. This is not the case with me, though. We are a highly motivated, strong and capable ‘family’. And we rock, we really, really rock. I can hardly believe it that any other company in our field will be able to provide such competitive development support, professional services and educational initiatives.

The passion in the eyes of professional testers, when we talk to them, also explain and demonstrate the capabilities of our products. I see they love it and keep asking for more. ‘Can we have this, and can we have that? And when?’. We are heading in the right direction, this is what I think after such interactions. I wish these kinds of inspiring experiences for every other Product manager out there.

Because the TenKod EZ Mobile Platform is NOT and will never be feature-complete. This is to say that we are constantly following up with test experts and organisations all over the world and strive for improving it. Listening carefully to our potential customers is one of the things that makes a huge, huge difference. This ensures the constant delivery of more and more value to the wretched souls who are to automate Mobile tests with the means available today. This is how we make their life better.

Apart from the aforementioned reasons I could state a number of technical advantages that we possess. However they would not fully reflect my own views as to why we are loved.

What kind of people are using your solution? Have you got some success stories to share?

We are currently releasing mostly beta versions of the TenKod EZ Mobile Platform and do our best with gathering valuable input that we later incorporate in our offerings. In this sense our pilot users are mostly senior Mobile test consultants in huge companies and professional Mobile test engineers.

On May, 16th, during RTC 2014, we had a great opportunity to get together around 30 young test engineers. Young talents, as I refer to them. They had the chance to experience Mobile test automation first hand. Apart from the Open Source solutions presented by us the TenKod EZ Mobile Platform was also given a try. We got back with high hopes and a few bugs to fix.

Many of our readers will be working with continuous integration and deployment stacks. Is EZ Mobile Platform compatible with such an environment?

Oh, absolutely. Our concept is that the testing of Mobile apps shall happen as early as possible, unlike most solutions in the market these days, which focus on post-production phase testing. In this sense we believe that test developers would benefit from most utilising the tools and frameworks which are positioned as close as possible to the ones used for the development of the app in question. The ultimate goal? Well, eliminate any redundant post-production testing cycles. They cost a lot of time, money and resources in general. Furthermore, the cost of resolving an issue discovered when a Mobile app is already developed is kind of high compared to issues discovered, resolved and tested earlier.

From this perspective we see the usage of Continuous Integration (CI) as a must. Hence each and every test project created using the TenKod EZ Mobile Platform is integrated with a build automation system (Apache Maven) out of the box. If we take Jenkins as a reference CI system, one would just need to create a standard Jenkins job and then point to the location of the POM file for the corresponding test project. It is that simple. Basically providing the team CI system with two parameters and boom, the tests just run.

I’m not particularly familiar with mobile development. What are the pain points you identified in the mobile development lifecycle? How is your product addressing these?

There are really lots of pain points. Therefore I will touch just 3 of them right now, the first one being the diverse development environments used for producing apps for smart mobile devices.

A quick comparison between Android and iOS development and testing models, tools and frameworks would illustrate my point better. With Android one uses the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). In future it seems it will be replaced with some IntelliJ products, which will add some amount of confusion, I believe. The Android apps are relatively easy to get built, assembled and tested using Continuous Integration. Yet Android has its own platform tools to be learnt, used and worked around. The iOS apps are developed using a proprietary Apple IDE – Xcode. It is superior in many respects, but it is a world of its own. On top, there is no official tools yet that could deploy iOS apps to physical devices during testing, for example. This is definitely an issue with setting up Continuous Integration for iOS. And this is just a simple example of what might be missing with the iOS development environment. If you add Windows Phone to this equation, it would just get more and more exciting or scary…

As I mentioned earlier, no test-tooling or frameworks currently manage to tackle this issue and unify the testing experience. TenKod does strongly focus on bringing the right mobile development and testing tools to the right IDE’s. It is a strong emphasis of ours and we truly believe we are on the right track. Our long-term goal is to standardise the mobile testing experience.

There are also issues with testing solutions requiring jail-breaking smart mobile devices and also instrumenting the tested mobile applications prior to test execution. Why? Because these used to be some of the ways developers worked around well-known issues in the Mobile space. Fortunately, more and more open source projects and business organisations recognise the major threat with investing in such testing solutions. At TenKod for instance, we do not offer such messed up solutions. I believe we will stay like this. In short, one should be extremely careful with picking up the right mobile automation solution. Some of them are really glossy but not very loud about how they manage to automate tests. So far so good, the real issue becomes evident with the organisations paying for the mobile app testing. Many of them disagree with such techniques for the money they pay, if you get me right.

CI is another important aspect as it would hardly make sense to implement automated tests and not to harness them into some kind of automated regression avoidance process. This is, where CI makes it easier for us to manage the risk and cost of any project. CI steadily enters the Mobile apps space, as well, and this makes me quite happy. Even today the TenKod EZ Mobile Platform elegantly integrates with any CI system out there. Is this the case with most of the players in our field? Not really. And we may again spot that vendor lock-in with commercial testing solutions makes it really hard for most of the apps to be continuously integrated, so to say.

And so on and so forth…

What does the future hold for EZ Mobile Platform?

Success. Great success and numerous technical challenges, I believe. No worries, though. We will do well.

The more interesting question would be: ‘What does future hold for the Mobile testers?’. My hope here – a stronger and more capable TenKod EZ Mobile Platform that makes their life better.

Do you have anything else you want to share with our readers?

I want to meet you in person, guys. I’d like to have the chance to talk to each and every one of you in person. This not possible, I encourage you to get together and talk, and discuss, and share the passion and excitement of what you do. This is the only way we would progress – both as professionals and integral part of Humanity.

Emil Simeonov can be contacted via email (emil dot simeonov at tenkod dot com) or via Twitter @e_simeonov if you’d like to talk to him further about the EZ Mobile Platform.

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