Tricentis today added a Virtual Mobile Grid service to its portfolio to make it simpler to test mobile applications at scale.

The service is based on the platform Tricentis gained via its acquisition of Waldo and is now integrated within the Tricentis Mobile application testing framework.

Tricentis CTO Mav Turner said the Virtual Mobile Grid extends an existing Tricentis Device Cloud service for accessing mobile devices to include the ability to author, execute and analyze tests that can be run across thousands of real and virtual devices.

In effect, Tricentis Mobile brings together Tricentis Testim Mobile, Tricentis Tosca Mobile and the Tricentis Device Cloud into a single platform, he noted.

DevOps teams can now test end-to-end at every layer of a mobile application using a platform that leverages neural network technology to test user interfaces. They can also build and run no-code tests to identify and resolve critical user interface and performance issues through real-time tracking of more than 130 key performance indicators (KPIs).

Organizations building mobile applications that must be deployed at scale and regularly updated are integrating testing platforms such as Tricentis within their continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms. Many of those efforts are tied to digital business transformation initiatives that rely on mobile computing platforms to access a wide range of backend services.

There is a lot of debate over how far left application testing should be shifted. In theory, the more developers test applications themselves, the fewer issues there should be once an application is deployed in a production environment. However, organizations need to be wary of increasing the cognitive load on developers, especially to the point where they spend significantly less time writing code, noted Turner. There will still be a need for dedicated testing teams to conduct tests across multiple stages of the application development process to ensure quality, he added.

Testing mobile applications is more critical than ever because the cost of failure—in terms of impact on the business—is 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 developers make are eliminated. That should improve everything from application security to the user experience as applications are continuously updated.

Theoretically, 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 naturally don’t conduct as many as they should. The simpler it becomes to author and execute those tests, the more likely it becomes a test will actually be run before an application gets deployed in a production environment.