It is no secret that businesses are now starting to embrace enterprise apps. The benefits are amazing: workers are more productive, business processes are more efficient and it helps you leverage big data. These mobile solutions are used by your employees and other internal stakeholders, as opposed to consumer apps, which are geared towards customers and other people outside of your organization.

There are various reasons for this acceptance. For one, you now have more enterprise apps, more and more developers are getting into creating enterprise apps, and major players are forming alliances that directly or indirectly encouraging apps for businesses, such as the IBM partnership with Apple and Oracle’s rumored tie-in with Samsung. But one big factor is the maturation of the software and tooling support ecosystem that is present in a mobile enterprise.

And this is why testing automation is very important. Businesses often make platform decisions for the long term. In contrast, a mobile app in the app store has a typical shelf life of around three months.

Testing native iOS apps are not easy and it could be time consuming. And the testing tools you have are not as polished as, for example, the tools that are available for Java and other platforms. But thanks to the release of both Xcode 6 and iOS8, you might want to give automated testing of iOS apps another try.

XCTest

iOS developers now have access to XCTest out of the box. XCTest is a unit testing platform that examines the internal operations and then tells you the problems in your code base when you update to newer versions of the iOS.

OCMock or OCMockito

If you want to find out how your iOS app would do in certain situations, these are the tools to use. For instance, both testing platforms are used if you want to recreate a bank transaction or a stock market trade, so that you could see if there is anything wrong with your code.

Xcode Service

In developing iOS apps, you can use continuous integration to immediately notify you if bad code has been introduced into your program. You feed all our code to a repository. It is compiled and then tested on an ongoing basis. The trick is that once a bad code has been introduced into your app, it will be able to alert you about potentially problematic code. In fact, it will alert you if there are any additions to the code in the repository, bad or good. XCode Service is a great way to make continuous integration as painless as possible.

Instruments

Apple has a suite of instruments that allow you to know about memory leaks, battery drains, random crashes, and everything else that is going on with your apps. And using these instruments, you can test the user interface to ensure that your app works from the outside in, as you intend it to work.

And that is just for the iOS. Android has its own set of tools, all of which have made testing easier to automate. And because of that, you can now easily test your mobile apps to make sure that they work well and that they work as they should, paving the way for businesses to use more and more mobile apps.

Four Cornerstone offers Oracle consulting services in Dallas. If you want to get into easy app development and all its necessary processes, give us a call at 1 (817) 377 1144.