Mobile Design and Development

Chapter 15. Supporting Devices

Imagine a restaurant where you could just walk up and order whatever you felt like—no menu, just anything you want. If you felt like eating a salad, the restaurant would make you a salad. If you felt like a steak, it would make you steak just the way you liked it. If you wanted a banana, peanut butter, and potato chip sandwich, it would make it. Or, if you felt like ratatouille niçoise, in which each ingredient is sautéed separately, layered together, then baked to perfection (the proper way to prepare this delicious dish, by the way), it would make that for you, too. If you are the only customer, then this restaurant would certainly be a dream come true, because the chef would have time to focus and prepare your dish to perfection. It would probably be one of the best meals you’ve ever had in your life.

But, of course, as more customers enter our fictional restaurant and as more custom orders are placed, the kitchen would become a nightmare. The chef, regardless of his training and expertise, would have to deal with so many variables that not only would it become unmanageable, but the quality would start to decrease. It becomes impossible to create so many variations and still maintain a high degree of quality.

This is the case with the task of testing mobile devices, and unfortunately, we are the chefs. Dealing with one device is easy, but as you start adding more and more devices the variables/variations become too great to manage. Maintaining quality ...