Many people have often thought about what is more profitable: to ride your own car or use Uber. A similar question arises for companies who need to test their product on real devices: to set up their own device farm or to use a public device farm. We will clarify it below. Furthermore we will consider two public device farms.
Uber is cheaper than using a private car, if you drive in the city not more than 91 km per month in USA, not more that 98 km per month in UK, not more than 67 km in German. Let’s see how things are with test automation, when you need to choose between a public device farm devices and a creation of your own device farm.
Device Farm is a testing environment that helps to test remotely the performance of web and mobile applications on various real devices. Device Farm includes both modern and outdated devices from multiple manufacturers.
The need for device farms arose when the smartphone market started. Even then testers had to test applications on various physical devices and on various OS to make sure that everything works fine. But every year, more and more new smartphone models enter the market, and now almost every day new models come to market. Moreover, different models have different versions of firmware, which makes manual testing more lengthy. To reduce the amount of manpower involved, some companies started to create device rental services, or private device farms.
Now you can use a specific device from the device farm remotely: if the developer or QA engineer works from home or even from another country. In practice, it works as follows: through remote access a special script is run, which simulates the user’s behavior on a particular device.
Public device farms are farms that provide separate devices for public usage.
Using Public Device Farm can be a good solution for midsize businesses that care about quality assurance of its product. At the same time these businesses can’t afford to maintain a large QA team or large number of devices for testing.
Public device farm allows you to:
Public device farms work with various types of cloud, such as public, private, on-premise. So you can not worry about the security of your data and customers’ data.
Private device farms are farms that individual companies create for their own use. They use devices that they have and unite them in one system with access through a cloud. Every employee gets access to every device from anywhere.
Private device farms can be useful for customer service. A customer with a faulty device can connect it to a private device farm through the cloud and allow the technical specialist to fix the issue remotely. Once the customer disconnects from the farm, remote access to its device is immediately terminated.
If your company already has all devices necessary for testing, then it’s a great idea to create your own private device farm. If you don’t have all the necessary devices to build your own private device farm, it’s better to use a public farm.
Let’s see how device farms work comparing 2 products.
AWS Device Farm is a service for testing Android, iOS, and Web applications on real devices such as smartphones, tablets, desktop web-browsers, and improving the quality of tested products. The service allows to execute test-cases in parallel, generates logs and video to rapidly fix the bugs identified. AWS Device Farm is used for automation testing and for testing with remote access.
The workflow of automation testing with AWS Device Farm:
Zebrunner Device Farm is a physical device farm for mobile testing, works with private and on-premise types of cloud. Customers get full access to the devices through ADB, and the ability to develop and debug remotely. Zebrunner Device Farm provides a cross-platform solution, a private mobile cloud for testing apps. A private cloud ensures the highest level of security.
What problems Zebrunner Device Farm solves
Necessity to execute a large amount of automated tests daily (500+). At the same time, using a public device farm for this purpose is expensive.
Complex test flow, where simply test-cases require an interaction with multiple mobile platforms, web, API, and IoT devices.
Ensuring the highest level of data security, mandatory for a number of industries.
Multithreaded tests execution. You can divide the test-suite into multiple threads, when you need a rapid result of test execution. You also can run a simple thread for deep regression coverage of every device.
Dockerized container. Each device has its own dockerized container. If you need to restart Appium or ADB service, it’s not necessary to restart the entire cloud, it’s enough to restart the container for a separate device.
Full control over the selected device. Each selected device is accessible through the admin panel. The customer has full control for manipulation, logging, screenshots/videos.
Plug-n-play. Easily remove mobile devices, when you need it for manual testing. When you’re done, plug it back, and it will work automatically.
Integrations. Use tools that you prefer and get results from them in one place. Retrieve the results directly where you want to work with them: Jenkins, Teamcity, TestRail, JIRA, Slack and many more.
Automation Frameworks. Run mobile test scripts using Selenium, Appium, Carina, XCUI Test, UI Automator, Protractor, Custom Test.
Pricing. We apply elastic pricing when you pay just for time of using this tool. This price includes access to private cloud, dedicated set of devices, secure access via SSO, parallel test execution, automated and manual test scenarios, permanent access and full control, hardware installation and maintenance.
High speed of test running and test execution. Zebrunner Device Farm allows users to run hundreds of tests in parallel and get the results within minutes.
Security. Support team can configure the entire infrastructure directly in your office or in a remote data center, ensuring compliance with all IPSEC and data protection standards.
Rapid scaling. You can use as many devices as you need.
Uber Business Model is beneficial in automated testing in such cases as: