Debugging Software

Each year in the Spring we pick a topic to do a survey and this year (no surprise given our mobile initiative), we assembled about a dozen questions covering the development of mobile app’s.

I’ll use this and the next several blogs to cover the results but, as always, the results have been very eye-opening. First, some background on the those who responded.

• 80% participate in some part of the mobile application life cycle: development, test, project management and support.
• We had a nice mix of organizations. Half the responders came from organizations under 1000 people.
• The target(s) for their mobile apps were split along the lines of consumer/customer-only (50%), internal/employee-only (20%) and both consumer and employee (30%).

Given the proliferation of device types and operating systems, one of the trends we were most interested in is how much native vs. HTML5/JavaScript development is being done. Surprisingly given the conventional wisdom that most mobile app’s are written in a native language (e.g. Objective C or Java), we found that 70% of those who responded developed either full HTML5/JavaScript or Hybrid applications.

We’re still doing the slicing and dicing on the survey results to better understand if size of organization, user target, vertical industry, etc. has more or less influence on that 70% number, but overall it validates something else we have been hearing a lot: IT organizations are really struggling to provide mobile users access to enterprise applications and services and that writing custom-code for each device is a losing battle.

Hence, the pendulum is swinging to higher-level languages like HTML5 and JavaScript, aided and abetted by mobile application platforms like JQuery, Titanium and PhoneGap. More on that in our next blog—we’ve got some data on that too.

I guess the question is “who isn’t going mobile?” When enterprises woke up on Jan 1 and found that in Q4 well over 100 million smartphones and 25 million tablets were shipped –whether they liked it or not, they were not just “going mobile” but running to catch the train.

We’ve been watching the mobile space for about a year and as recently as last summer, mobile application development for our enterprise customers was more of an horizon event than a current project. But now, we’ve clearly reached a tipping point–what a difference 6 months makes.

With smartphones and tablets crashing into enterprise IT, everything from mobile device management to mobile security to mobile application development is a number one priority. Predictably, the requirements are many and the answers are few—especially given the n-dimensional problem of hardware, operating systems, languages and networks.

This all preamble to the news that we’ve just announced two products focused squarely on mobile application development and deployment for HTML5 and JavaScript–across all device and all operating systems. Our application record and replay technology—so potent for C, C++ and Java—bridges some deep gaps in mobile application development vis a vis standard enterprise web applications. Everything from debugging to testing to security to real user monitoring and customer support reminds us of the state-of-the-art circa 1999.

In addition, there is a marvelous ecosystem of HTML5- and JavaScript-focused Mobile Application Development Platforms such as Titanium, Sybase Unwired Platform, Adobe AIR and PhoneGap—a natural home for our mobile products and where we fit seamlessly and productively. Plus Microsoft is coming with Metro.

So, we are excited about the mobile space and ReplayMOBILE and apmMOBILE are the first of a family of mobile products that will ship this year. Because of where we sit in the code execution on smartphones and tablets, we see everything from what part of the code is exercised to what works (and doesn’t) through what data flows through to “did that last dot release of the O/S just break our app?”

We’ve heard “wild west” often applied to mobile application development. Here comes the cavalry.

Check out our HTML5 and JavaScript products at

http://www.replaysolutions.com/products/replaymobile.

We do webinars about once a month on various topics across the software development lifecycle. The common theme of course is how application record and replay can dramatically and demonstrably improve defect resolution.

Usually we average between 150 and 200 registrants. However, this month’s topic has driven sign-ups absolutely off the charts. Seems like test automation is a hot button topic right now and our webinar on Wednesday, Nov 2 (Automate testing for Java EE apps – Selenium, HP ALM, LoadRunner) already has 400+ registrants with more pouring in.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised because as organizations push more agile (and shorter) schedules, automation is crucial. For us, this trend is definitely our friend.

It starts with continuous integration and our ability to identify and explain even minor differences in test execution between code versions. After that, our ability to precisely locate regression test failures extends the ROI of that process from bug finding to bug communication, replication and resolution. We’re now even getting traction with the security folks who in addition to finding security and compliance issues via vulnerability scanners,  now want to bring the issue to development in the form of our recording to accelerate remediation (after all, a vulnerability is simply just another kind of bug).

We’re excited that our automated test solutions are resonating so strongly. If you happen to miss the live webinar, check out our website where we archive all of our “greatest hits”.

Postscript:  Final count 482.