Testing Experience Issue 28, December 2014

The final issue

The issue. Issue 28, published in December 2014, was the final issue of Testing Experience. The magazine had appeared every quarter since March 2008 as a free PDF in English for professional testers, published by a Berlin testing consultancy and training company and edited by Jose Diaz. Its theme was mobile testing, which made a fitting close: the magazine had opened in 2008 with a launch issue on test management and ended on the platform that had changed day-to-day testing more than any other in the seven years between.

What it covered. Mobile testing is the known theme of the issue; its individual articles are not described here. Over its 28 issues the magazine had covered test management, security testing (with a sister title, Security Acts, growing out of the June 2009 security issue), agile testing, open source testing tools and much else, and the mobile theme drew several of those threads together. Device coverage is a test management problem, mobile app security is a security testing problem, and short app release cycles pushed teams toward agile delivery whether they had planned for it or not.

The end of the run. Testing Experience ended with this issue in December 2014, and this site is an independent knowledge base, started in 2026, that continues the magazine's subjects; it is not the original publisher. The magazine hub describes the publication as a whole, and the issue index lists all 28 issues with their dates and known themes.

Mobile testing, 2014 to 2026

Mobile testing in 2014. In December 2014 the device matrix was still built by extension from desktop practice: a few phones and tablets across the two dominant operating systems, chosen largely by what the team happened to own, with emulators considered adequate for most cases. Interruptions such as calls and notifications, poor networks and permission prompts were known risks, but they were often tested by hand at the end of a cycle. App store review was something to get through rather than something to plan for, and there was no shared standard for what a secure mobile app had to demonstrate. Test automation for native apps existed, but most teams treated it as an experiment rather than the backbone of a release.

How it changed by 2026. By 2026 the matrix is built from the app's own analytics, the OS version dimension has to cover several years of releases on one platform, foldables and tablets are separate form factors, and device clouds make real-device runs cheap enough to be the default, which is the argument of the mobile guide's closing section on emulators, real devices and device clouds. On security, nothing equivalent to OWASP's Mobile Application Security Verification Standard existed in 2014; its first version appeared in 2018, the companion testing guide followed the same year, and MASVS 2.0 in 2023 is now what an app store review or a client contract cites.

Where to read about it now

Where to read about it now. The mobile app testing guide is the current treatment of the issue's theme. Figure 1 is a device matrix of form factors against OS versions, with primary configurations that run in full every release and sampled cells that rotate; Table 1 gives the dimensions of that matrix with the options in each and a rule for choosing, and the text sets the target at 8 to 12 primary and 6 to 10 sampled configurations for a typical consumer app. The interruption list (seven cases), the network conditions section, the store submission checks and a 25-item checklist cover the rest. The performance testing guide covers the test types and reporting that apply to the services behind an app, and the recommended reading page lists the standards, books and communities that have taken the trade magazine's place.

Then and now

Guides that continue this subject

• Testing TechniquesMobile app testing: device matrix, checklist and strategy
• Testing TechniquesPerformance testing: types, workload models and p95 results

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