Testing Experience Issue 28, December 2014

Record card

What the links show

The final issue exists under one file name, issues/testingexperience28_12_14.pdf, with four referring domains. A book on mobile testing, published on a self-publishing platform, links the file with the anchor 'Testing Experience Issue 28, 2014' from its feedback and references page, which is how a mobile testing theme attaches to the issue in this record. Separately, the publication list of a well-known industrial research laboratory links the file with the anchor 'View Original Article', meaning one of its researchers published an article in the issue and the lab catalogued it. Two tester blogs make up the rest.

Two links is a small number, but they are the right kind: a book citing the issue as a reference and a research institution cataloguing an article in it are the citations a trade magazine hopes for. They also confirm that the magazine kept its practitioner-and-researcher mix to the end. Three other German research institutions and a university catalogue link the magazine's homepage with the anchor 'Download fulltext Publisher: (free access after registration)', the standard phrase their repositories use for an article held behind a publisher's registration wall.

Publication stopped after December 2014. No file for a 2015 issue appears anywhere in the link record, the publisher's newsletter links end with the 2013 campaigns, and the site itself was gone by around 2019, when the scraper sites that still list it last saw a live page. The magazine hub explains what happened to the domain afterwards and what this site is.

For the reader who arrives from the mobile testing book, the mobile app testing guide is the continuation: device matrix design, interruption and network testing, permissions, store checks and a 25-item checklist, written for current platforms. For the researcher, the recommended reading page lists the standards, books and communities that replace a defunct trade magazine.

The four domains on issue 28 are few, and each is a different kind of link. The mobile testing book's anchor, 'Testing Experience Issue 28, 2014', is a bibliographic reference: it names the publication and the issue the way a citation does, which no blog link in the run does. The research laboratory's anchor, 'View Original Article', is the fixed label its publication database attaches to an external link, so the anchor tells us the database's convention rather than the article's title. The two tester blogs use the magazine's name. There is one file name only, issues/testingexperience28_12_14.pdf, with no root copy and no campaign-tagged shape, because the newsletter tracking stopped after 2013. The homepage anchors from three further German research institutions ('Download fulltext Publisher: (free access after registration)') belong to the magazine as a whole and are not counted against this issue.

A reader who followed the book's reference wanted what the book cited the issue for: practical mobile testing. The mobile app testing guide is the current answer. 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 the 25-item checklist cover the rest. For the researcher who followed the laboratory's link, the recommended reading page lists the standards and communities that have taken the trade magazine's place.

Mobile testing practice in December 2014 and in 2026 differ in what a device matrix contains and in what the security expectations are. In 2014 the matrix was still built by extension from desktop practice: a few phones and tablets across the two dominant operating systems, chosen by what the team owned, with emulators considered adequate for most cases. 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 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.