End-user app testing and the holiday season

I am writing this blog post as I wait for my flight back home at the Dubai International airport. I am travelling back home from a short holiday to my parents place and this post is going to be about a little something about end-user app testing that I discovered during my holiday.

I grew up in a place with little or no internet connectivity and hence when I was working on my app, My Day To-Do, I made sure that the app  works offline i.e. it doesn’t require an internet connection to at least use all it’s core features. During development I tested this extensively by switching off Wi-Fi, turning the mobile data off and testing the app’s core functionality. All that worked as expected and I had made sure I released an app that would work offline, however recently I realised that there was one more test that I had to do which I didn’t. Next time, a similar use case will be a part of my test plan.

During my recent trip to my parents place, I was working on one of my app updates and I was testing some basic app features on a very slow internet connection speed, when I realised that the app showed some very odd behaviour. It was difficult to pin-point the exact issue but the settings in My Day To-Do wouldn’t often load properly, especially the part of speech selection. At times the app would crash or I would just have to quit and restart the app to make the problem go away. It wasn’t very consistent and since I do not know how to re-produce the issue, it’s really difficult if not possible for me to diagnose and fix this issue. If anyone reading this post, has had a similar issue then feel free to leave a comment on how did you go about diagnosing or solving this issue? So that’s where I am at, I know of an existence of a problem but do not know exactly what it is. I made sure the app works offline but I am not sure how it works with slow internet connection speeds (0.5 mbps or so).

Last year, I released the Lite version in time for the holiday season and this time I have made the Pro version free for a limited time, i.e. free from 23rd Dec to 1st of Jan 2017. If you haven’t given the Pro version a try, then please download it and if possible let me know what you think.

In case I do not write another blog post before the end of the year, Happy Holidays. A merry Christmas and a happy new year to all of you.