Universal compatibility in today’s digital world is vital for web and mobile applications to ensure seamless functionality across multiple devices, browsers, and operating systems. With the global use of different mobile devices mobile application developers and engineers often face various challenges during deployments and version rollouts. To deliver the desired user experience, the essential part is to provide users with the convenience, speed, and novelty they expect, regardless of their preferred device or browser.
Therefore for a successful deployment, applications must run smoothly across multiple devices, and for this reason, a well-maintained device lab comes as an optimal and feasible solution. A device farm provides a dedicated device lab for those organizations that seek a more controlled testing environment. This on-premises solution allows organisations complete control over their testing infrastructure, which enables them to customise their testing processes as per their exact needs and security requirements.
Device farms provide practical alternatives and replicate real-world conditions to enable developers and testers to guarantee that their applications work seamlessly across various devices, browsers, and operating systems to ensure smooth rollouts and enhance end-user satisfaction.
This article provides an overview of the device farm for optimizing testing costs and overall performance. Additionally providing a brief knowledge of a device farm including its types and benefits.
What is a device farm?
A device farm is a testing environment for testers and QA to remotely test their websites’ performance and web and mobile applications on many real devices. A device farm maintains the hardware, software, and network configurations of the devices in a specified condition and offers a consistent and accurate testing environment. These device farms can either be hosted on a cloud or maintained in-house.
Usually creating an in-house device farm is challenging to develop as it comes with extra maintenance and high operational costs. A device farm is an important tool in a developer’s toolkit making the development process smooth, decreasing operational overhead, and improving user satisfaction. Also, it offers an effective and dependable platform for testing and optimizing applications across rapidly evolving device environments.
The main purpose of a device farm is to fulfil the requirements of mobile application testing which consists of Android testing and iOS testing. It allows testers to choose a device, upload their application, and start to operate on it instantly without spending extra money, which as a result reduces the need to purchase a bunch of devices. Device farms certainly resolve the most significant challenges of mobile app testing, In today’s world there are hardly any organizations that are not making use of it.
Benefits of using device farms for application testing
Instant access to broad devices: A device farm provides instant access to a comprehensive of devices which includes smartphones, tablets, and various operating systems. This helps to eliminate the necessity to physically procure and maintain a large inventory of devices.
Cross-browser compatibility: A device farm helps provide access to various browser types and versions, both recent and legacy, for comprehensive compatibility.
Concurrent testing: It eliminates the necessity for testers to wait for physical devices to be available. Multiple testers can access devices on the farm concurrently, which helps in making the testing process efficient and uninterrupted.
Integrated with bug-tracking tools: Device farms are often integrated with continuous integration (CI) tools, which helps in automated testing and deployment. This ensures that code changes are thoroughly tested on a wide range of devices and helps streamline the development process.
Debug issues quickly: A quick debug issue indicates that issues can be fixed before they become serious concerns, which helps reduce time and expenses in the long run.
Identify compatibility issues: Testing on device farms provides access to a large number of real devices, which can cover various models and operating system versions. This will ensure that the application is tested on various devices, which helps identify compatibility issues and ensure that the application smoothly works across all devices.
Cost-effective solution: The time and money involved in testing can be saved by using device farms. Holding a large number of devices is a bit costly and takes time to maintain. So, there is no need to purchase and maintain multiple devices in device farms. Furthermore, device farms deliver a cost-effective testing technique to boost the return on the investment for every device that they have invested in.
Flexibility: Based on testing requirements, device farms have the flexibility to scale up or down. Depending on the requirements of the project testers can quickly add or remove devices from the farm.
Faster testing: Testers can run parallel tests on device farms, which reduces the overall testing time. This ensures to speed up the testing process and allows developers to quickly release their applications.
Compatible with third-party tools: Sometimes testing teams require access to third-party tools to create tests for various mobile operating systems. Device farms support most of the third-party tools, which helps deliver the perfect testing experience.
Access to connect remotely: When the various devices can be accessed easily, testing teams have the higher opportunity to perform tests on whichever devices they want. This approach helps in improving productivity.
Using a device farm users can connect remotely to any device whenever they want to and wherever they are.
What does a device farm offer?
Device management: A large number of mobile devices are being managed in a device farm which provides access to various devices, operating system versions, and configurations. A device farm is responsible for handling the setup, configuration, and maintenance of the devices, this helps testers and developers to focus on testing.
Test automation framework: A device farm integrates with popular test automation tools like LambdaTest or Selenium, which allows testers to develop and execute automated tests on various devices.
Reporting and collaboration: Collaboration features in a device farm allow testers and developers to perform their work together, share project results, and communicate about issues. It also helps in providing detailed reporting which includes test results, screenshots and device logs.
Privacy and security: A device farm helps provide secure data transfer, secure data storage, and data isolation and also ensures the security and privacy of the data and applications being tested.
Billing and payments: A pricing model is being enabled in the device farm that allows users to pay for the usage of the devices on a timely basis, depending on the usage requirements.
Overall, device farms deliver scalable and cost-effective solutions for testing mobile applications. It also helps provide access to a large number of real devices, which reduces the necessity for buying and maintaining physical devices. Features like test automation, reporting, and coordination enhance the performance making the testing process more efficient and effective.
Types of Device Farms
Three major types of device farms are cloud-based, Hybrid and on-premise device farms, let’s overview the main features of all of them and how they empower automation testing.
Cloud-based: Cloud-based device farms are hosted by third-party providers, It provides access to various devices, including smartphones, tablets and desktops. Cloud-based device farms are ideal for organizations which require testing on multiple devices to test their applications on a variety of devices without having to invest in their hardware. It is highly scalable and flexible and can easily add or remove devices as needed. No upfront cost is required users can pay only for what they use.
LambdaTest is a device farm that provides access to a huge collection of real devices over the cloud. These devices include multiple brands, various models, and versions. LambdaTest often adds updated device versions to ensure testing on the latest hardware devices in time. This extensive device lab of LambdaTest helps testers ensure that their application works smoothly across all endpoints including mobile, tablet, and desktop devices that users can use.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test execution platform to run manual and automated tests at scale. It empowers testers to perform both real-time and automation testing of web and mobile applications by providing access to remote test lab of 3000 environments, real mobile devices, and browsers, helping in providing high-quality applications and delivering a high return on investment.
LambdaTest real device cloud offers multiple outstanding features that make it stand out from the competition, it includes, pre-built integrations with all major CI/CD tools, a Remote Test Lab to perform app testing and browser testing for instant and realistic checks for top-notch application quality, and easy integration with popular testing frameworks such as Selenium and Appium with the existing testing workflow.
On-premise device farms: On-premise device farms are hosted on an organization’s premises. It consists of a smaller number of devices than cloud-based farms, but these farms offer more control over the testing environment. Generally, it is also ideal for organisations that need to test on specific devices or operating systems. It delivers greater control over data and security and can be customized to meet specific needs. The on-premise device farm offers no ongoing costs for cloud access.
Hybrid device farms: Hybrid device farms are a combination of cloud-based and on-premise device farms. Hybrid farms typically leverage a cloud-based platform to manage the devices and run tests, supplemented by on-premise devices, a good choice for organizations but more cost-effective, and more flexible than on-premise device farms.
Role of device farms in overcoming testing challenges
The critical part of the application development life cycle is testing, but it comes with a bunch of challenges. Let us have an overview of how device farms can help overcome those challenges.
Device variability
Promising compatibility and performance across a various landscape of devices is more complex every day as technology is moving very fast. Developers and testers need to consider differing screen sizes, hardware capabilities, resolutions, and OS behaviours. A device farm encourages its testers to access a variety of emulators and actual devices.
Scalability
Building, maintaining, and scaling a large array of physical devices for testing can often be very expensive. To manage this, device farms come into a place where its features provide a cost-effective option by hosting a large number of devices on a cloud-based framework. Testing efforts can easily be scaled up or down as per necessity since there are no hardware costs involved.
Device connectivity
Device farms provide testers with the command to simulate different connectivity and network situations as during testing, problems with device connectivity can occur which can often compromise the validity of the testing results.
Following this provides an idea of real-world conditions in which the device operates. App’s behaviour can also be checked to see the battery consumption, requirement of network bandwidth, behaviour in case of low battery percentage or if the device turns off unexpectedly, interaction with other features of the device like GPS or Bluetooth, and performance.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the above benefits of using device farms represent why they are the best option for testing. Having access to various devices makes mobile testing cost-effective and more accurate. Though testers can test the app’s behaviour virtually using a simulation of the mobile device, the chances will be very high that some aspects might get overlooked, or bugs might be unearthed while testing on the physical device.
Device farms provide more developed techniques and access to real devices, which makes them a better comprehensive solution for mobile app testing. However, developers still need to write, manage, and update automated tests. A hybrid approach where combining manual testing with automation may work better In certain scenarios. Overall as part of a comprehensive testing strategy, choosing device farms is a valuable tool, complementing in-house testing environments and enabling continuous testing across an expanding matrix of devices and platforms.