Welcome to this month’s edition of our regular software development news digest. We try to cover a few recent stories of interest to both software engineers and QA professionals. Hopefully, the insights within help foster some ideas to help your own team’s application development efforts.
If you are interested in checking out last month’s digest, simply click on the following link.
Given that hardware – the iPhone, iPad, and even the new HomePod smart speaker – drives Apple’s enormous revenue, sometimes we forget they remain one of the largest software development companies in the world. Recently, Cupertino suffered a few highly publicized bugs in its iOS mobile operating system. Perhaps the company approaches the SDLC in a too “agile” fashion?
As such, Apple plans on slowing down the rate in which it releases iOS and macOS updates. The company hopes to increase its focus on stability and bug fixes as opposed to trying to fit a ton of new features into every release. News about Apple’s shifting development cycle appeared this month in ExtremeTech among other sources.
Major iOS version releases are now expected to take place every other year instead of on an annual basis. Given that the older iPhone battery slowdown “bug” attracted interest from the U.S. Government, it is a smart move for Apple to take a more measured approach to OS releases. It will be interesting to see how well they keep to a more deliberate schedule in a competitive computing industry.
If you want to read more on this topic, check out former Microsoft engineer Steven Sinofsky’s blog entry. Considering Sinofsky’s role in leading Windows OS and Microsoft Office development, his insights are worth your time.
Giving software engineers the ability to test their code in an automated fashion remains a key part of any Agile or DevOps implementation. A Boston-based startup led by former Stackdriver principals is building an automated testing tool suitable for continuous delivery scenarios. Their nascent product shows promise as evidenced by the $10 million in venture capital awarded to their firm, named Mabl.
News about Mabl’s venture capital success appeared this week in Xconomy. The fact that Mabl’s chiefs, Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri, sold Stackdriver – a Cloud management software company – to Google in 2014 likely helped attract funding for their new venture. In an era where continuous deployment is the Holy Grail for many companies, automated testing is vital.
At the core of Mabl’s tool is a service that operates like a virtual QA engineer. Dan Belcher described the approach of Mabl. “Think of Mabl as an extension to your QA team, like you hired a new QA person. Just as you’d train the person about your app, you train Mabl, and expect [it] to write new tests, new test cases, run tests automatically, and find defects based on an understanding of how the application works,” said Belcher.
The tool leverages machine learning routines to improve its ability to find bugs and even predict their existence. It integrates with Slack as well as other email and messaging tools. If Mabl looks like something your development team needs, explore the information on the company’s website.
That’s it for this edition of the Betica Blog News Digest. As always, thanks for reading!
Posted on February 23, 2018 | Categories Quality Assurance, Software Development | Tags apple, Automation, development, devnews, february, iphone, mabl, Quality Assurance