Is your team building Windows 8 Modern App for customers? As part of QA team let me assure you it’s a good  thing to be in that project! But we ready to get exposed to new things to test, its lot of interesting stuff for QA community to learn and quickly come to terms of changing software trends.

Testing a Windows 8 Modern Applications is interesting and happening space. Having tested couple of these applications made me write this post to share some of the things which are different and need more attention than normal testing approach.

As much as tester is required to understand the intended functionality of the Win8 apps, they need to understand Win 8 Modern App principles themselves thoroughly to really test a true Win 8 app than just any HTML5/XAML application.

Watch here about Windows 8 Modern Application guidelines, you will find many bugs by just validating against these guidelines during tests.

Testing data in your application would be specific to requirements, however some of the important things to consider during different phases of development are listed below in tabular format. This list focuses on QA tasks which are important or different than conventional application testing.

  QA Tasks
Requirements Ask do we really need Win 8 Modern App? 
  Why not other solutions? 
  Who is the Customer base ? Do they have or will have Windows 8 in future?
  Influence the requirements which are really appropriate to show in a Windows 8 App
  Get Performance (concurrent/simultaneous) requirements
  Security requirements, who can access, how to download/Install
and data related security
  User Experience Requirements
   
Design/Code Go through material available online to see if design is in right path?
  Why HTML5 or XAML as solution technology for Windows 8 Application?
  UX design is most critical to review
  Validate UX and Design against Modern app principles
  Plan for Automation early, Microsoft Test Manager(MTM)  2012 part of
Visual Studio 2012 offers in built automation functionality
  Plan for White Box testing, structure based testing and Code Coverage
for your testing aka Test Coverage against Code
   
System Testing Other than normal things which are part of test strategy below are some important things or
different things which comes into equation when testing a Windows 8 App
  MTLM for exploratory testing for modern apps
  Test in Landscape, Portrait mode
  Performance Testing: Visual Studio Load Tests with Unit Tests added to them are useful 
  Windows8 Application Tool Kit is good tool to run against your app
  Touch and Click, test for both operations
  Application Bar
  Navigation Bar
  Resolutions supported
  How does App works when projecting to a monitor or screen?
  Logging for all errors/crashes are very important, as Operating System itself is evolving,
so log every Crash you see with detailed logs to track
  Will App work like Outlook meaning can it sync from different computers?
  Live Tile / Notifications
  Uninstall/Install
  Immersive Content
  Snap feature
  Different Hardware like desktop, Slates, Tablets, Surface, Monitor mode,
extended display, 32 bit/64 bit
  Tile size, all options you get when right click app tile
  Various Charms and gestures supported
  Keyboard support, can user do everything in application without Touch as well
  Application Permissions like sharing, document library etc..

Hope this would help QA community to test Windows 8 Modern Apps better and delight customers!

Happy New Year and Wish you happy reading.

-Naren

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