Testing the Social Mobile Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Apps

SMAC stands for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud, and today’s enterprise business innovations are being truly driven by it. SMAC creates an ecosystem that allows social media management activities to better reach and interact with customers. Mobile technologies have changed the way people communicate and interact with each other. The analytics part of SMAC allows businesses to deeply analyse and understand customer behaviour and their response patterns better, so as to take corrective actions for improving the relationship. Cloud computing provides a new way to access technology anywhere, anytime making possible for businesses and customers to access the data in these ever changing erratic markets.

Need for the Evolution of SMAC Concept

Business eco-system changes are inevitable; the IT industry has been witnessing new innovations which have changed the way IT services are being delivered to the enterprise users. This may likely be called as the Next generation of corporate makeover shift through a new responsive IT architecture composed of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud technologies.

In view of the value that each area adds to the business, their combination becomes more viable and potent as it also promises minimal overhead costs. Thus today’s enterprises are strategically deploying the SMAC Stack across key business processes to combine the best of virtual and physical retail shopping experiences. Moreover, most enterprises wish to take a phased approach to migrate their businesses completely to the SMAC platforms, keeping budgets and their current state of business in view.

Mobile Revolution

In all Industries across the business landscape, the SMAC concept has changed traditional age old structure of value chains and spawning newness and landing in virtualized business models. The power of this technology platform is in treating it as a stack as its components have a multiplying effect when they work in combination. Now a customer’s mobile device can signal & store while they’re shopping and thus customers can compare products, get information, and redeem targeted offers from the Cloud while in store. They can then share the offers to their friends through the Social platforms. The mobile technologies have changed the way people communicate, shop and work. Mobile devices have enhanced customer’s reach to information from various sources. Mobile applications will help businesses reach these customers and interact with them at a more personal level.

Benefits of SMAC Technology

• Delivers agility, scalability that are unmatched by the capabilities of traditional IT offerings
• Reaches larger customer segments through social media channels
• Allows context driven marketing initiatives based on user behaviors
• Gain significant insights into the customer minds through mobile apps
• Lowers total cost of technology ownership
• Tracks opinions & preferences through analytics
• Helps to identify new market segments

Gartner Analysis on Connected Devices Expansion Dimensions across the Globe

According to one of the Gartner Analysis Reports, it is stated that by 2020, nearly 30 billion connected devices with unique IP addresses will exist. This list includes smartphones, tablets, connected televisions and wearable devices that are all responsible to generate data. With this expansion spree all around, the concept of SMAC concept is bound to dominate the scenario all around.

SMAC Testing – An Outlook

With the advent and emergence of social platforms, mobile, analytics, and cloud, the outlook towards testing this congruence of four objectives has become very positive and is leading to the emergence of a comprehensive testing fold. Testing Service providers consider that these four technologies have to be implemented in a stack to be successful, and as a result have crafted a new business centric strategic testing approach to achieve it. The industry is striving to develop better testing algorithms to process the right and relevant SMAC data faster. The aspects of social concepts are also driving the way software is being built at every phase of development, testing and further maintenance.

The common testing techniques for all the four ranges include Security, Functional, Performance and Usability testing.

Below are listed a set of testing methods for SMAC approach:

Social Networking Testing Range:

• Social coding
• Data analysis
• Demand and delivering tests
• Google Analytics

Mobile Testing Range:

• Device Testing, Memory Leakage Test
• Interrupt Test, Usability Test
• Installation Test, Carrier Validation Test
• Platform Certification Test, Protocol Validation Test
• Geo-Fence Test, Field Test
• Functionality Test, Compatibility Test
• Test Automation, Performance Test
• Security Test, Browser performance testing

Test Analytics usually consists of Failover mechanisms while Cloud Testing includes Compatibility testing, Latency testing, Browser performance testing, Latency testing, Capacity testing, Fail-over testing, Scalability testing, and so on.

Adding to the mix continuous delivery and lean processes, it then becomes really important to automate most pieces such as data generation, data validation, security among others to achieve a quicker time to market.

It is obvious, therefore, that integrated testing techniques do not simply mean aggregation of various testing technologies together. In fact, a strategic and comprehensive testing approach must be adopted so that the end-to-end Platform delivers higher benefits than that derived from testing Social-Mobile-Analytics-Cloud elements independently.

Cigniti has a decade of expertise in enabling independent testing services, and is ahead of the curve in imbibing new technologies. It has developed new frameworks to deliver comprehensive and the best fir testing approach for the clients. Cigniti uses a common testing method for functionalities like security common across mobile and social media, and follows a similar approach for performance testing.