Testing Beacon based Mobile Applications

Read about mobile application security testing with MobSF here: Mobile Application Penetration Testing with MobSF

What are Beacons?

Beacons are a small transmitter that Emits Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).It transmits a signal which can be used to communicate with other devices. It works with Bluetooth activated devices and they should be within the range.

Types of Beacon:

1. Eddystone:-It is a BLE devices developed by Google to communicate with smartphone, Tablets, and other IoT based devices

2. iBeacon:-It is a BLE device developed by Apple to communicate with smartphone, Tablets and other IOT based devices

How does beacon work’s with other Devices and IoT

Eddystone used the following to communicate:-

1. Eddystone-UID: An opaque unique ID.

2. Eddystone-URL: A compressed URL that, once parsed and decompressed, is directly usable by the client.

3. Eddystone-TLM: A block of telemetry information containing beacon status and runtime values.

iBeacon uses the following to communicate:-

1. UUID: B9407F30-F5F8-466E-AFF9-25556B57FE6D it is a Unique Identifier

2. Major ID: 1

3. Minor ID: 2 

Use case of Beacon based application

Suppose you are a customer of one of the reputed 5 Hotel star hotel.

 How you will feel when someone greets you at the reception with your name without asking your name on arrival.

 You are being virtually assisted in your room without an attendant.

 You are near a Bar and get a notification to visit there with a 25% discount especially for you

 You are not sure which is the nearest pool to go for but get a prompt reply from the admin team about it

To provide all these services we can use Beacons based applications on Android and iOS devices.

Suppose we have been provided with the application by developers we need to take care of the following Test cases:

1. The application should work with all supported devices

2.Apk and.Ipa file should successfully be installed on every device

3. Verify that when the customer enters within the hotel range then Front desk should get a message With the name and estimated time of arrival

4. When the customer opens the application to see in house map of the hotel he should clearly see it in order to route to the room

5. When the customer is near a Pub or Bar he should get notified about the deal of 25% of especially for him.

6. When the customer searches for the nearest swimming pool he should be routed to the correct area

7. Verify that if customer moves out of the BLE range then he should not be able to use the service since he is not in range

8. Verify the minimum distance is correct when we are in the hotel area I.e. the distance supported by beacon

9. The data shown by the iOS and Android devices should be accurate.

10. Does it show the relevant result on low data I.e 2g and 3g

11. Verify if we use the same Application in a different branch of the hotel then it should not work

Beacons drain the battery of the device fast and some time is not too accurate 

Giving Estimation using Story Point

What is Estimation in Agile:-

How much time/effort is going to be taken to do a particular task or requirement Viz User Stories is known as Estimations.

Estimation is a very tricky task.A wrong estimated User Story can defeat the purpose of delivering any working project.

Who all are involved in estimation:-

Different stakeholders such as Product Owner, Developers, QA, UI/UX designer, and other higher management can estimate their effort in sprint planning once the backlog has been prioritized by the Product Owner requirement/story has been groomed.

Estimation Difference within Member’s, Why??

We cannot deny the fact that every member will have different estimations.

This is because every member is taking their individual effort recounting their past experiences or by self instinct that how much time they will take to do that task.

Something may take time for the developer to implement but the same thing can be easy to test for Testers. The same goes for UI/UX designers.

How to estimate a user story from a QA perspective??

Let’s say we have any user story like sorting the price of flights and the Acceptance Criteria as below:-

As a traveler, I can sort flight having price from low currency to high currency.

Acceptance Criteria

i. The flight search should be in ascending order

ii. When no flight available display the message “Please search using different combination”

iii. If two flights are having the same price search then display the flight in alphabetic order

Estimating the above story using story points:-

When we are estimating any story using story points we are using a judgmental approach and define the complexity of the story rather than manual effort in days.

The judgmental effort are done using some progression formula like Fibonacci-like format: 0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100.

We can use https://www.planningpoker.com/ to estimates our user story which is interactive and easy. Let us suppose the team after the meeting came to the conclusion that the above story is of 5 Story points

Now to estimate the above story as a QA I would take into consideration the following point.

1) As per acceptance criteria, I will write the test case and upload it on Test Management Tool “1 Hour”.

2) To test the whole according to AC I will take another one “1 Hour”.

3) To test on 4 different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, IE 10, and Safari “15 Minutes” each which counts 15*4= 1 Hour.

4) If the change is reflected on webview of Android and iOS application then “15 Minutes” to install the build on each OS and “15 Minutes” each to verify the functionality on each OS. The time will increase if the devices list will increase. Therefor 15 Minutes*4= 1 Hour

5) Now adding 1 Hour to the total estimated task.

There fore total time taken is 1H+1H+1H+1H+1H=5Hours