Live from Evolve: The New, Mobile-Optimized Development Lifecycle

In recent years, pressure on product development teams to iterate more quickly and deliver more frequently has increased dramatically. The advent of continuous integration, test automation, and a vigorous focus on DevOps efficiency has helped many organizations meet these rising demands. But while web applications have continued a steady march toward continuous delivery, mobile has been bogged down by the unique challenges of the ecosystem and a weak toolchain. Xamarin and Microsoft are excited to share today just a few of the ways we’re modernizing mobile DevOps and making it easier than ever to deliver value faster while maintaining a high quality experience.

Automate Faster with Xamarin Test Recorder

Delivering a high-quality mobile experience can be complex and challenging, especially for robust apps that need to run flawlessly on hundreds of device configurations. Test automation gives teams the confidence to go fast and know they’re not breaking things, but test automation itself can prove challenging and is often sacrificed when time is short or personnel is sparse. That’s why we recently announced the preview release of Xamarin Test Recorder. Test Recorder allows you to generate automated test scripts by launching your app on a device or simulator and interacting with it as your users would. You can lift the script as-is or modify any of the recorded values before exporting your test authored in Xamarin.UITest.

As part of our continuing mission to remove friction and provide a delightful developer experience, we’re excited to announce that Xamarin Test Recorder is now available as a Visual Studio plugin. Open your project, launch your app, and create test scripts in real-time simply by interacting with your app on a device or simulator.  

  Test Recorder’s ease of use expands your team’s capacity to fight the good fight for full test coverage. Further adding to its value, anyone from manual exploratory testers to business persons can produce automated acceptance tests. When testing is this simple, there’s no excuse for a feature to go uncovered.

Cut Debug Times with Test Cloud Live

While automated tests are a tremendously powerful tool for defending the integrity of an app, it’s sometimes necessary to reproduce a test failure manually and examine the state of the app and device more closely to understand the root cause and arrive at a fix. Today we unveiled Test Cloud Live to bring the power of real-time debugging on hundreds of device configurations to every developer workstation. Test Cloud Live allows users to manipulate a real device from within the browser, providing the extra level of detail sometimes needed to debug a complex issue. We’ll gradually be inviting users to try the product throughout the rest of the year; those interested in trying Test Cloud Live can sign up for updates here.

Deliver, Monitor, Iterate

Beta testing your apps provides an additive layer of valuable feedback, helping you identify device-specific edge cases and user paths your automated tests may have missed. This vital knowledge gives teams the opportunity to address issues before they hit the core audience. HockeyApp has continued to provide a best-in-class beta distribution since joining the team at Microsoft. When we announced that Xamarin Insights would join the HockeyApp team, we promised we would bring with us the features our customers love. In the short time since the announcement, we have already begun delivering on that promise by bringing first-class Xamarin C# expectations to HockeyApp.

Today we showcased a beautifully redesigned HockeyApp crash group page highlighting important metrics and featuring the parsed stack traces that so many users had come to love in Insights.

Better Together

Xamarin and Microsoft have strong histories of delivering products and services that developers love. We are thrilled today to share with you the beginning of a new chapter in mobile which we’ll write together. Xamarin, Microsoft, and you—our amazing customers.