The State of Mobile Application Quality with Tricentis’ Mav Turner

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

My next guest is my friend Mav Turner. If you've been watching Textron tv, you've seen Mav on here a few times. Mav is the chief product at strategy officer at Tricentis.

Good partner of ours here at Techstrong, as well as just the wealth. They're the worldwide leader in continuous testing. Right.

Um, hey, Mav, welcome back to Techstrong tv. It's great to see you. I hope all's well, Everything's great.

Thanks for having me, Alan. Uh, always fun to talk with you and your audience here about, uh, what's going on in the world of quality engineering. And, uh, again, for those of you who may not know Tricentis, uh, as, as Alan, uh, graciously introduced us, uh, the worldwide leader in continuous automation, uh, in addition to automation, a lot of folks are, are using us, test management, performance engineering.

Uh, we have quite a broad portfolio, but if you're thinking about how do I deliver quality with software, uh, Tricentis probably has something for, for you there. Absolutely. com, of course is the website.

Um, and you can go check it out and, and that, that's a, you know, ma I noticed, I, I'm at a date, you call it worldwide continuous automation, not just testing, Right? Yeah. We, we, we've really expanded beyond just the kind of functional testing concept, right?

If you go back to our founding, that's what most people know us of, right? I'm doing testing, I'm trying to move from manual testing to continuous testing, that we've been really big in that for a long time. When we think about the quality engineering process and we think about what needs to happen to deliver high quality software, that's where we get into how do I think about test management?

How do I think about performance engineering? And to segue into some of our conversation here, you know, as mobile becomes more and more important, how do we make sure we have coverage of all the technologies in the enterprise and in your application environment to ensure success? And so that's the continuous evolution for tricentis here.

Excellent. Glad I caught that. All right.

Mav, recently, Tricentis came out with their state of mobile application quality report for 2024. First of all, it, that's a mouthful. What exactly is the report on?

Yeah, so when we think about what we need to do to help our customers, obviously we're talking with them all the time, or we're talking with non-customers, right? We're trying to understand where there are the challenges and how can we best apply our resources, our technology, uh, to help, right? And, uh, so in addition to all of our one-on-one conversations with customers, we like to do industry surveys to help inform that strategy.

And so to your your point about the long title here, um, we just wanted to understand from a mobile perspective, um, where everybody was, where do we think, uh, mobile quality is? What do we think the gaps are? Where do we need to focus?

Um, and, and get that kind of different perspective of, of research. So, uh, yeah, we fielded this report, um, globally to understand. 'cause sometimes you'll get interesting data from different parts of the world.

Um, but just to understand, yeah, what's the state of mobile application development and mobile quality? Okay. And is this report based upon like survey data or interviews in-depth interviews, customer data somehow, or, you know, some other proprietary Yeah, all of the above, above Global survey, primarily survey.

Um, so the mm-hmm, the survey's informed by the deep 1 0 1 conversations we have with our customers all the time. And so that allows us to kind of frame out the questions we want to go deeper and more, more broadly. Um, so usually when you think about research methodologies, you think about, you know, how can a 1 0 1 qual qualitative conversation, uh, inform and drive a more broad scale quantitative analysis of the market, which then actually feeds back into our fall, our, our, you know, uh, future, uh, qualitative research with, with customers.

And so it's a continuous loop. It never, it never really ends, uh, which, if you're doing it right, uh, but yeah, this was a, a, uh, global market survey that, that we sent out a bunch of questions on to understand, you know, a couple of areas again, where everybody is today. Um, you know, from a, you know, what are they doing?

What do they think the impact of, of quality is in the mobile experience specifically? Uh, we think about, um, how AI is impacting, uh, their development processes and where are they using it, uh, what their, do they think it's good or bad? Um, why, why is it important, right?

Is is it really important, it, should it be a priority or not? What, what, what do the, the, the people think when we are, we're doing these mar market surveys, and then what's the future? Where are we going with, with, with quality?

How do people think about their strategies and their roadmaps and, and how it impacts their, their business growth? Excellent. Very cool.

You know, did, do you have a sense in, in terms of the survey size of the audience that responded here? Yeah, it was over a thousand people. Uh, like I said, global survey.

So we have hundreds of people from the us, from Germany, um, um, and, and Asia Pacific and Singapore. Um, lots of markets that we wanted to make sure to hit. Um, you know, the, the interesting thing I'll say from, from the size of the, the thousands of developers and IT professionals that responded was, um, that, that most everybody's kind of struggling with a lot of the same things.

And, and, uh, you know, there, there wasn't one pocket where, you know, um, yeah, any one country kind of stood out. Um, the one area I will, I will kind of peel back on that global topic is around the, um, sentiment around ai. And I'll tell you, I was somewhat surprised by this, and I think it's a, this may end up being a whole top track on this one topic, but, um, when we look at AI in the sentiment and we split that out by country, um, the most positive sentiment was out of Germany about the impact of positive impact of ai, um, in the context of mobile quality.

And the reason I'm surprised by that, I'm curious, Alan, if you have any reactions to that yourself, was, um, generally we see more skepticism from that market, right? More, more concerns, uh, particularly around data privacy and, and the risk of ai. But, but when I, when I've talked with a lot of our customers in that market, um, while they still want to apply this rigor to the adoption of ai, they believe and want to be leaders in the market when it comes to leveraging AI and see this as a huge opportunity, and not just in, in Germany and, and, and other European countries as well.

Um, so they don't wanna feel like they get left behind here, right? So they're very, very, uh, forward adopting here. Um, actually the US was, um, had had the least positive, I don't wanna say it was negative, but about 81% of people in Germany had a positive sentiment on the impact of, of AI and quality, whereas in the US it's only 69%.

So there was a pretty big distinction there. Um, right behind Germany was Singapore, um, and then the UK and the US were kind of notably, uh, further behind. So I don't know your your, your reaction to, to some of those, those points, but I thought it was interesting.

Um, I'm, let me say, I'm not surprised on, on that last one, right? I, I, you know, it was interesting. I recently came, I was out in Paris for CubeCon, and then from there we went over to Sicily and Rome and some other places.

And I, I travel to Europe a bunch and I'd go to Yeah, therapist. Yeah, someone's got to do it. Uh, yeah, We appreciate you doing it.

Yeah. And then, yeah, I've been, I usually go to Singapore like once a year as well, and in that area of the worldpac, yeah, AsiaPac, you know, I, I think it reflects their usage. I think it reflects their values, I think it reflects their goals.

Um, that being said, for whatever reason, you'll see crazy innovation in the US and, and the UK kind of does mirror us a lot more than it mirrors, let's say Germany. Right? Agreed.

Um, so I, I'm not saying that we're laggards or that we care less or we're, you know, but are we less optimistic or do we not even think about that? Just full speed ahead and down the torpedoes That's ready. There is some of that too, right?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. You know, we'll, we'll, we'll think about it later.

So what if we dive in the pool and find out at bottom, there's no water in there, right? It's all good. Yeah.

We were the first one to dive in. Um, it's funny. Hey, you know, I do wanna mention though, before we jump more into the report, anybody who wants to go grab the report themselves, it it, I will put this, we'll try to put this in the, uh, notes on the, uh, video as well.

com/resources/mobile-application-quality-report. And you can get it from there. As I said, we'll do, we will try to put that in, in the notes for today's interview.

So, Mav, what were some of the other, like, big takeaways here? Yeah, and kind of moving out of the, the AI question. 'cause again, that's, that's, you know, usually a, uh, you know, uh, evergreen topic.

Everybody wants to know about that, but there's a lot of other good, good nuggets, uh, we found out here as well. Um, we, another interesting thing that I got out of this report that, you know, you get a lot of anecdotal stories from customers, uh, but to do a survey at scale and you get responses that, um, when we talk about revenue impact and business impact of low quality, 'cause this is something that I think a lot of, if you go down to the development teams and the application teams, they usually get a little bit too far from, and if, and if they can kind of figure out how to tell that, that story about how their work impacts the bottom line, it really makes a more impactful story for what they're doing and why they're doing it and how many resources they need. But we saw that of over 90% of the respondents se estimated that this poor quality experience cost their business up to two and a half million dollars in revenue.

And so being able to quantify why it matters, why taking the time, um, why having the proper environment, the tooling, the people, the training to be successful can actually matter to the business. And so I was, I was interested to see that very, you know, kind of clustering of responses around, around that number. So obviously some people said higher, some people said lower, but, uh, but it was a pretty strong signal there about real business impact being felt, uh, around for quality.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What else?

Um, and, and I think that's really, you know, paired well with the fact that, you know, only a quarter basically said that their current strategy exceeded their expectations. So you say, you know, we know we're not doing well, we know it's having an impact. Okay, so now what do we do next?

Right? And so hopefully some of the things we talked about here, and if you go get the report that you just mentioned, people can start to figure out how can I make sure that this is elevated to the right priority level of business? Because the benefits are great, right?

Um, if, if, if, if, if mobile is a key part of your business, um, then ensuring high quality by understanding the processes that you need to deliver that quality, having the right tooling, um, having the right just quality mindset overall. Um, if they can move to more automated solutions versus, look, we, we all do what we can. I talk to some customers that say, our testing is, we deploy it to our internal employees and they use it before we deploy it out to the field.

And, you know, that's some, some companies that's what they do. But as you move from that manual testing, ad hoc testing to a more automated testing that allows that human resource resource to really spend time doing things that, that only humans can really do with the exploratory testing. And, and that, that kind of same theme that Tricentis has been repeating again and again around, um, automation is, is still very critical.

And we find that mobile applications are much less mature, uh, and mobile application development teams much less mature in an automation perspective than, um, web or, or desktop based, um, application development teams. Absolutely. Very cool stuff.

Um, let's talk about mobile applications versus, you wanna call 'em non-mobile applications or traditional, you know, there was a time map, I I'm gonna say seven, eight years ago where, I mean, clearly there was this fork in the road between mobile application development versus application development. A lot of, there were a lot of companies that focus solely on mobile app development, mobile app security, mobile app, this mobile app that it's my, and this is more of a gut feeling. I don't have kind of subjective numbers or objective numbers to to, to show to you.

Um, but it, there seems to be more of a, a coming together, right? That mobile is not just a totally different animal than it was years ago. I wonder if that somehow is reflected in here or maybe just from your own, you know, experience.

What do you think? Couple of things there, right? If you, if you go back to, and, and I'll use iPhone, obviously Android has its own similar story, but slightly different.

Um, you know, the original launch of the iPhone and you know, weren't gonna have third parties being able to build custom apps. Everything was just gonna be developed by Apple. And then opening up of that app ecosystem, and I think around the same timeframe that you're talking about where you see this explosion of application developments, everybody's getting into it.

Um, they're building native apps and, and then, and then Android, I mean, has a massive market, right? Much larger than than Apple. And then you see, okay, now I have to figure out what, where my customers are, what devices and what, what, what I've seen is in the last couple years that we've really invested more in mobile, um, is really the, you know, react native, NA native, these hybrid applications that have web and some native components.

Teams trying to, um, kind of build once, deploy twice, right? Instead of having to have, here's our, you know, iOS development team and here's our Android development team, how can we, you know, use frameworks like Flutter to build an application, um, effectively and reach these audiences? And, and not to get too much into the weeds, but it really comes into an overall well architected solution.

When you think about the backend, you think about the customer's experience, if you can abstract the business logic from the presentation layer, effectively, you can go really fast into building front ends, um, and the web, web UI or, or even a desktop app, maybe you have a, you know, a desktop apps you wanna run, um, and a mobile app. But if they're all hitting the same backend resources efficiently, um, then you really maximize your market capture. And, and I think through a lot of these frameworks and a lot of the, it's much easier to be an application mobile application developer today than it was 10 years ago, for sure, seven years ago.

Um, but there's still a lot of challenges. And, and I think what we're, what I'm seeing anyways is, um, with, with some of the advances in maturing on the development side, you naturally see more maturity on the testing and quality side that comes around that as well, right? But, but usually that is a little bit of a laggard compared to the development tool stack, which is iterating very quickly, um, the frameworks everybody's using.

And so when I think about it, I think, or when, when I see what, what's happening with our customers, um, I expected a lot of more just native development teams when we, a couple years ago when we kinda really started to go deep. And what we've need mostly seen is the use of these frameworks, um, to actually build, um, build once and then kind of take advantage of these hybrid apps, which is much more prevalent than I, than I first suspected a couple of years ago. Absolutely.

Hey, Mav, we're about out of time. Actually, we're over time. I apologize.

We got kinda waylaid there, but, um, look, it was interesting stuff again that this is the t Tricentis State of Mobile application quality report for 2024. com/resources/mobile-application-quality-report map. Thank you so much.

Hope to see you back here soon on Text Drug tv. Say hello to all our friends at t Tricentis. Will do.

Thanks for having me, Alan. All righty. This Alan Hummel, we're gonna be back here on Tech Drunk TV with even more news and information in just a second.

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