Overview
As of 2010, more than a quarter of the world’s population will be connected to the internet. Media companies’ focus is shifting towards the web and, increasingly, mobile platforms. As technology has changed, so has content. Video is becoming a key channel for organizations to deliver information. Cross-platform media players and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is moving television online.
And advertising networks have sprung up to take advantage of lucrative possibilities the web affords. The rise of social gaming has altered the landscape further. Millions of users log onto sites like Facebook daily to play games and other applications. Every day, thousands of users download new games onto their smartphones. The games market has become a highly profitable industry. Of course, all this is impossible without the hard work of testers and quality assurance teams who ensure the end user experience is perfect.
The Challenge
Media companies operate in a very competitive environment, where fast time to market and high quality products are critical to success. A lot of this responsibility falls to quality assurance teams who have to conduct an incredibly diverse range of testing tasks every day. Just some of these include:
- Testing advertisements for consistency across web browsers and mobile devices
- Conducting comprehensive functional testing of media players, to ensure playback is adequate across all platforms
- Testing media codecs to ensure compatibility with wmv, mpeg, flash content (among others)
- Thoroughly testing browser games built with HTML5, Flash/Flex and Silverlight,
- Testing browser games to ensure cross-browser / cross-platform compatibility, and regression testing to prepare for frequent OS updates
- Scheduling regression testing to ensure continuous quality
- Thorough mobile testing and browser testing to ensure video players work on different browsers, mobile devices and IPTV platforms.
- Adoption of black-box testing approach in agile test environments
Traditional testing tools are insufficient for such a diverse range of tasks, particularly with the rise of new technologies such as web 2.0 and mobile applications. Ideally, businesses need to complement their quality assurance cycles with an automated test tool such as eggPlant.
The Solution
eggPlant is a graphical user interface (GUI) test tool that enables organizations to run multiple test cycles, including data-driven testing, load testing and regression testing simultaneously. eggPlant is perfect for the media industry because it can automate application and GUI testing across multiple browsers, mobile devices and platforms using the same scripts. As a result, the cost of testing and quality assurance is greatly reduced and it’s much faster to get products to market.
The eggPlant test tool uses TestPlant’s leading-class image recognition technology to compare multiple screens and report the test results in a single table. Quality assurance professionals are able to analyze results and instantly identify potential problems in the application, making their jobs much easier. eggPlant is a platform agnostic test tool, it can be used to test applications across multiple platforms. This makes it perfect for media companies,game developers and advertising networks. Many businesses that operate in this space are already seeing the benefits of the test automation with eggplant as a test tool – for example, Mind Candy one of the world’s leading developers of social multi-player games like Moshi Monsters use eggPlant for their gaming application testing.
Example
Click the video to see a flash game being tested with eggPlant. 
