Learning How To Test Mobile Device Applications (Part 3) - BlackBerry

In this HOWTO series, we've covered two popular mobile device platforms, webOS and Android, in these articles:

Learning How To Test Mobile Device Applications (Part 1) - Palm webOS
Learning How To Test Mobile Device Applications (Part 2) - Android

Today we'll look at BlackBerry. As we've stated in previous articles, our goal is learn enough from developing simple apps on each platform so that we have a better understanding of the platform as testers. And we want to accomplish this without having to buy each mobile device or any development software. Fortunately, developer offerings from RIM meet these requirements, albeit with less hipness than webOS and Android.

Learning How To Test Mobile Device Applications (Part 2) - Android

Last week we introduced this series on learning how to test mobile device applications based on the idea that developing a simple mobile app on each platform will help you understand how to test them (Learning How To Test Mobile Device Applications (Part 1) - Palm webOS). And we want to do this for free and without having to buy an actual device. That's worked for webOS from Palm and will work with this week's platform - Android.

And as we recommended in Part 1, testers should start by downloading and installing the SDK and building one of the included apps. For the Android platform, the steps for building your first app is explicitly laid out at Android Developer's SDK page. The instructions provided take you through the following steps:

Learning How To Test Mobile Device Applications (Part 1) - Palm webOS

I recently visited Palm and our friends there gave us a Palm webOS book - signed by the author Mitch Allen (VP, Software CTO at Palm)!  Very cool.  While reading this book I thought I would use this opportunity to start a HOWTO series on learning to test mobile device apps, and model it after the process we used in our labs - develop apps to learn how to test them. Basically, we took testers through the process of setting up a development environment, compiling a simple app and then installing and testing that app.

We'll start with Palm webOS and then cover the iPhone and Android platforms.  The place to start for any of these platforms is the software development toolkit, or SDK.  And in the case of webOS, as the book points out, the SDK is available for free.  It's called the Mojo SDK and it's available at http://developer.palm.com or can be directly downloaded here.