The announcement that Mountain View, CA-based cloud and mobile testing solutions provider SOASTA has been selected by Huawei (News - Alert) to provide continuous integration and functional test automation for its business and consumer offerings highlights the importance of getting it right fast the first time, and keeping it right during product and service life-cycles.
Huawei will be utilizing SOASTA (News - Alert) TouchTest and CloudTest for internal testing of Huawei’s apps, ensuring peak performance and user experiences for its PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) ecosystem.
In today’s hotly competitive markets the old adage that, “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression,” has never been more relevant. In addition, as pointed out in several previous postings, we also live in “The Age of Acceleration”—where the only constants are change and the speed at which change is occurring—which dictates companies must be fast to market and fast in the market to be successful. And, as headlines in the past several months have continuously reminded us, proper pre-launch testing and post-launch fine-tuning is now, and always should have been, a cornerstone for all product and service introductions and ugrades.
Because failure is not an option
There is a very famous scene in the movie Apollo 13, where the mission flight director Gene Kranz says, “Failure is not an option!” This perfectly encapsulates the value of testing before your company goes general availability (GA) and why continuous testing post-GA is becoming valuable. The stakes for imperfection in a world where they can go viral in minutes on social media, and where customers have solutions options, are high and are getting higher very quickly.
In recognition of the importance of testing in the explosive cloud and mobility areas, Guoqiang Rong, President of Device Cloud, Huawei , noted “We chose to work with SOASTA because of its unrivaled leadership in cloud and mobile testing.” He added that, “SOASTA continues to outperform the competition by ensuring top application performance and quality user experiences, allowing our developer base to bring apps to market quickly. Huawei would have needed three companies to accomplish what SOASTA can achieve. We look forward to continuing our work together to enhance our business and consumer cloud offerings in China and beyond.”
SOASTA’s solutions will be used by Huawei Consumer Business Cloud Service— which includes Emotion UI, Open Cloud Platform, and the Huawei App Center for Android (News - Alert)-based applications—to help assure quality user experiences. The group’s core focus is the Mobile Devices Cloud, which is responsible for developing iOS and Android apps for Huawei’s IaaS Cloud Services, the Huawei App Store, Vmall.com, and for external developers through an open API.
Specifically the two SOASTA solutions will be employed as follows:
“Huawei’s solutions have been deployed in over 140 countries, serving more than one third of the world's population,” said Tom Lounibos (News - Alert), SOASTA CEO. “We’re thrilled to help their team deliver quality user experiences and look forward to expanding our relationship. China is a market that is devoting more attention and resources to application quality. A continued relationship with Huawei will increase our footprint in Asia, and enhance Huawei’s reputation as the global ICT provider.”
A Russian proverb, “doveryai no proveryai" (trust, but verify), used by U.S. President Ronald Reagan many times, also is fitting here. Vendors need to create and engender not just customer but ecosystem trust. They also need to be able to do so fast without compromising, in fact hopefully increasing, quality in the process.