Mobile/Fennec TestDevices

There has been a lot of talk regarding the availability of mobile devices for people to test Fennec. With the official release getting closer and our list of supported devices getting larger we need to figure out a solution to get Fennec in the hands of more people.

We are already moving towards leveraging device specific communities. This page is intended as a brainstorming page where we can come up with different strategies, reasons, and approaches to this problem.

lab full of devices

This approach has us buying many devices and keeping them in a lab where people can check out the device to use for testing purposes.

• Pros
  • more device availability for QA events (onsite meetups, workweeks, testdays)
  • purchasing a smaller pool than 1 device per person

• Cons
  • Devices would be sitting around the majority of the time
  • High probability of losing the devices
  • Somebody needs to maintain all the devices

Noah's Ark of Devices

this is similar to the lab approach, except in this scenario we have 2 of every device we support so it is easier to get ahold of a device, but it will probably be a different device than you are used to.

• Pros
  • much wider test coverage on devices
  • easier to find a specific device

• Cons
  • Devices would be sitting around the majority of the time
  • even harder to maintain the devices
  • same problem of tracking
  • harder for people to get used to the different platforms

Other ideas?

Please let us know what other ideas we could use.

Some other considerations is the use of wifi vs cellular data. We really need to test gsm, cdma, and wifi, but being practical all devices should be wifi based only.

Using devices at conferences/trade shows. This is a great idea as it shows off the browser. We might be limited by wifi availability and familiarity with the specific device.