Billy Landowski & Sira Rao, Microsoft
As the mobile application market continues to grow, product teams need effective ways to gather user feedback about their mobile applications in order to improve software quality. Although extensive application testing is performed by dedicated product test teams, it is extremely valuable to enable beta users outside of the product team to try the application and provide feedback on their experience. This provides the product team with real input from real users that closely align with target customers.
To solve this problem for mobile applications, the Microsoft Lync test team developed a tool called Shake ‘n’ Send to enable feedback submission directly from the Microsoft Lync mobile applications. This tool allowed beta users to provide feedback by simply shaking the phone and providing information about their experience using the application. The simple and easy-to-use interface enabled users to quickly report on product bugs and other quality issues. It also allowed them to “send a smile” about what they liked.
For Microsoft Lync mobile application beta testing, Shake ‘n’ Send has proven to be very effective. Using this tool, beta users submitted several thousand feedback reports and that information helped the Microsoft Lync Mobile team increase software quality by fixing an additional 30% more bugs in the product.
Shake ‘n’ Send has proven to be a fun and efficient way for beta users to submit feedback directly from mobile applications. Because of this success, the feedback tool is currently being embraced and extended to support other mobile product teams within Microsoft.
Billy Landowski & Sira Rao, 2012 Technical Paper, Abstract, Paper
