Innovating Mobile Testing: 42Gears Game-Changer AstroFarm with Prakash Gupta

Get ready to discover the most actionable end to end automation advice for some of the smartest testers on the planet. Hey, I'm Joe Calantonio, host of the Test Guild Automation podcast and my goal is to help you succeed with creating automation awesomeness.

Hey. Hey. As you know, DevOps and QA teams need a wide range of devices to develop, debug and test their code against to ensure their software works as intended. It's even now more important than ever. But accessing different devices becomes really challenging for a multitude of reasons. When your teams are spread all over the world, how do you overcome these challenges that I see a lot of teams struggling with? Well, listen all the way to the end to find out. Hey, I'm Joe and today we'll be talking with Prakash all about beyond testing. How 42 Gears is changing the game with a product called Astroform. If you don't know, Prakash is the co founder and CEO and CTO of 42 Gears Mobility System, overseeing basically all aspects of technology and product development for his company. Really excited to have him on the show to talk about this. He has close to two decades of experience in building cutting edge solutions that aim to transform the digital workspace, especially in the testing realm. His recent passion project being Astro Farm, which is a cool solution I just recently learned about and I thought, hey, the Guild's gonna love to learn more about this. It's a mobile device farm solution that really helps mobile QA and DevOps teams to be more productive and efficient that I think everyone is gonna get value from. And this fast evolving platform really tackles critical enterprise challenges from supporting hybrid work modes to optimizing infrastructure costs and a lot more. You don't wanna miss this episode. Check it out. Hey Prakash, welcome to the Guild.

Hey Joe. Hi. Thanks for having me on the show.

Really great to have you. Really excited about this. I always ask entrepreneurs, I'm always curious to know what made you want to get involved in this, you know, software testing, DevOps space.

So that's an interesting story. So 42 Gears, I mean we are close to 14 years old organization and we generally operate in enterprise mobility domain and any company who's using mobile phones and mobile phone based solutions, our products help them to sort of secure manage and sort of make those deployments more successful. And Interestingly, when in March 2020 when we all went into lockdown, within a few days we all realized that it was becoming increasingly difficult for us to make the devices available to our team members for their day to day work because everybody was working from their home. Back when we were in office, it was easy for our team members to just walking into our office lab and pick any device that they want to work on or maybe borrow it from one of their colleagues. But it was no longer possible for us to do so. So we figured that we need some kind of a solution to solve this problem. We tried some public cloud platforms like AWS Device form, but we soon realized that it would work out for us A because it's too expensive. And then again, I mean most, most of the time the devices that we really want to use at a particular time, they were probably not available to us at those times. We tried a few open source solutions and that also probably did not work to the specific needs that we had at that point of time. And we figured that we will have to cook something up ourselves. And we started picking up pieces from here and there and started customizing them. And then probably in a couple of months we had a system running internally which was sort of being started, being used extensively by everybody within the organization. And that is how it all started. So yeah.

Awesome. So when you say there were some people struggling with, especially when they're remote accessing devices, like what are some of the other things you heard people struggling with? Like how does communication come into play and how does this platform kind of try to solve that issue?

So yeah, I mean there was generally, for example, that there's a device on which somebody is running an automation test case and there's another developer who's working on a customer issue. And then sort of incidentally, he needs that exact device model on which that, that the other QA engineer is working on. Right. So I mean this platform helps to solve that problem in making sure that you sort of, you can book your slot, you can, you can communicate over the platform itself, you can leave sort of interesting comments for how long I'll be using those devices and then help teams collaborate better to make more optimal use of these devices.

You know, this may sound silly. I used to work for a large company in the medical device space and we used to have a, an environment where we did a lot of deploys to. But we also had people that did demos in this environment. And so sometimes you'd have testers mucking around in that environment when someone's trying to do a demo in the environment and then they'd be embarrassed because they broke something. So is this one of the use cases you see of why something like this would be critical?

Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So one of the features of our Platform is a role based access and then device categorization. So you can organize your devices into different folders and groups and make sure that different teams have access to only those folders and those set of devices within those folders. That can ensure that the isolation and the different teams have different set of devices and those overlaps don't happen. Another very interesting use case, as you mentioned. Right. So for example, within 42 gaze as well we have R and D team which probably has like close to 200 devices which they share amongst themselves. And then we have our sales team as well, which is probably working in different time zones and they use their own set of devices for their demos and PoCs and pilots. Right. And a platform like Astrofarm actually allows teams to sort of make best use of those resources. For example, when the US sales team is sleeping and then those devices are sitting idle in our US office, the team in Bangalore can make use of those devices during that time and then make sure that when we are sleeping, those devices are untouched and they can be sort of safely used for whatever purposes they are intended for.

Yeah, it brings up another use case. Before I would leave, I'd kick off our test suite to run overnight, you know, overnight. But nowadays overnight, like you said, we have teams all over the world. Overnight for me is not overnight for another team. So this is what seems like a great way to communicate, hey, this is being used, maybe not access it during this time, right?

Exactly, yeah.

So how does that work? Does it. Is it just like, hey, does it lock the mo or is it just communicated to them somehow through some sort of messaging to let them know leave this device or this area alone.

So in our console there are the tags that you can apply to those devices. And the moment somebody searches and find the device, those tags are impossible to miss. And people can use tags like do not disturb automation in progress or things like that so that people know that these devices are off the hooks and not to be touched.

Nice. So you know a lot of your. So a lot of things I saw on your website as well talks about DevOps as well, like how does DevOps, how does this help the DevOps team then from a DevOps perspective?

So yeah, I think, I mean we at 42 Gears ourselves, we run nightly builds in CI CD workflow whereby are the runners running on sometimes on cloud, sometimes on our local infrastructure within our office premises. They procure, they use the APIs of Astrofarm to procure devices. And once those devices are procured, then a parallel test invocation Multi threaded test invocation or appium can be triggered. So and that can make sure that whatever is the test suite of maybe 100, 200, 500 test cases that can be deployed overnight on whichever number of serial number of devices you have selected for.

Nice. I guess also in development, when a developer is writing tests and they need to commit it before they commit it, maybe there's, is there a tag or something there or a CLI command, they could say, hey, I want to run it on this device, make sure it passes before I actually promote the code to the main branch.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. It is completely possible. And if you have a set of devices specifically allocated for the unit test cases of the developer, or a sanity test before the code gets merged into the main branch, those runners can sort of, you can have a configuration file with the serial number of those devices and then the moment those comments happen, those suites can get triggered which will execute those test cases on those allocated devices.

Nice. So, you know, I speak with a lot of testers and a lot of times they're like, I'll just use, like you said, AWS Device Farm and you mentioned it does get very expensive at some point and also open source solutions. So can you dive into a little bit more how why AWS Device Farm could be expensive and how your solution might be different and maybe also compare it to maybe an open source solution how your you may have different benefits that you don't get from an open source solution.

Absolutely. So if you compare, for example, take AWS Device Farm in picture, right? So a ballpark monthly cost for a single device comes around $250, which means that in one or two months you end up paying for the entire cost of the device itself. So it is, it is far, far more economical for a company to buy the device in house, maybe 400, $500 and then use it forever. I mean, all you need are tools to make that device available readily to your entire organization. Astro Farm offers to do. And in addition to that, I think another very important factor that comes in picture is device variations. Right. So especially in enterprise mobility. So iOS is, I mean all the devices are made by a single company, so we cannot probably talk about the variations there. But Android, I mean in enterprise mobility there are all kinds of devices available. Devices with a barcode scanner, for example, devices with an RFID reader, devices which is like operating like a post terminal devices which has a credit card reader. And then we have our wearable devices, we have our VR devices and all these devices require, there are tons of Manufacturers who are manufacturing these kinds of devices, and there are even more companies who are writing applications for these devices for their enterprises. And it is very, very difficult for a QA engineer or a developer of these organizations to find these kind of devices in a public device form like aws. They will mostly get most of the consumer grade devices, Samsung's and the iPhones of the world. But these device variations are very, very difficult to get by. And the only way in which a collaborative testing and access of these devices can be provided by an organization to their team members is using a private device farm like astrofarm.

All right, so this is a good point. So I've seen setups where, like you said, they have a more like an embedded type of technology on a device where, where they might have like a robot messing with it. And like you said, there's a lot of device problems out there. You never would have that available in the cloud. So it sounds like if someone had a unique setup, like that, unique hardware, they would just plug it into your solution and then people would be able to have access from all across the world. Is that how it works?

Oh, yes, yes. For example, the rugged handheld devices, right, from companies like Honeywell or Zebra. At the end of the day, they are also Android devices which support the standard Android implementation and the Android instrumentation that is available for any kind of automation frameworks. Right. But AWS device farm will never offer a Zebra device on the device farm. Right. So companies working on a Honeywell or a Zebra device, maybe a airline application or warehouse application, developers who are working on those kind of applications and testers who are working on those kind of applications need those devices. And the only way is that they own those devices and share it across using a private device farm.

Interesting. So how big of a use case do you see that? Do you see a lot of companies dealing with this, struggling with it? Obviously, I guess. Could you create a solution to help? But like you said, there's a lot of device farms out there, Labs. But this is unique in the sense that you could have hardware specific to your organization being run on the cloud. So is that a use case you hear a lot from?

Oh, I mean, as I mentioned, there are like hundreds of OEMs making these unique kind of devices and there are probably, I mean, thousands of companies who are making apps on these devices. So we have a very big sort of ecosystem of companies and developers who sort of make applications on these devices. And it spans out different industries. Right. There's a retail industry, warehouses, retail floors, shops. There's hospitality industries, hotels, transportation, logistics, healthcare. All kinds of these industries are using these digital science devices, for example. So there are small TV sticks that are practically running Android now. There are digital signage applications running on those TV stacks and they also need development, they also need testing. And if I have to test my application on TV sticks, I need access to those devices and how do I get it right? So yeah, I think a private device farm where I have those devices but I can still share it with my global workforce is what people probably prefer.

Great point. Once again, I used to work for a medical device and they had these handhelds where basically like you said, running an iOS in the background or Android in the background. But it was specific use case for it that you wouldn't have on a normal iPhone or a normal Android device. So great use case. So also what are some other benefits of a private cloud? I would think like healthcare insurance. A lot of these companies are regulated, right? And so I'm sure they may have like I don't want to put it on the public cloud, even though there may be some places some sort of security in place. What is some benefits of having a private client besides having maybe unique devices like that?

So absolutely, I think you sort of said it very nicely. So all these regulated industries, right? So if I have an application which is related to health care or insurance, and maybe those applications are not public applications, these are like for private distribution to my targeted clients or maybe they are public, but I am testing a version of that application that is not yet public and I would be very uncomfortable in deploying that application to a device in the public cloud not knowing that who used that device before me, what kind of residue of might be still on that device which might be snooping on my activities or something, or who's going to use this device after me, right? What will happen if the connectivity to that device breaks in between and my data is still on that device and who can it get exposed to? So those kind of security considerations are also very, very important for certain industries. And that is another reason for private device farm to be much more suitable for these kind of.

Absolutely. No, I love open source, but once again used to work for healthcare teams would start using open source. And also you have these security things you didn't know about because they were using an open source solution and you had to justify it to like the fda. Why is this happening using a private type of solution like Astrofarm? Do you have any special certifications where you know, because I'm using this particular solution you can go to your manager, say it's okay to use that because it's, it's not open source, it's been certified to, you know, whatever certification it would be. Does that make sense?

Oh, yes, absolutely. So there are lots of, I mean, security certifications that we as a company and undergo. And so those compliances and those certifications are, they span across all the product offerings that we have, including Astro Farm. So some of those certifications, like for example, ISO 27001, HIPAA compliance, SOC2 compliances, all these compliances, make sure that all the agents that we run on the devices, all the backend microservices that we have, the databases that we have, the data at rest, data in motion, the kind of encryptions that we use, the business continuity of our services, everything is sort of taken care of. And when we do it in a way in which we make sure that the data from our customers is secured.

Beautiful. So, you know, it is the new year and I always ask guests as well what they see as trends. And are you seeing any trends that would lend themselves to really thrive using a solution like astrofarm?

Good question. So I think we see a trend of increased adoption of different kinds of devices other than phones and tablets, more and more number of VR VR devices, AR devices. Apple has recently introduced their AR VR headset and the watches are sort of gaining more traction in enterprises, specifically in healthcare. So I believe the influx of these devices both in consumer and in enterprises should, would increase and so will the apps running on them. Which means that our tools, our development tools are QA automation tools, our processes, all of them have to be more aligned and more adapt. They have to adapt more to sort of take care of these devices. Right. So that is one thing that I feel is something. And astrofarm as a product has the capability of not just adding Android and iOS phones and tablets, but also these devices as well. We can very well share a smartwatch and an AR VR headset and roll them and make them available to anybody else in the organization to use. So that's one trend. Another interesting trend, as you mentioned, right, security. Security is something which is gaining more and more importance as day goes by. And I think this year will be no different. And healthcare industry specifically, I think in the west there has been a, a consistent push on digitalization in the healthcare industry and them being so, so such a regulated industry security would be a top priority for them. And a solution like astrofarm, with all the security compliances and everything, definitely sort of makes a Good candidate for companies in the healthcare domain to try out. And of course no discussion for Trends is complete without talking about AI and ChatGPT and the LLM models. Right? So yeah, I think I personally believe that every aspect of innovation of all the areas will get impacted by them including a development and testing and particularly I think the UI based testing will definitely build with the multimodal models that are available today. It is definitely going to have a big impact oftentimes, I mean internally at 42 gears also we have numerous test scenarios where the test scenario requires us to step out of the predictable UI of our own application and sometimes go into a third party operating system settings or third party applications and interact with it and then come back to our ui. For example, if I have to write a test case for testing the offline functionality of my application and the test step will require me to go to the operating system and turn off the WI fi and then come back to my app and verify whether the offline functionality works or not. But then turning off WI fi can have a very different UI between Android 13 and versus Android 14 or between a Lenovo versus a Samsung. And the moment these not under my control variations comes into picture writing, the automation test cases become very complex, right. And very difficult to maintain because they are breaking changes done by somebody else which you have to sort of keep making sure that sort of you you take into account. But with a multimodal, I mean theoretically it is, it can be made possible that we can give it a prompt that go and turn off the WI fi and based upon the visual cue, if we feed it the current screen and tell it dynamically generate the scripts to turn off the WI fi it has a better chance of doing it and even doing it on some small mind with small minor UI modifications as well. So those kinds of, I mean visual cue based dynamics automation script generation frameworks I believe will probably be much, very very useful in automation industry, test automation industry. There are a few R and D tasks that we are also sort of pursuing in these lines and hopefully yeah, I think we might be able to offer something to our end customers on these lines.

I love that you brought up AI with the multimodal because I think it's going to be a game changer actually it's on my top trends for 2024 but you seem like you've actually used it or you're actually smarter than I am in this case. So is that something you really see as something that is going to benefit testers then? It's more Than a buzz, because I think it's more than a buzz. So have you seen it yourself or played with it yourself?

Absolutely, yes and definitely. And as I mentioned, right, we have some R and D projects and threads going around at 42 gears where we are exploring these possibilities. Where we allow as a device farm solution, we have a continuous stream of the device screens. So we have the ability of feeding that stream to a multimodal model. And if we allow the users to specify a prompt, in theory, we can combine these two inputs together and ask a multimodal model to generate the scripts dynamically for us as well. So this is something that we are playing around with it. It's still early days, but definitely very, very promising.

A little off script. I mean, that's why. Another reason why I love working with vendors is you have an R and D team and it always drives me nuts where someone has an open source solution and they try to implement their own multimodal type deal and the team is like creating a healthcare software has nothing to do with any of this. They should be focusing on their product, their expertise in that area. Working with a vendor like you, you have an R and D team that deals with this, so they don't have to worry about it. I mean, do you agree with me? I mean, I think that's, I mean, I'm not just pushing it. I mean, I actually see that's why vendors in general had a lot of value. And that's just one main reason as well.

Absolutely, absolutely. As vendors, right. We have to make sure that we sort of, we stay on top of our game and we sort of anticipate what's coming forward. How can we offer more value to our customers? And then. Yeah, I mean there's lots of motivation for us to sort of, apart from it being super cool to work on, there are lots of motivation for us to work on and make sure that we stay ahead here.

Nice. So I know you said you've been around for 14 years, but this is a newer product for 42 gears. Do you have any customer success stories or. I'm always curious to know, like when a company releases a product and they think they know how it's going to be used, but when it goes in the wild, you're like, didn't even know it was going to be used that way or while I didn't even think of that use case, any of those type of scenarios or stories you could share.

Oh, absolutely. So earlier when I told you the story about how we went into the lockdown we faced the problem that what led to the creation of astroform, we never had the idea of productizing it. So what led to the idea of productizing it was when we spoke to a few of our existing customers and partners, existing customers of our other products. And while talking to them, we figured that they are also having exactly the same kind of problem that we have solved using this tool. And that is what led us to sort of probably wrap it up in our product. And those were the first guys to whom we pitched it and they are still using that product of ours. So we were able to upsell this astrofarm product to a large number of our existing customers of mobile device management software tool. Because all these customers domain and industry where they work on these specialized rugged devices and these devices are very, very difficult to be available on aws, Device Farm or any other public solutions. And then they face a very similar set of challenges to us. So yeah, I think we have numerous customers who are successfully using these products and also specifically, I think not just application development companies, but also OEMs. So device manufacturers also have tons of test cases and development work to work on these devices and they generally have their very, very dispersed geographically. Right. The manufacturing is probably in somewhere in the eastern part of Asia and the development is happening in India or Europe or in some part of the US and sharing these devices and sometimes shipping the devices from one part of the world to the other part of the world is a very cost intensive affair. And a solution, Device Farm solution like astrofarm allows them to share the device and make it available from any part of the world to any part of the world. So yeah, I think that there are quite a few compelling success stories that we have with astrofarm.

That's a good point. You can have a mission critical device that's being developed, you need to start testing it right away and you can make it available, I guess for all the different countries, different teams automatically, then as soon as it comes online, bam, it's available. That's pretty cool.

Yep.

I know you've touched on this. So there are a lot of solutions out there. We touched on some of the reasons why someone should definitely check out astrofarm, the different use cases. But what does your ideal customer look like? I don't think. I think different tools for different companies and different people, different teams make sense. So astrofarm, what do you think would be like an ideal? If someone's listening, you're like, if you're in this situation, you definitely need to check this out because this is definitely going to help you and your team deliver better quality, faster software to your customers.

So I think a company which has a geographically disposed theme and their constant need of devices developers and QA team members, and someone who wants to run a large suite of automation test cases on a periodic basis. So rather than having to have a workstation somewhere in some corner of your office and with like tons of devices plugged into those machines and running the entire test suite over there on that machine itself, having a single point of failure, astrofarm allows you to sort of contribute that devices from any number of nodes. I mean, you can have hundreds of employees contributing one or two devices and all of them pooling together on a central cloud server of ours. And then you can run your automation test suite on a cloud machine itself because using the astropharm APIs, even a cloud test runner can procure the devices and start sort of running those scripts on top of it. Right? So a geographically dispersed team working, maybe in a hybrid model where people are coming to office a few days, people are working from home for a few days, and if they want to have access to the devices all the time, I think Abstract Farm would be a great choice for them.

All right, I was thinking, you know, a lot of times when people use open source solutions and they're trying to get all the devices hooked up, it's a, it becomes a mess and a nightmare. And that's one of the reasons why I never understand why they just don't use a solution. So how easy is it to someone to contribute, add a device to Astrofarm?

Oh, that is one of the USPs of Astrofarm. Any person, any employee with a workstation or a laptop, you just have to install our agent, Astrofarm agent on their laptop and login into their astrofarm account. And now once they have done so, any device that they plug into their laptop, they have a choice of sharing it on astroform. And if they do so, that device becomes available on the cloud. Now, anybody in the organization who has access can very easily sort of use their device as if they're working on a real device. They can manually use it, or they can hook it up with their development tools, their Android Studio or Xcode, or their Appium test suite, and then start running their automation scripts on it. So contributing a device is as easy as using a device on.

So any device, like you said, you mentioned a bunch of different unique use cases for devices, AR, VR, IoT type devices. So if I understand correctly, regardless, you just Plug it in. And is there anything else that a developer needs to worry about? It actually just picks it up. Do they ever need to work with you directly if it's a real custom type of hardware?

No. Any devices, as long as it's an Android device or an iOS device or a flavor of one of these. Our installation packet, our agent that gets installed on these machines, it has all the drivers required drivers needed for it and you just have to plug it in and you have to select whether you want to share it or not. Once you do so that device becomes available.

Awesome. We talked about security, we talked about a bunch of other things with mobile testing that's important. Another thing is performance and performance testing, battery life, those type of things. Does astrofarm help with that at all or is that not part of the core features?

Absolutely, absolutely. So astrofarm has the section in the UI where either you are working on the device manually or you're running an automation test case. In order to do both, either of them, you have to procure the device from the astrofarm using a use button on the UI or you can call in procurement API. The moment you do that, the astrofarm engine starts recording lots of vitals of devices, which includes the CPU usage per process, the battery usage, not just the system wide battery usage, but you can also select the specific application that you are trying to stress right now, the data usage, the WI fi, mobile data usage of that application, any crashes that happens on that application, it starts monitoring all of them and it keeps recording them during the entire session of your testing so that once your test is completed you can know and you can compare the battery usage trend, the data usage trend and the CPU usage trend between the various invocation of the same test.

So a lot of times people can get lost in logs and reports. How easy is the reporting? Is there any functionality that does AI that says you ran this last month x amount of times, you ran it this month x amount of times and the CPU has spiked by X amount. Does it do anything like that to correlate it for you or bubble up insights?

Yes, yes. So we have a dashboard section which makes it extremely easy for you to see the various invocations side by side with the average values of all these trends that I have talked about. And then you see a one is to one comparison between two or three test invocation and you can start them, filter them based upon your or your needs and you can see that whether you have done well compared to the last execution or worse. So yeah, it's pretty intuitive.

Awesome. Okay Prakash, before we go, is there one piece of actual advice you can give to someone to help them with their mobile testing efforts and what's the best way to find contact you and learn more about Astrophone?

Piece of advice I would say, I guess as I mentioned, right. The technology is sort of changing very fast. The kind of devices that are coming in and the frameworks themselves. Right. Newer versions of Appium Selenium. So yeah, I mean important for us to sort of keep, keep ourselves updated and be very open minded, be mindful of the newer technologies that are coming in. ChatGPT. I love ChatGPT. It helps so much in our day to day activities and in writing small, small scripts. So we should, we should definitely make best use of these new technologies which can help us do more compared to what we can normally do. And yeah, I think and in order to contact us, I guess our website has lots of information specifically about astrofarm as well. If you go to our website to the products page, you go to the astrofarm page, it has most of the information about astrofarm. There's a contact us sort of form there. If you have any inquiries, any questions, you can sign up for the product, you can contact us from there. And we also have a very nice chat button on our website and we take pride in our support and our customer support. Right. So even if you are not a customer yet and if you ping us or chat somebody, one of our rock stars are going to sort of get in touch with you immediately and would be more than happy to answer any questions you might have.

Thanks again for your automation awesomeness. The links to everything we covered in this episode, head on over to testguild.com A4E, and if the show has helped you in any way, why not rate it and review it in itunes? Reviews really help in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full stack automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers. Hey, thanks again for listening. If you're not already part of our awesome community of 27,000 of the smartest testers, DevOps and automation professionals in the world, we'd love to have you join the fam@test guild.com and if you're in the DevOps automation software testing space or you're a test tool provider and want to offer real world value that can improve the skills or solve a problem for the guild community. I'd love to hear from you. Head ON over to testguild.info and let's make it happen.