A blog from ITBusinessEdge written by Mike Vizard. The contents are as follows:

"From an enterprise IT perspective, mobile computing can be a little daunting. Not only is there almost a limitless combination of devices and networks that an IT application needs to run on, but you then have to continuously test the performance of your application on all those combinations.

The folks at iPass, a provider of mobile connectivity services widely known for automating the collections of tolls, provide access to their applications to end users that can be on almost any mobile computing device attached to any number of cellular or WiFi networks. As most IT organizations well know, application performance can vary widely depending on the device and the network in question. The challenge was finding some way to automate the testing of all those combinations.

To accomplish that goal, iPass enlisted the aid of Micro Focus, which provides a set of application testing services in the cloud called SilkTest and SilkPerformer. According to Steve Dykstra, product marketing director of Micro Focus, one of things that sets SilkTest apart from other application testing services in the cloud is that it makes it easy to change the configurations that are being tested, which he notes is now a critical capability when it comes to testing mobile computing applications.

In addition, Dykstra says the SilkTest works just as well across multiple application development frameworks, which means that IT organizations can, for example, test Java and Microsoft.Net applications using the same cloud computing service.

There is no doubt that application testing is more important than ever with the advent of mobile computing. There’s also no doubt that application testing is getting more complex for the same reason. The challenge facing most IT organizations is finding a way to reliably test those applications in a way where the testing doesn’t actually wind up taking longer than the time it took to actually build the application."

A good article from Mike Vizard.