There are many stages to the lifecycle of a mobile app – Concept,
Design, Development, Testing, Publishing, and Marketing. One thing we
probably do not do enough of is thoroughly test our application before
publishing it. Let’s face it, testing is difficult. There are lots of
mobile devices, each with different hardware characteristics, and lots
of different OS versions to compound the problem. So, on my most recent
project I wondered if Facebook could help.

Note: This article originally published in our iOS App Builder blog in June 2013.

Compulsive

The development of my new game, Compulsive,
was almost finished and I decided to ask my online friends if they
could help try it out before I published. I couldn’t believe that over
100 people responded saying they were willing to help out.

My problem now shifted from needing testers to how was I going to
manage this entire process? I decided to create a private Facebook group
called, “TMSOFT Elite Users,” and then sent invites to everyone on that
thread to join. This way all communications could be private between me
and the testers. And I’m sure my family would appreciate that my wall
and their news feeds wouldn’t get blasted with stuff they don’t care
about. This also allowed everyone to communicate and post questions to
the group and not just myself. It worked really well and became a
thriving community with questions, suggestions, and bugs being posted to
the forum.

Testing lessons

The most tedious part of the process was asking everyone for their
unique device identifier (UDID) so I could register their device for ad
hoc iOS builds. This allows users to install apps that aren’t already
published on the App Store. There is a useful app called UDID
by Harrison Apps that allows users to get that information from their
device and then post it to the forum. I would then take all of those IDs
and copy it into an Excel document for upload to Apple.

I quickly ran out of test devices because Apple only allows you to
register up to 100 and I already had 60 allocated even though most of
them were no longer being used. Apple lets you clear unused UUIDs at the
annual renewal of your developer membership but that was a few months
ago for me. I sent a quick email to Apple support to see if they would
make an exception and allow me to delete some devices and they responded
the next day that they granted me a one-time exception. I was then able
to delete all my old devices and free up enough space for everyone to
participate in the beta.

If I could do the whole UDID process over, I would have created a
shared Google Doc spreadsheet and just had everyone fill in their name,
device model, and UUID. That would have greatly simplified the process
and been less work for me. Make sure to download the sample spreadsheet
file that Apple provides so that it is formatted correctly and won’t be
rejected when you upload.

Beta 1

I was able to get my Beta 1 build posted to Google Drive and provided
a download link to everyone in the forum so they could install the game
using iTunes. Once my beta users got the game installed on their
device, the forum came alive with lots of posts, screenshots, and even
videos. My first major bug rolled in:

In the game you have to group four or more same color tiles together
to trigger an explosion and remove those pieces from the board. As
pointed out from Shelli’s screenshot that did not happen when she joined
five blue tiles together. This gave me some really good information,  especially how the board was configured when the bug occurred. This made
it much easier to figure out how to recreate the bug and ultimately fix
it.

Another user posted a video of their experience with the game, and it
wasn’t great. They felt like it was too difficult to grab the tiles, and
his video really helped to show that. This would require a major
redesign under the hood, and I initially didn’t want to do this because
it would most likely (and did) create new issues. But in the end, it was
the right thing to do, as the game play experience greatly improved.

There were countless other bugs and feature suggestions that were
shared in the community. One of my favorites was a request to listen to
your own music while playing the game. This was suggested by numerous
users, which motivated me to come up with an elegant solution. Now when
you launch Compulsive, it will detect if you already have music playing
and if so temporary disable the in-game music until the your music
finishes. That’s much better than having to change the setting to not
play music, go back to your music app, restart it, and then return to
Compulsive to play a game. Those little touches are just an example of
how my game really benefited from this experience.

Bottom line

My Facebook experiment was so successful that it will become part of
my business process before I publish any new apps. The next time you’re
getting ready to launch a new app you might try leveraging Facebook for
something other than sharing cat photos. I felt a lot more
confident launching Compulsive v1.0 knowing it had been thoroughly
reviewed and enjoyed by an amazing group of elite users.

Compulsive is a free download for Android and iOS devices.