3. Testing & Debugging

Introduction

Testing and debugging is very important for any application and even more so when the application can be run on many different devices that can range in power, screen size and even how you interact with them. As this application is a Univeral Windows Platform application it can run on phones, tablets and desktops. This meant that testing on different devices was important.

Testing

To test the application I used "local machine" in Visual Studio for testing it on x86 and x64 architectures. This is my testing for a desktop computer. I would take note of any bugs when doing it and create issues for them.

I used the emulators that Visual Studio provides and by using these I was able to test on many different screen sizes. I could also test how adding a picture on a mobile device was handled compared to adding a picture on a desktop, for instance, one difference found was that on a mobile device the same functionality for adding a picture to the device gives you the option to use the camera whereas on desktop you do not get this option.

I'm also in possession of a windows phone (one with a very small screen) and with that, I was able to deploy the application to it. This allowed me to get a real feel for what the application was like and it gave me the chance to see if the drag and drop feature was working well. It's one thing to test some of these features using emulators but it doesn't beat testing it on a real device. The phone also gave me great insight into how big the images should be and whether the application would be of any use in portrait mode. I had original dismissed the idea of portrait mode for the application and although is definitely isn't as user-friendly as landscape mode it works much better than I had anticipated.

Many bugs were found when testing and of the ones I found I was able to fix all of them. There were times though that if it wasn't for Visual Studios debugging feature some of these bugs may not have been fixed at all.

Debugging

As mentioned above, I used Visual Studios debugging feature a lot. It came into its own when I first started dealing with files and having to convert them into bitmap images. In the beginning, I was constantly getting null pointer exceptions and was not able to figure out why but using the debugger fixed these issues for me.

Another big use of it was any time I had to pass information about images across pages. When receiving the information or details I sent over I found it was a different type to what I had expected, using the debugger to check the type of the variable was a massive time saver as sometimes it turned out to be a very different type to what I thought it was.