When did you ever jump into the bath without first testing the water with a presumably slightly expendable toe? Probably some time ago. You really don’t want to commit to the plunge without making sure everything is just right! The same should be true for your mobile marketing campaigns.

Before you launch that push notification message, or the in-app promotion, or even before launching that A/B test of your menu system, you’d really like to be able to sanity check what you’re about to do to your millions of users. Right?

This is why we developed the Swrve QA Device system.

Software development processes have seen lots of big changes in the past decades, with a general move away from monolithic waterfall lifecycle processes, where testing and validation is left to the very end of a long cycle of development. It’s generally accepted that this is not a good thing; leaving testing until you think you're finished with development leads to huge costs associated with potentially big impacts of small bugs, often resulting in redesign and at a minimum a big impact on the schedule.

The new way is agile; doing smaller iterations, validating the design as you go, tweaking requirements and addressing issues as they arise before they snowball into costly crises.

In the same way, Swrve is all about bringing agile processes to app marketing. We enable the complete planning, creation and deployment of in-app marketing campaigns, and full A/B testing of mobile apps without having to build a new app or submit a new version to the app stores.  

And while on one hand we embrace the philosophy of “fail fast”, we also are pragmatic and want you to be able to sanity check things before you launch. While failing fast is a good thing, there’s no point skipping some due diligence to avoid the inevitable “D’oh!” moments, particularly when (as with many of our customers) you are deploying straight out into multi-million DAU environments.

Swrve’s QA Device system allows you to register a set of devices which are then used to preview campaigns before you launch them, or to sense check the events that are being sent back to Swrve. The system operates in real-time, and the QA facilities are available immediately a campaign is ready for deployment.

Registration of your device takes seconds, and once registered it’ll appear in the QA device list as shown below:

Now the magic starts!  You can start to inspect, in real time, the events and transactions that the device is generating as they are received by the Swrve service. This event log is incredibly useful for validating your SDK setup and to check how your application is interacting with the Swrve service:

Each individual event has a wealth of information attached detailing the event context, rules that might be applying to in-app campaigns and information about the state of the device - all the information you need to be assured things are working perfectly!

With a QA device you can preview any of the marketing systems that Swrve enables. For example, preview what a push notification will look like on the device using the Push to QA Device feature. This gives you the confidence that the content is correct, but more importantly that the push system is correctly configured to reach your users.

When implementing complex A/B testing, you can configure a QA device to preview any of the variants you’ve setup in the test. This forces that QA device into a specific treatment bucket (rather than using the normal unbiased population sampling) and allows your team to ensure all the variations in the test are working as expected:

The Swrve QA Device system allows your team to create a complete workflow for the creation and deployment of complex campaigns, incorporating comprehensive quality assurance passes, giving the you the best of agile but without the “D’oh”!