Categories: Symbian C++ | Quality | Books and Other Resources

From Forum Nokia Wiki

A short review of

"S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance"
A Guide for Mobile Engineers and Developers 
Saila Laitinen 

Introduction by Jim Gilmour /Forum Nokia Champion/

The reason for writing this book review is to show that this is an original text containing information on the S60, This is a good quality book, the text of which is much easier to understand than similar information found on the internet.

Review

The author is a Saila Laitinen, an engineer. She leads the global consultancy for Forum Nokia serving the biggest developer community on top Nokia platforms.

The book is aimed at managers, engineers and developers in high-tech industries. Topics include definitions of high quality documents; how to get organized; such as specifications, procedures and culture.

The introduction begins with S60 development community, Product Creation Community, and then there is a chapter on Binary Compatibility. This is a well thought out chapter with good diagrams showing the relationship between API and the reasoning for binary compatibility. There is discussion of why some API’s eventually become public and the issues surrounding API changes can cause unexpected problems.

The chapter on Certificates and Standards gives clear instruction on all the relevant standards and the organisations, which need to be contacted to certify applications. There is an excellent example about predictive text pointing out that this feature belongs to a third party company, not Nokia, and therefore requires a licence agreement from the third party company to use this feature in your application.

The next chapters deal with reasons for lack of quality in a product and the testing of products. In the diagrams of these chapters you can see the complete S60 test management process from concept to final testing of the release product. The most worthy of note is the testing of the Requirement Specification, the basis of the product.

Quotation from the text
"The challenge comes when the of an informal design process are misunderstood
in later phases of the program. That is why all intermediate
products such as documentation should be tested
against the outcome of an earlier stage".

The final chapter deals with Integration and Build Environment; while many engineers know this will affect the final product there is an even greater need for software configuration management. The cost of having many versions with one version overwriting a previous version and resulting test failures may be too high for any project and simple examples show how to control changes to code resulting in a stable good quality product.

Summary

The book is well organized. Chapter titles are very descriptive, allowing the reader to find what they need by scanning the table of contents, or by consulting the index. The appendix contains an excellent Glossary of all the terms used.

Extras

An interview with Saila Laitinen In MP3 or AAC

Jacek Wojciechowski's Forum Nokia Champion blog entitled "S60 and creating applications with quality in mind" (including some excerpts from this book): part 1 part 2 part 3

Available at Amazon

S60 SmartPhone Quality Assuarance