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My team consist of 6 backend developers, with 4 different test phones and tablets.They need to use test phones to cross check front end developers work, and debug their API.
Testing in mobile is about 10% of their workload.
Should I let them take the test devices home? Or put those devices in office and let those who need to perform testing to take the device?
Should I let them take the test devices home?
For several reasons:
Insurance: company property on company grounds is covered by the companies insurance. Company property in the hands of an employee damaging it after hours on private grounds? Might be insured. Or not. You would need to figure it out.
Availability: If employees come in one morning and don't have a device to test on, that's bad. You said you have more employees than devices, so even if they all need one, they can talk and figure out priorities in the office. If the device needed is still on Steve's kitchen table because he had an urgent doctors appointment and is late today, then you cannot do anything but sit around and twiddle thumbs. Equipment that is not available is not acceptable.
Accountability: Lets say it gets lost or stolen. Apart from insurance, is there enough trust that an employee can "lose" a thousand dollar consumer electronics device and not be suspected or reprimanded?
Work/Life Balance: An employee should have a healthy time off. There is no reason to have a work device in your spare time. Leave work at work. Live a happy life and come back to work relaxed and ready. That's way more productive than being "always on".
The answer mainly depends on whether you have enough phones so that if people are using them outside the office nobody in the office will be searching for a phone (and can't find one because all of them are at home).
So if you have lots of phones, you can allow them to go home, otherwise, you probably want them in the office all the time, unless there are tests that are best done remotely.
But more importantly, if you do let people take them home then you need to have a clear procedure for tracking who has which phone.
If somebody leaves the office with a phone they need to check it out from a spreadsheet or database - and then it's their responsibility to return it safely.
Otherwise, you will quickly start losing phones; easy come = easy go as the saying goes.
For a simple reason. You need to test your apps beyond the idealized conditions of your testing lab.
I can't tell you how many Really Bad apps and websites I have used when the app was clearly only tested on the latest hardware, with an all-internal-router gigabit pipe to the servers, and never "in the wild" with cellular data networks falling back to last-gen and 5% packet loss. In those cases you just get stupidly dopey performance, and testers are oblivious.
So yes, get those phones out into the real world and test. And take the data seriously.
Make a rule for them to ask for it every time and explain why they need a device at home.
This will stop them from making a habit of taking devices home for no reason and will give them an option to do some testing outside of work when necessary.
If the applications the testers are developing are applications they would be using anyway, or if the testing runs automatically in the background, then by all means let them take the phones home. Or on holiday, or anywhere else. The quality of system testing is roughly proportional to time spent, and the more time spent, the greater the probability of running into one of the (inevitable) corners you've not thought about. Your team don't need to be doing anything in particular, they just need to have the phone with them.
I worked in mobile phones for a couple of years. We were all issued with development phones which we could take home with us, fully equipped with logging. If anything went wrong when we were away from the office, we raised an issue and dumped logs when we got back in. I was working on system-level debugging, so a lot of my work came from these issues. It was incredibly effective, it didn't take time from the engineers, and it only cost the company the price of phones, SIMs and calls.
The most significant case where this helped us was an obscure issue with the phone dropping the network. Hong Kong were reporting this as a regular occurrence, but we simply couldn't reproduce it over here. Then a team leader happened to go to the local pub near us, and found that his phone fell over repeatably with exactly this fault. This was the first time anyone had managed to get it to happen anywhere in the UK. So my friend talked nicely to the landlord, and for the rest of the week his entire team relocated to the pub, occupying a fair chunk of the restaurant area with their PCs and hardware test kit, until they'd fixed the bug!
Yes, but only on weekends and when necessary.
I feel that only staff who have pending tasks to be done and have decided to take the device home over the weekend to finish should be allowed to take it home. There should be a rule for them to ask for it whenever they need it, explaining why they need a device at home.
Moreso, every task done during the week that needs testing should be tested before the weekend to enable those with pending tasks take it and those taking the device home must make sure it remains in good condition.
i thing this is related to your company policy and the business needs. some products need to be released in a certain time, so over-time or night-shift team will be a necessity to end up with expected release date. you can decide according to the number of phones. who used it. and the priority of the product that phone are needed for. in our company as a night-shift testing team we suffer from another morning Work Team, some people take devices to work from home. our manager order us to collect all device in a draw to be available to all team.
