Reporting bugs on Android devices

On Android devices, MobileFirst Quality Assurance automatically places a notification widget on the system status bar. When a user taps this widget, MobileFirst Quality Assurance opens the bug report screen, where the user can enter additional information about the identified problem. The bug report is sent to MobileFirst Quality Assurance with relevant debugging information.

Important: The email address of the tester must be included in the participant's list for the product. If the address is not included on that list, an error occurs when the tester attempts to log in.

Shake the device

Although the status bar widget works in most applications, some apps must use a different mechanism. For example, a full-screen application or a game might hide the status bar, which prevents the tester from accessing it. To solve this problem, MobileFirst Quality Assurance offers an alternative way of triggering a problem report: shaking the mobile device.

If your application does not use the accelerometer on its own, then shaking the device is an option for triggering a problem report. Because shaking does not rely on any on-screen element to trigger the bug report, the method is always available, regardless of whether the application uses the whole screen.

By default, the report-on-shake function is disabled in the Android library. To enable it, call the .withReportOnShakeEnabled(true) method on the configuration object. For more information about configuring MobileFirst Quality Assurance, see Starting an Android session.

Triggering bug reports programmatically

You can also open the bug report screen from inside your own application code. Opening the report screen is useful when your application uses the full screen and relies on shaking for its own input. By using this method, you can add your own user interface mechanism for starting a bug report.

Add the following line of code to your app to trigger the mechanism:

MQA.showReportScreen()

You can bind this call to any specific user interface action such as tapping an on-screen control or choosing an option from a menu.

Important: If you use this approach, you must remove the MQA.showReportScreen() code when you switch to production mode.