UnifiedPush Server 1.1.0-beta.1 testing report

Hello there again,

so I have tested the UPS using the UI console, iOS 8.0 and Android 5.1. I have used the HelloPush example as to me it seems the best for testing the server and messaging.

I have not tested the Windows, SimplePush and Amazon. The Simple Push was tested in the automated integration tests, but that does not apply for Windows and Amazon as we do not have the test cases for those. I also could not test them manually because I do not have Windows nor Amazon developer accounts.

I have tortured the Admin UI quite thoroughly and it did really well. There were some bugs and some UX quirks that I suggest we fix into the next beta release.

Kudos for:

• Absolutely f***ing awesome wizard in the UnifiedPush Server Admin UI. I have loved every step of it and what totally amazed me was that when I deployed the app on the device and the app registered itself to the UPS, the wizard automagically progreessed to the next step! That is so damn awesome and the UX is just wonderful.
  • It was so great that I (as a user) would not mind if it was shown also when creating another variants in an application that already has some, because it makes it more friendly and gives the feedback when the first registration is successful.
• It is also great that the user does not need to click on a link to keep logged in and only focusing the window is enough. Thanks for that.
• iOS HelloPush example is Swift 1.2 ready!
• Very nice error reporting in iOS HelloPush example (I set the URL wrong and the app told me about registration issue)

Found bugs

• When sending push message using the UI, the following can happen:

  1. Check one or more variants in the variants list
  2. Uncheck all of the variants (this will leave you in the same visual state as it was before step 1.)
  3. Send the message
  4. Wonder why it was not sent to any of the devices

  It seems that when I open the dialog, it shows No variants, but it really means All variants. However when I check some variants and then uncheck them all, it will still say No variants, but now it really means it as No variants. My suggestion is to start with having all the variants checked and instead of listing them all separated by commas, we should showAll variants.

• For some strange reason there is a lot of space in the bottom and I can scroll away all the content.

• There are ? help icons/buttons in the lower-right corners [5] in the analytics panel, but they do not do or show anything.
• In the variant list it still shows 0 delivered[7] even when I already sent and delivered messages.
• In Sender API tab there is always Set up Java UPS on top of the other sender platform (see [2, 3, 4])
• Clicking the Read more about master secret and push app id security [8] leads to /ag-push/# (and somehow corrupts the history and I could not hit back button).
• Search in PushApplication list does not work (and I am not sure if it is necessary as there should not be that many apps).

UI/UX Quirks

• Variant creation dialog wraps text when there is a lot of space [1].
• The area between number of devices and edit button shows the hand cursor, but it is not clickable. I would suggest to make it clickable and the action would be expanding/collapsing the variant detail.
• The +/- button for expanding/collapsing the statistics does not show hand cursor when mouse is above it.
• In the top right corner of the window, there is the warnings information, however it is strange when there are no warnings so I would suggest one of these:
  1. Do not show it in the bar altogether when there are no warnings
  2. Disable the clickability of it when there are no warnings
  3. When the popup is shown, it should not be just an empty box[6], but should show something like No warnings
• When hitting the Edit variant button, it shows a dialog where I can change only the name of the variant. However when I click theChange network options button, I am presented with the possibility to change both the name of the variant and the network specific configuration. I would therefore suggest to not show the name field in the Change network options dialog as it is not considered a good practise to have two ways of doing the same thing in UI.
• It is a bit strange that when I hover over the copy (sources) in variant detail, the edit and delete buttons disappear until I move the mouse away from the copy.
• Links to Android, Chrome, iOS, Cordova etc. in variant detail should open the documentation in a new tab like the rest of documentation links. Now it opens in the same app which is not good because the user wants to stay in the Admin UI.
• When I click on the in the documentation link on the no variants screen, I get redirected correcly, but it takes a while for the images to load and it pushes the content away and I lose track where was the help I came for. I would suggest to set the dimensions into the <img> tags therefore it will not push the screen away, but simply load into the empty space.
• Each time the user wants to do a destructive action (i.e. deleting application, deleting variant,reseting master secret) he should be presented with a dialog in which he would have to type the name of the variantor application in order to continue. This was already in before and I am not sure why was it removed.

Questions

• I am not sure what x receivers / y opened means as well as the meaning of first time opened andlast time opened.
• Is there a way to access the list of registered installations as it was before? Should it?
• In analytics there are Push opens statistics. Does that mean there is some new API in UnifiedPush Server? If so should we test it? If so how?

One more thing

It would be great if we implemented documentation versioning similar to readthedocs.org. That way there could be more versions of the documentation hosted on the aerogear.org site and each version of UnifiedPush Server Admin UI could point to the specific version. It would lead to better user experience because they would see the documentation exactly for their version.

All taken into consideration the team did a great job on the 1.1.0 and even though it is still just beta.1, it is working very well. Thanks guys!

PS: Sorry for the order of images, it is 3 am and I was too tired to reorganize them. Also I did not yet create any JIRA tickets for the bugs. I just wanted to share the report with you guys so we can discuss which of the items will be moved into the JIRA as tickets and which are not important or would me marked as "won't fix".

Thanks,
Tadeas Kriz

1 - https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-OHKxiXEIT88/VV6DvB0uRKI/AAAAAAAAX5I/a-m6umCfZUo/w593-h758-no/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-05-22%2Bat%2B12.14.05%2Bam.png
2 - https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-KzruF4kzwj4/VV6Dyuu1kxI/AAAAAAAAX5o/RFuCFGzxtXo/w1192-h512-no/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-05-22%2Bat%2B1.27.53%2Bam.png
3 - https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-ZAlJzi51BX0/VV6Dx1J3SxI/AAAAAAAAX5k/UQiql9TMye4/w1187-h571-no/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-05-22%2Bat%2B1.27.58%2Bam.png
4 - https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-LHyvZPW5AzI/VV6DxSuf-yI/AAAAAAAAX5c/bi9eJaQ6RLc/w1199-h491-no/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-05-22%2Bat%2B1.28.04%2Bam.png
5 - https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-A-dpKMM4IcU/VV6D1WjHp5I/AAAAAAAAX54/XeQC-2KUqVg/w373-h146-no/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-05-22%2Bat%2B1.12.15%2Bam.png
6 - https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-dU4Weqwf5as/VV6D2OFf-II/AAAAAAAAX6A/T5CDLREzT-w/w277-h83-no/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-05-22%2Bat%2B1.09.51%2Bam.png
7 - https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-q_0F21tJZgo/VV6Dz4jZJPI/AAAAAAAAX5w/ngGABCT_AUM/w320-h316-no/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-05-22%2Bat%2B1.19.53%2Bam.png
8 - https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-57qlJTvJEBI/VV6Dwg3i0SI/AAAAAAAAX5Q/KPQxgw1DS0w/w644-h63-no/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-05-22%2Bat%2B1.28.56%2Bam.png