What are the Differentiating Factors That Make HeadSpin Unique?

Introduction

Post-Covid, digital has arisen as the key way of doing business, and digital experiences have become more critical than ever. With the increasing demand for high-quality apps and better digital experiences, global enterprises are considering investing in effective app testing and improving their apps’ user experience. Moreover, they predict an exponential increase in business revenue owing to the seamless experience promised and provided to their users.

HeadSpin's mission is to help businesses deliver "perfect digital experiences". Understanding the current trend, the HeadSpin team developed an AI-enabled testing platform that evaluates digital experience and factors impacting it (location, network, device, and applications). The HeadSpin Platform helps product managers, SREs, developers, QA/release engineers, and support professionals collaborate seamlessly to accelerate release cycles with intelligent automation in test and production, optimize digital experiences across applications, devices, and networks, and automatically surface insights with practical, context-aware AI and analytics.

HeadSpin replaces a number of tools required for ensuring great digital experiences in various industries. All app/software testing requirements of enterprises in different industries can be fulfilled with higher automation and lower cost through HeadSpin’s globally scalable and continuous model. Moreover, with the HeadSpin Platform, organizations can enhance the understanding of end-user experiences and existing issues with no added effort or cost to improve the performance of their products.

This blog highlights the HeadSpin Platform's unique capabilities and features that its competitors do not offer.

How Does HeadSpin Help Improve Your App Testing?

Using the HeadSpin Platform, app developers and testers can:

Capture UX and Performance Issues

Organizations can use the devices in HeadSpin’s PBoxes to execute app testing remotely. The data collected by the HeadSpin Platform are screen recording, network traffic, device metrics, device logs, and automation logs. The Platform offers complete visibility into the connected experiences of customers to proactively identify and fix performance and functional errors faster across apps, devices, and networks. Moreover, HeadSpin’s performance & ML module helps organizations collect insights into their applications' performance and user experience. Packet-level network data and device KPIs are measured and analyzed through HeadSpin's ML models to provide actionable insights for organizations. With this model, companies can gather insights about their applications, such as issue cards, time series, session videos, and packet-level details. These insights will help them to improve their applications' performance and deliver better digital experiences.

Leverage Data Science to Identify Issues and Root Cause Analysis

Poor application performance can lead to low customer satisfaction. So, it is crucial to thoroughly perform regression testing of apps to proactively detect and resolve performance, functionality, and localization issues. With the data gathered from the test sessions of the devices, HeadSpin automatically surfaces issues and points to underlying root causes across all layers of the stack—from quantifying audio/video QoE to code and packet visibility. HeadSpin’s Regression Intelligence is a powerful comparison tool for analyzing degradation across new app builds, OS releases, feature additions, and locations. This feature re-uses legacy automation to enable non-functional performance and UX insights quickly. Also, it will help customers get insights into third-party API and SDK behavior and performance impacting UX. Testing teams can use this analysis to fix the bugs in their apps and improve the overall user experience.

Perform End-to-End Automated App Testing on Real Devices

HeadSpin’s AI-based testing platform helps testers perform app testing with real devices on real carrier and Wi-Fi networks in 90+ locations worldwide. Testers are not required to install SDKs to perform the testing and analysis through the HeadSpin Platform. HeadSpin’s end-to-end automation testing solutions cover the testing of mobile apps, cross-browser, Android, iOS, and mobile app automation with the latest test automation tools. The Platform provides end-to-end visibility and UX and functional assessments for enterprises. Moreover, this feature will help enterprises track the development and performance of the products to define the product vision. HeadSpin’s end-to-end automation feature can also help increase collaboration for product management and release efficiencies across teams and team members. As a result, the time to market for the product will reduce. This testing ultimately enables companies to stay competitive in today’s crowded app space.

Enable Global Teams with Remote Access

With the help of the HeadSpin Platform, testing teams can remotely access and debug their apps on real devices from their desktops or phones without SDK or local team support. They can also choose the most popular devices, such as iPhone, iPad, Samsung Galaxy, Xiaomi, and Pixel, for testing their apps. HeadSpin also offers multiple deployment models, namely on-prem, cloud (single tenant), cloud (multi-tenant), and create your own lab. With these deployment models, enterprises can execute app testing remotely or on-premise and store their test data in the cloud. In every deployment model, HeadSpin deploys a purpose-built patented appliance, PBox, to securely store its devices and perform testing. HeadSpin’s PBox supports enterprises to perform functional and UX tests on real devices in real locations without compromising the security and performance of their applications.

What Makes the HeadSpin Platform Unique?

Here are the four crucial features that make HeadSpin unique compared to its competitors.

1. Deep Data

The HeadSpin Platform offers a large set of data related to the app being tested. With the Platform, enterprises can get a number of secondary metrics, such as code, packet, and network visibility details, page load time, CDN, API, and third-party SDKs. These data points can help organizations to improve their app's performance effectively.

2. AI-enabled Insights

HeadSpin's AI engine evaluates end-to-end user journeys, identifies areas of poor performance, and suggests how to improve the app's performance. With HeadSpin's AI-based actionable insights, testers can identify the possible errors a customer can face and fix them proactively. This is a unique feature of the HeadSpin Platform that can help enterprise improve their digital experience.

3. Global Device Infrastructure

HeadSpin has a global infrastructure of devices, including mobile and desktop browsers, OTT devices, smart TVs, game consoles, and more, deployed across 90+ locations worldwide. The HeadSpin Platform enables organizations to test websites, native applications, and hybrid applications from various geographies and access thousands of real mobile and browser testing devices. Global device infrastructure with physical devices worldwide also helps the testing of different distributed edge nodes or "edges."

4. Audio-Video Evaluation

Another unique feature of HeadSpin is that it enables audio-video evaluation of various devices and apps. With HeadSpin's AV Platform, organizations can test audio and video applications, such as media, entertainment, gaming, and video conferencing, run tests on OTT media devices, and perform testing of DRM-protected content and voice activation and speaker-based use cases. Using HeadSpin's audio and video MOS, companies can understand how end users perceive their audio-video content. This feature can help enterprises identify and fix audio and video issues in their applications and devices.

HeadSpin v/s Competitors

Check the table below to understand the unique features of the HeadSpin Platform, which helps us stand out from our competitors.

Use Cases	HeadSpin	Competitors
Testing
Video testing	Yes	No
Audio testing	Yes	No
Competitor benchmarking	Yes	No
Manual testing	Yes	Yes
Automated testing	Yes	Yes
Functional testing	Yes	Yes
Performance analysis	Yes	Yes
Root cause analysis	Yes	Yes
Regression testing and analysis	Yes	Yes
Device options
Apple TV	Yes	No
Firestick	Yes	No
Zebra devices	Yes	No
Chromecast	Yes	No
Android TV	Yes	No
AirTV	Yes	No
Android phones	Yes	Yes
iPhones	Yes	Yes
Browser testing on laptops	Yes	Yes
Deployment Options
Dedicated/single tenant (cloud hosted)	Yes	No
HeadSpin Create Your Own Lab	Yes	No
On-prem (customer premise)	Yes	Yes
Shared/multi-tenant (cloud hosted)	Yes	Yes
Hybrid (One or all of the above)	Yes	Yes
Audio testing features
Reference free quality evaluation of audio content	Yes	No
Audio match analysis	Yes	No
Support for multiple audio device configurations	Yes	No
Real-time audio playback and microphone quality testing	Yes	No
Drive tests to understand audio quality on the move	Yes	No
Video testing features
DRM content evaluation	Yes	No
Live streaming quality analysis	Yes	No
Video conferencing and video calling evaluation	Yes	No
Support for multiple video device configurations	Yes	No
Reference-free video quality evaluation	Yes	No
Full reference video quality evaluation (VMAF)	Yes	No

Conclusion

With the increasing number of competitors in the market, HeadSpin always ensures that it updates and modifies its Platform to help enterprises worldwide increase their total addressable market (TAM) by delivering the best digital experience through various channels. By selecting the right solution for testing their apps, our customers have achieved the following outcomes: